I am an artist and have always enjoyed two particular streams in art; oil painting and drawing comics. My interest in comics led to screenprinting, where I intended to publish short-run comic books. However my fine arts interest took over and I produced silkscreen prints for art galleries instead.
I stopped drawing comics for a long time until I bought a computer three years ago, and a wacom tablet. Computers are ideal for drawing comics, and Xara is made for drawing (and animating
drawings). And it is a small step from comics to logo design, which I also enjoy.
All of my images featured here are done exclusively with Xara's default toolset. No filters or add-on programs,
because I'd like to demonstrate to new users what you can do with the basic program. My usual Xara tools are: blend, colour gradient, arrange-combine shapes, and interactive transparency. I particularly like
to keep my designs exclusively as vector images if possible. This allows further uses for the image.
Animation in Xara is a breeze if you like to draw. The live editing feature of the freehand
tool (where you can add or subtract from the drawn outline), coupled with ctrl-C/ctrl-shift-V (to copy/paste in the same position onto a new frame) are my most used tools here.
