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Extra Bits

That is pretty much covers it, I made some other adjustments here:

Sparkly Gel Pen Lilne Tutorial © Copyright 2005 Su Lawrence.  All rights reserved.

(a) I contoured inwards (plus inset path) the darker speckled shape by 2 pixels; so as not to have darker speckles over the edge of the indigo pen line shape. You may also want to do this with the white sparkles if you are using a coloured background.

There are various techniques you can use to create a darker edge to the pen line, which perhaps makes it look a little more gel like. Here I cloned the original indigo shape, changed the transparency to Flat, 0% Bleach, increased the feathering to 8 pixels, then sent it backwards to just above the original indigo shape. This lightens the inside area and leaves a slightly darker edge. I nudged this bleach transparency shape about 1 pixel left and 1 pixel down to vary the size of the darker edge a little.

(b) This changes the overall colour, so a quick way to restore some of the colour is to clone the white sparkle shape, change colour to indigo and change it's transparency to 50% flat hue. (Using a hue transparency overlay can also be handy to do quick general colour changes of all underlying objects).

(c) Very quickly, I added a gold glitter version which has a bit more sparkle coverage. For the gold glitter: I cloned the white sparkly object, changed colour to standard yellow, set start transparency to 0%, moved the centre transparency handle again and then sent this object behind the white sparkles. I slightly reduced the amount of white sparkles by setting the white shape's transparency profile to 0.5 in the top box.

Although I added these last bits, this tutorial was mostly about adding a metallic glitter type effect to a pen line, rather than exploring how to recreate a realistic gel pen line itself, for example the shape of the line probably looks a little too neat/even etc.

Exporting

Because this produced the sort of twinkly effect I was looking for and also to keep things simple - I didn't use any never-smoothed bitmaps this time. I just exported by: doing a screen capture, pasted the bitmap capture into Xara X, trimmed out the bits I didn't want and exported that normally as a GIF bitmap image.

Sparkly Gel

I also used the sparkle effect with some more gel like objects see Main Pic (bottom left gel). For these sparkles I used never-smoothed bitmap copies, one for the white sparkles and another for the darker specks (as they needed to be fairly distinct). I also added a Fractal Plasma transparency to the white sparkle bitmap copy as another way to vary the lighting effect and make it more twinkly.

 

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© Copyright 2005 Su Lawrence.  All rights reserved.

 

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The Xara Xone Guest Tutorials ©2005 Gary W. Priester All rights reserved
Tutorials are for private use only. No text or images may be used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author.