January 2015 Video Tutorial -- Tracing Is Not Cheating!

[Rik]

Love the Teddy Bears, Egg.
Can't pick a favourite!

[Gare]

Now that is pretty darned interesting, Eric! I was going topost something totally non-reflective as an exercise, but you intuited it before I could get to it.

Very well done, congrats!

My Best,

Gary

[Gare]

Here’s a micro-tutorial that relates to the tracing adventure. Once you’ve finished tracing something, naturally you want to apply flls. Enter this little toy car render. I don’t think it’s too challenging to trace out, but here’s the neat thing you can do. In the attached file is a good resolution JPEG of the toy car, and also a piece of seamless tiling wood, although you might want to go find a better example.

The deal is this: if you fill a shape of your car with the wood sample, you can then Shift+drag around the control handles to tailor the angle of the wood pattern to match the perspective of the car (use Repeating Tile on the drop-down list to make sure your Fill tiles).

THEN: Try using the Color Editor’s Light and Dark Contone to make the darker rings a certain color of brown and the Light Contone color a lighter color of brown, each time you define that color, use the Name color function to tag the color and put it at the end of the color line.

Than when you’re all done filling the shapes, you might want to put a duplicate shape on top of the original (Ctrl+K), make it a solid, medium brown fill, and then use the Transparency slider in Stained Glass mode to shade the wood.

Finally, if you want to change the color of the entire composition’s wood, you redefine the tagged colors to create differen tones and types of wood. How cool is that?



-g

[Bob H]

I feel very fortunate to have come access to this great source of Xara graphic knowledge and look forward to learning from all of you!!!!

Bob Harmount

[Gare]

Hey Bob, and welcome back!

I must confess that this month's tutorial is not for the faint of heart, but its a good place to start...by tracing off shapes from photos, you'll get better experience with the drawing tools. I find the Pen tool is almost exactly like CorelDRAW's Pen too, while others here prefer the Shape tool.

You just let other member know where you are with drawing programs and they can better gauge the type (and amount) of assistance you might need.

The Xara Xone, under my custodianship (I don't believe that's a word. Tough.) has grown over three years of tutorials, at all levels and all on a different subject, but the end goal in each is to cover an artistic principle and by the end of the video, you'll be able to draw something new, better than you imagined.

Which is not an over-promise because it is you...and other members who have to work with me to get the results you want. I can't mould a sculpture if the clay is dry, you know what I mean?

Here's the "menu", which ultimately takes you to YouTube List of video tutorials since January 2012. And of course my predecessor, Gary Priester has an archive of 16 years of written tutorials and he is indeed still active on TalkGraphics.

Have fun exploring and learning!

Gary

[Rik]

Your wooden car made me think, Gary.
So, I thought I would try that with a Coke can!

[Gare]

HAH! A good one for sure, Rik. Tell me: how do you store such a can without the Coke leaking out within 15 minutes?

Perhaps make the can out of maple and fill it with syrup?

-g

P.S. Warm the background up. The combination of warm wood with a grey background is unappetizing. Try:




I used a9a89d for the dark of the ellipse and white for the centre.

[Rik]

Here in the UK, we've been fermenting beer in wooden casks for centuries.
And I'm using the same method for making my wooden Coke can!

I did, actually do a different background, to be more in line with your wooden car.
But, there are a lot of light sources in your image, so...!

Is this better, or should I really work with your suggestion of the colour a9a89d?

[stygg2003]

Nice coke can Rik, I like that. I tried to do the toy car, not very successful I'm afraid but enjoyed making the attempt never the less.

Stygg

[Crow Haven]

Great ones Egg, Rik and Stygg!!