"A Digital Room" CorelDRAW - Corel PhotoPaint Plus

A Digital Room

Browsing my Dover Publications folder in Picasa 3.9 I found a coloring page of a simple room. I opened CorelDRAW and pasted the bitmap into a page. Using the Poly Pen tool I drew the lines around the pieces of the room. Using the various fill tools I added texture, a floral wall and used gradients for the other walls.

Back to my Dover folder I looked to populate the room with colorful characters, I found two women that I liked and I carefully cut them and pasted them, resizing as needed. I added two posters and the vase from more Dover Clip Art.

I did quite a bit of this in Corel's PhotoPaint after I had created the rooms walls, floor and ceiling. I also used the Tone Curve for more color depth on the file. I saved the large file and opened with Corel Paintshop Photo Pro X3.

Here I added the brown border of 25pixels and added the frame to the piece. I saved that file and then resized for display. I had added my signature in PhotoPaint as usual.

Listening --- Doves --- The Cedar Room

Vintage Dresses - Vectors - CorelDRAW - PhotoPaint

Click for Larger Image

A Vintage plus Vector graphic image is the focus of today's piece. I opened Picasa 3 and browsed my recent pictures and found a catalog display of some vintage dresses from my Dover Sampler. I took the image and opened in PhotoPaint and applied the Image> Transform> Threshold> to create the black and white base image.

I duplicated the image and filled it with red. I then took the back and white image and copied and pasted it to the red filled background. Applying the property Multiply I got rid of the white and merged the two together.

Once I had the red and black piece I copied to the clipboard, opened CorelDRAW and pasted it into a new landscape workspace. I used the freehand drawing tool to create the first yellow curve. I adjusted the curve with the bezier tool to make it more uniform.

I then duplicated it once, shrank it down to size to fit within the other curve then using duplicate I created the other curves automatically. I added the yellow orb and grouped them all together. I duplicated that grouping and rotated it to fit the opposite corner.

I grouped the entire image and copied it to the clipboard. switching to PhotoPaint I opened it with File> New from Clipboard>, added my name and copyright in Arial Rounded MT Bold.

I deliberately kept the image simple using only bright colors to make the black fashion standout. I saved the larger image and resampled for display here.

Listening --- Kirk Mathew Gatzka --- Hello, Hello

Autumn Color Kensington Metro Park

Autumn color tours are common in the Midwest states, and we took a tour late Sunday at Kensington Metro Park. I took quite a few photographs and gathered some colorful leaves to scan in for artwork.

So here you will find an image made from one photograph of dried snowball flowers in the background and the scanned in leaves in the foreground. I used both PhotoPaint and Paint.NET in creating this piece.

I have an older scanner so I only did the scan at 300dpi 50% to keep the size workable. I used a white piece of paper behind the leaves and then using the Wand tool selected a lot of the white background leaving some of the 3d shadows intact. I took the photograph of the dried flowers and used it as a fill after I masked out the leaves.

Saving that file I opened it in Paint.NET to use the Effects> Artistic> Ink Sketch> filter with the coloring set high and the ink set low. This gave me the textures I wanted. I saved that and reopened in PhotoPaint and found a frame in my Dover Clip Art collection that I added using a filter on it for more texture.

I am reviewing some of my older songs right now in Windows Media Player. Before I had a good microphone and the Toneport, I did OK using Audacity to record with a condenser mic. Funny how things can change with better equipment. The content is still good but now with the Toneport to preamp and a Shure microphone everything is much improved.

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Now playing on Windows Media Player: Kirk Mathew Gatzka - Love Is
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Vector Export to Jpg - Portrait - CorelDRAW

I visited the book store yesterday and looked at a variety of design magazines. Computer Arts creatives and other Photoshop creatives were highlighted. I noticed the use of vector graphics is very popular with programs like Adobe's Illustrator and of course Photoshop.

I used Corel products almost exclusively from the Corel Graphics Suite 12, (I am behind on upgrades.) I used CorelDRAW, CorelTRACE, and PhotoPaint to create today's image.

My first step was to take the portrait into Paint.NET and applied the Effects> Artistic> Pencil Sketch> filter to create a line image in black and white. I opened that file in CorelTRACE and converted it into a vector cmx file, a native Corel vector image file format.

I saved that traced file and opened it in CorelDRAW to add some vector objects. I used Fit Text to a Path with the forms I created there. My favorite is the little bug like creature I made. I used many of the tools in DRAW for the forms I made including the Freehand drawing tool, the Oval tool, the Rectangle tool, the Graph Paper tool, the Spiral tool.

I saved the large file to the native CorelDRAW cdr file format to be able to use some of the objects later in other images. I then exported the large image to jpg file format. This is opened in Corel's PhotoPaint 12 and also opened a grunge texture of painted watercolor paper. I copied the vector created jpg to the clipboard and pasted it into the texture as an object (layer.) then using the Object Property Multiply I made it semi-transparent to allow the texture paper to show through.

The whole process was influenced by the magazine's images I was looking at while at the book store.

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Now playing on Windows Media Player: Jeremy Fryc - Track 2
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CorelDRAW Vector Art Samples

I enjoy CorelDRAW's ability to do vector graphics well. On display here is a collage of a few vector drawings I have done using various photographs as a basis for each of the imagea.

I use the freehand drawing tool and map out the basic shapes of the faces and then use fills to color them. The approach is simple enough if you can select the shapes from the shadows and outline them, then chose the right type of fills for each shape.

To show them on the blog I have them saved as jpg files or tif files and reduced them in PhotoPaint for sharing online.

I used Picasa's collage tool again to create this multifaceted image, saved as a jpg file, of course.