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

I've added a link called Visual Illusions to the Links section. The Japanese author, Akiyoshi Kitaoka runs a site containing many of these interesting and unusual phenomenon. The art comprises geometric, colour, relative motion and stereoscopic art illusions some of which are awesome. Look at the central area of this ArtWorks example below. The arrows in the centre appear to move around; the verticals appear to be leaning to the right and the horizontal arrows on the right appear to be higher than the ones on the left. An even better drawing - Illusion Museum spine drift illusion of this is on Akiyoshi Kitaoka's site. The background colour, size, number of arrows all seem to have an impact on the amount of movement.

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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

Drawing This Unique Spiral

I've long been fascinated by how the wonderful spiral pattern animated here is produced. I've tried creating it unsuccessfully in ArtWorks until I discovered a book called Drawing Optical Illusions by G. A. Sarcone and Marie-Jo Waeber that contains details about its construction. It really is simple to draw. Clone the first square, change its colour and rotate it. The newly cloned square is then resized so that each corner touches the sides of the preceding square. The procedure is repeated many times until a tiny hole exists at the centre. Easy!

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The number of visitors to this site is....................   since Tuesday the 30th of October, 2007.

Links checked Friday the 12th of November, 2010

New material added