Heraldry & Calligraphy in Xara Pro

[gbpatriot]

Intbell wrote

A nice piece of work.

Trouble is, the printed word does not have the free-flowing spontaneity inherent in the work of the calligraphist.

Not that it matters - mostly the punters are ignorant philistines who couldn't tell the difference.

Of course Intbell is quite right in his comments. As a calligrapher for over 40 years, I too miss the pounce, egg-white, hand-mixed inks and hand-cut quills in this 2D traversty. The work also lacks the depth provided by burnished gold and fine shaved parchment. But he misses the essential shortcoming with very expensive commissioned civic heraldry - few people ever see it. Many of my works are on display in Mayoral offices and glass cases well away from the fading effects of sunlight, where the public (who pay actually for them) seldom see them.

In a similar way I mourn the loss of hand-drawn animated films - like the Disney masterpieces of the fifties where there was never a still frame. But this does not stop 'punters' from turning out in their millions to see the current flood of sterile CGI films that pollute the cinemas.
Software like Flash, Swish and now Xara Pro allow amateurs to believe that they are actually animators. As if drawing two frames and having the computer 'tween' the rest can be called animation. But at least it has the dubious merit of keeping the art alive.

Despite its shortcomings (which are many), this sort of digital heraldry and calligraphy might at least allow the common man to engage with this ancient art - albeit on a superficial level. Perhaps some may be motivated to buy a copy of Boutell's Heraldry and set of ink pens and metal nibs? Indeed how many artists who visit this site could understand the following blazon: 'Gules, a chevron ermine between ten crosses paty argent.'- and how many could actually paint it?

Thanks for your continued support.
Ray

[Intbel]

I never made inks though I frequently used hand-cut quills which are a joy to use once one is practised with them.

Only ever once wrote upon a skin and that was a great experience.

Wish I'd kept it up now - there is a greater demand today as computers take over and generally folks don't even use a fountain pen let alone a nib and a bottle of ink.

Handwriting began to deteriorate with the advent of the ballpoint and today they bash their burblings out on a PC and have near enough lost the ability to produce decent handwriting.

Assuming they had acquired it in the first place.

And how much signwriters' work do you see these days?

I tell 'e - the whole wyrld is going to pot as folks choose cheapo floss an' gloss, instant gratification and sacrifice quality for quantity.

At least with Xara we can still produce animated gifs which is the closest one can get to Disney's hand drawn animations.

While the new flash export is a great feature, I still prefer gifs - far more satisfying work.

I despair for the future - already many women think cooking involves no more than transferring summat from a freezer to a microwave oven while their husbands think being able to assemble cheapo laminated chipboard furniture makes 'em skilled joiners.

And their children think they are doing well when they pass a maths exam yet couldn't get past first base without a calculator.

Standards are almost rock bottom.
Most towns and the people who live in them are tarts - all squeaky clean glossy glitz on the surface while in truth they have no real value at all.

Bleh.

Our governments are corrupt, as are the agri-corps and the pharma-corps and the food industry and the health industry likewise - where is there any value today?

Need coffee ...

[ankhor]

Need coffee ...

I can remember the time when we still had to burn our own coffee
beans and than grind them by hand, and we poored our hot water,
which we heated over a wood fire and we had to find the dry branches
and grass to start the fire by rubbing sticks together.Then put the kettle
up and boil the water, nowadays you youngans have it way too easy.

It almost start to sound like the scene in the movie life of brian where
he gets thrown into jail and there is a guy hanging from the wall.
Ah we probably know the scene, if not, go out and rent the Video/DVD
or download it. Search for "life of brian"

Intbel, if you start to talk like this, you know you are getting old.

(Ink? ink? Man I used a chissle and hammer, and we chissled the
words out of hard rock, man since ink we are loosing our skills. )

[Intbel]

You had chisels? Wow. I'm impressed. We had to make do with flints.

[ankhor]

You had chisels? Wow. I'm impressed. We had to make do with flints.

Did he mind that you'll used his tools?

[sallybode]

Still if you hand letter it with a pressure sensitive pen with a custom stroke, alas, with making my own brushes in Xara, haven't managed to make the plain like pressure sensitive nor is it happy to add one the way I want. Am I missing something.

The closest I've found is the italic lines I can use in CorelDRAW, you can draw swashes all day, and though I hate to say it, Adobe Illustrator has some nice lines for that purpose.

With my new tablet, I have pressure sensitive strokes and a little program called "Office Ink" which lets you twiddle away, then I can enter it in DRAW and have it do a trace of what I did so I get some pretty nice lines that way too. Just have to tell it how much smoothing vs. detail you want. Haven't tried this yet in Xara, will have a go with it tonight.

Yes, it seems that the quality of the individual has indeed gone down. And there are a lot of people who really seem disconnected and not really able to interact in the ways most important to being a whole human being: namely intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and psychically. Indeed if you find another person who is top notch in all of the above, never let them go, they are indeed at a premium these days. Fortunately the rest who have been raised by mothers who had to leave them with baby sitters to go to work, do not know what they missed. They even consider such individuals not quaint or eccentric but rather distasteful and rude. There is a definite difference that a quality stay at home moms give to kids that nothing else does. Not to say that a father cannot do that, but lets face it, quantity of time is what is truly lacking in the raising of our youth. And as housing and all the costs of living is so high, what else can people do unless they prefer to be homeless. They don't let you pitch a tent anywhere you know. With kids quantiy of time is what really makes the most lasting impression. As would you be able to survive on one bite of sirloin steak when you could eat three meals a day of common fare?

[David O'Neil]

...Standards are almost rock bottom. Most towns and the people who live in them are tarts - all squeaky clean glossy glitz on the surface while in truth they have no real value at all...

...Yes, it seems that the quality of the individual has indeed gone down. And there are a lot of people who really seem disconnected and not really able to interact in the ways most important to being a whole human being...

I urge you to not get too negative. After all, it was your generation and the generations before that helped get us to this state, by urging their children to go for the money, and disconnecting from their children in their own ways. These problems will only be overcame when all of us face them together, and see both the good and the bad. To overcome them, all of us will have to focus on the positive. We will also have to acknowledge the negative, but the focus must be positive, or we will just bring more troubles to ourselves.

Some positives I see are that the standard of living is very high in many portions of the world compared to even a century ago. We have things our ancestors couldn't even have dreamt about, such as computers that allow us to create things in almost unimaginably short time periods compared to what it would have taken without them. In its way, our world is magical in its technological achievements. Now let us take that magic and spread it around to all of us, and remember that we are all children of God, as it were. (Even the ones you don't like. They are good at heart, they are just showing us the problems with our older beliefs plainly, so in a way, they are doing all of us a service.)

Maybe I shouldn't have written this, but so be it. So much for the true topic of this thread. To address that, Ray - your image is fantastic. A family would be proud to hang that on their walls. Thanks for posting it.

Best wishes to all,
David

<gets off stupid preacher stool, and back to work again, hoping I didn't come across as an arrogant _____. Unfortunately, this is a subject I feel strongly about. We must start being constructive rather than destructive if we want to overcome these problems.>

[handrawn]

At least with Xara we can still produce animated gifs which is the closest one can get to Disney's hand drawn animations.

And as a pen and ink cartoonist myself [still] may I draw the attention of those interested in animation to Toon Boom software which does not tween and [relatively speaking] is not that expensive.


vive l' 'belleville rendez-vous' - someone can still do it... just takes too long and too many people to do it all by hand these days ..[!]

[WolfMoonHP]

There are still high-quality calligraphers out there. Unfortunately, I'm not even close to being one of them.

I was born at a time when all children were forced to write with their right hands. Being a natural lefty, this was extremely difficult. But to this day, I still write --- badly though it may be --- with my right hand.

I am actually paying for someone to do calligraphy for me...

I have a 12-line poem that is being done as a Celtic illuminated page, and the calligrapher is doing all the knot-work, animal illustrations, etc., by hand, topped off with gold leafing.

Could I do something similar in Xara? Of course. But Raymond and you others are correct. There is nothing like something created by hand!
---
Will

[Intbel]

Could I do something similar in Xara? Of course. ---
Will

Not the gold leaf you couldn't