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Step 4. Click on the Blend Tool (F7) and blend from the larger magenta circle to the smaller white circle. Increase blend steps to 25 (by typing 25 in the 'number of steps in this blend' box in the Blend Tool Infobar and by pressing Return (or Enter) to apply the change). Click on the entire blend with the Selector Tool (F2) and with Lock Aspect Ratio disabled, type in the Width of Selection text entry box 137 and press Return. This just creates an elliptical firework. Finally hold down Ctrl and select the inner small white circle with the Selector Tool. Nudge this upwards 4 pixels (4 key presses of the up arrow key). This changes the perspective of the direction of 'explosion' and moves it upwards a bit.
Step 5 (Optional). If you like you can increase the colour saturation of the firework by using a rectangle with a transparency ... which is what I did here using a flat filled white rectangle with a Flat, 74% Saturation transparency as an overlay. I also added some extra sparkles around the firework, using a magenta sparkle shape and creating a never-smoothed bitmap copy and so forth. Now you have your basic firework image, you can experiment with it to make other looks, by moving or resizing ellipses changing colours and adjusting dpi settings, blend steps etc. (i.e. if you use a lower transparency dpi such as 196 this will create larger sparkles, although they will tend to be more irregular in shape). Anyway it's fun to experiment with. Using sparkle objects in blends is also a fairly good technique for creating other explosion like effects. Here are some more fireworks ... same as for the sparkly gel pen lines etc, the picture below was exported using a screen capture, trimmed and then exported normally as a GIF.
If you get stuck on anything, or have other questions or comments, then please feel free to send me a message using the feedback form on the next page. Su Lawrence
© 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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