Welcome to my Art Works Home Page

The photograph shows him working with an Iyonix Aria. Also shown is the superb and tiny Beagleboard (indicated by red arrow) running a full RISC OS desktop on a 1080 widescreen monitor. To find out more about this little beasty click the Beagleboard link on.... My RISC OS page

Northeast by North

Introduction

Vectortuts has an excellent on-line tutorial on how to create a compass. By combining the information from the Xara site a rather nice ArtWorks version can be produced. There are many such tutorials written for Adobe Illustrator and Xara that can be used to create graphic images that are comparable and of high quality in ArtWorks.

Compass Parts

The four main parts consists of.....

• Central star combination
• Circular degree markers indicating 5° steps
• Indicator
• Gold case

Areas Which Might Cause Problems

Central star embellishment

Use guide lines drawn on the Background layer to establish positions for four stars each with four points. For accuracy I decided to draw the stars using the Line tool rather than modify a shape from the Polygon tool. The guide lines and the initial shape is shown here. Hint - when specifying degrees of rotation in the Rotate by.... box 22.5° must be typed as 22.30 followed by return (representing 22 degrees and 30 minutes).

Uses a swatch. The ones used in the Vectortuts tutorial were provided by the author but (a) you have to be a paid member and (b) The eps format is not guaranteed to be understood by ArtWorks. The swatch can be constructed quite simply in ArtWorks using a group of graduated filled rectangles inside a square. Only four colours are necessary and are carefully chosen to produce a reflective quality reminiscent of gold. The swatch is finally 'clipped' to a circle to form the case. The Intersect with top tool is used to perform the clipping path. Avoid ClipView as jagged edges around the circle circumference spoil the final rendering.

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Moorish architecture based on Replicated polygons. No longer available.

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Further designs using the Replication tool. No longer available.

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This section shows some of my earlier illustrations. They are all drawn using the fantastic and easy-to-use ArtWorks 2. A couple of the pictures have been embellished with a bitmap editor.

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Last year I held an exhibition in my library in Mansfield. I exhibited a variety of prints consisting mainly of vector graphic images created 'naturally' in ArtWorks 2 with some kaleidoscope pictures designed in Photodesk. Comments in the visitors book were very favourable to the extent I sold two limited-edition prints. I was surprised because the library staff were adamant that none would be sold. The Three Hares seemed to be the most popular image and is a personal favourite.

The picture of the fox was originally conceived from a tutorial written by a superb illustrator - Walter Briggs. The original article (Mammals Art Course - Fox Part 1) was published in Acorn Publisher (vol 9, issue 2) and photocopies may still be available from http://www.finnybank.com/qercus/misc/archives.html. Creating an impression of animal fur is challenging in a vector package and may take some hours to perfect.

Some of the examples are tessellations. Once you understand the principals these unique and interesting patterns are very easy to create using ArtWorks 2. Last year I gave a talk at the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club describing how to draw a simple shape by converting the sides of a square to curves and then creating a tessellation matrix.

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ArtWorks 2 is superb when it comes to creating geometric images. The moire designs started out with a radiating pattern which is then copied and overlayed over the original - some unusual effects are produced. My favourite graphic in this group is the serpent. Because of the knot pattern it has to be one of the more challenging drawings to produce but I hope you agree the final effect is worth the effort.

These graphic thumbnails are now displayed using CSS giving a much cleaner layout. (All I have to do now is to convert the rest of the site to CSS compatibility).

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An interesting collection of graphic geometry that displays the capability of ArtWorks. The sine curves and spirals are produced using the excellent DrawLots.

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The three images in this section show how some Adobe Illustrator tutorials can be converted and made to look quite realistic in ArtWorks. The examples are from the American site Vector tuts+.

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The selection of images here illustrate that virtually any outline or filled object(s) can be blended. DrawLots was used to create some of the starter objects.

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Martin Bazley's brilliant little utility - Cogs was used to create the designs illustrated in this section. This ingenious little program builds spirographs and is extremely simple to use.

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Cogs has been redesigned with a more advanced user interface permitting some very complex patterns.

Owing to the lack of tutorial material available to ArtWorks users I ran a series of articles enabling readers to convert some of the graphics produced by Xara in their regular 'Workbook' series. Available from Foundation RISCWorld magazine the first article started in the August 2008 CD (Volume 9, issue 2). If you missed the articles you can see the final graphic illustrations here........ Foundation RISCWorld Graphic Thumbnails. All the drawings have a copyright notice overlay and was going to be the subject of my next article in Foundation RISCWorld but as most of you know the editor, Aaron Timbrell has decided to give up the editorship of the publication. The final release (April 2009) is volume 9, issue 6.

Animation in ArtWorks 2

Introduction

Stopwatch

Design of the StopWatch

The compass was relatively straight forward to modify into a stopwatch. To keep the animation simple only a single dial is drawn - this keeps the number of frames down to 60. The case was coloured using a swatch system described above. The start/stop/reset buttons needed another approach because if the size of a swatch is massively reduced two nasty artefacts occur - loss of feathering between the graduations and distortion in the graduations when objects are rotated. The blend tool came to the rescue - by blending between a group of lines with the same colours as used in the swatch the artefacts are eliminated and give the result you see here.

Practical Applications

Not terribly useful as it stands - however you could conceivable use it by downloading and dragging into IGViewer and use the toolbar to start, stop and reset it. Providing no CPU intensive application is running then its accuracy is not bad - from experience it losses only a fraction of a second over a 5 minute interval. Warning - IGViewer will only run on RISC OS 5.16 and below.

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Links checked Friday the 12th of November, 2010

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