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Center the Stone 13-filled shape over the well. Select the Transparency Tool (F6). From the drop down list of Transparency Types, select Brightness . This adds a bit of brown color and some texture.

Center the Stone 10-filled shape over the well. This time apply a Flat, Mix transparency. Change the Transparency slider setting on the Infobar to 65%. This gives the well walls an old stone appearance.

Next we'll make some old weather beaten wood.

Draw a rectangle about the size shown above. The exact size is not important.

Select the rectangle with the Fill Tool (F5). From the drop down list of Fill Types, select Fractal Clouds.

Adjust the fill path handles as shown. Hold down the Shift key to drag either of the two handles independently.

Using the Color Editor (Ctrl e), edit the two RGB colors as shown above.

We can use the Live Effects Tool > 3D Bump Map to add some depth to the filled shape. Here's how.

With the rectangle selected, select the Live Effects Tool (Ctrl F5). Press New > and from the fly out menu, select 3D Bump Map.

Change the settings as shown highlighted in green above, then check Merge.

Right click on the rectangle and select Create a Bitmap Copy... from the pop up menu.

Change the Color Depth setting to True Color. Press Create. Delete the Bump Map version. Nice though the Bump Map version is, having this as part of the drawing, even though we are not using it, really slows down the program.

Create a new rectangle about 350 x 180 pixels. This is for reference only.

Create a series of small random width rectangles until you fill up the large rectangle as shown above top. Delete the large rectangle.

Select the largest of the shingle rectangles and open the Bitmap Gallery (F11). Select the new wood bitmap we just created and press Fill.

Copy this shape (Ctrl c) to the clipboard. Select the rest of the shingles and from the Edit menu. select Paste Attributes or if you like, Shift Ctrl a.

©2008 Gary W. Priester - All rights reserved
This tutorial may not be reproduced in any manner
except as a tutorial for Xara Xtreme users
without written permission by the author.