Where there is a will, there's an art brush

[gwpriester]

One of our stereogram followers on our eyeTricks Facebook page posted the green looped in in response to one of our stereogram images, a knot. I decided to challenge myself to see if I could replicate this shape.

My arc had to be gradated from dark to light, and I needed it to have curve that my software would interpret as a rounded line.

I created an art brush using two rectangles, one with light to dark gradient fill and the other with a rounded fill to give the gradient rectangle a rounded shape.

BUT when I applied a Multiply fill to the top shape, when I tried to create an Art Brush, Xara said I could only use a normal transparency.

In the end, I used the Multiply transparency and created a bitmap (600dpi) of the combined shape.

Then I needed to split the line so I could achieve the over and under looping. So I sliced the bitmap into two shapes and made two brushes.

By splitting the line and slicing the bitmap into two brushes, I was able to achieve what appears to be a single shape.