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Extra Bits That is pretty much covers it, I made some other adjustments here:
(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.
© Copyright 2005 Su Lawrence. All rights reserved.
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The Xara Xone Guest Tutorials ©2005 Gary W. Priester All rights reserved
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