The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
Drawn Out
Myles Strous 		 

 

When I wrote about splines last year I mentioned their use in drawing programs. I'd like to take this opportunity for a further quick look at drawing programs and some of the features they may provide. 

Some drawing programs you may have heard of, or that you may wish to compare when considering a purchase, are listed in the box adjacent. 

Many of them have time-limited trial versions available for download. 

Drawing programs differ from painting programs in a number of ways. The most significant is that drawing programs store descriptions of lines and shapes. A straight line, for example, may be described as starting from a point 3 cm in from the left edge of the page or drawing, and 2 cm down from the top edge, and finishing 6 cm in and 5 cm down, 4 mm in width, coloured red with rounded ends (see Figure 1). 


Figure 1. Paint programs use pixels, drawing programs use mathematical lines.

A paint program, on the other hand, would store descriptions of every pixel making up the line. One red pixel here, another one here, another one here, and so forth (see Figure 1). 

This usually means that:

  • drawing program data files often take up much less hard disk space than a painted bitmap while you're working on them, although you often want to export the final output in a bitmap format such as JPEG/JPG for use in Web pages or other software. For example, the illustration of different line types (Figure 4) takes up a mere 9 KB as a Xara drawing file (most of it being my beetle brush), but 146 KB as a compressed TIFF file at 503x754 pixels, and 65 KB as a reasonable quality JPEG file. Of course, the inclusion of bitmap textures will increase the size of a drawing file by at least the size of the bitmaps.

  • drawings usually scale very well to large sizes e.g. poster-sized or even wall-sized, as the figures describing the shapes can be easily scaled while retaining quality, unlike the quality loss you get when scaling a bitmap. Either pixels have to be enlarged, leading to a blocky pixelated mosaic effect (see Figure 1), or the program has to separate the pixels and guess at the colour range between them, which leads to a blurring effect. 

  • you can usually go back to most objects in a drawing file and edit them later. You can go back to that shape 3 levels down from when you started working on the drawing and change it to a different color, give it a different outline thickness, trim a bit off the corners, change the font of that text curving around the object, etc., all in a matter of minutes or even seconds without worrying about other elements of the illustration (see Figure 2). 


Figure 2. Relatively quick editing changes later in the illustration 
process are a major advantage of drawing programs.


Treating illustration elements as shapes rather than pixels allows for some interesting effects such as text on a path, where the user can create a curved line and align text along it (see Figure 2). This is a feature more frequently seen in drawing programs than paint programs and at any time the text may be edited, the colour and fonts may be changed, and text positioning on the line can be altered. Blending along a path is another such feature, where the user can create "extreme" shapes and the software will create intermediate steps, optionally following a curved path (see Figure 2). 

Drawing programs are excellent for creating illustrations from scratch. Paint programs on the other hand are usually a better choice for photographic manipulation. 

However, many modern programs are starting to merge features of both paint and drawing software, allowing vector (drawing) and bitmap (paint) manipulation in the same software, so it is no longer always possible to clearly divide programs into one category or another (see Figure 3). 


Figure 3. Mixing bitmap (paint) and vector (drawing) objects 
within the same program.


Figure 4. Start with a simple line, then 
apply different brushes and effects.

One feature showing up in both paint programs and drawing programs is the ability to create user definable brushes incorporating vector and/or bitmap elements. These may consist of a single element repeated or a multiple set of elements repeated sequentially (see Figure 4). 

Corel Painter (formerly from Metacreations/Fractal Design) calls this feature nozzles, PaintShop Pro calls it tubes, PhotoImpact calls it object clones, WinImages FX calls it image barrels, Xara X just calls it custom brushes. A similar technique can be used to produce vector brush strokes imitating "natural media" such as airbrush or paintbrush strokes, a feature known in CorelDRAW as Artistic Media brushes and in Adobe Illustrator as Live Brushes. 

My favorite drawing program is Xara X, and the illustrations in this article were created in that program. Other programs will possibly have equivalent features allowing users to reproduce many of the examples shown here, although be aware that different companies may use varying names to describe similar features. 

Personally, I'd be delighted to see demonstrations of other drawing software at the Graphics SIG so other members can make an informed choice when buying drawing programs. When getting up to speed with Xara X, it helps tremendously that Gary W. Priester, an expert illustrator in both CorelDRAW and Xara, has been writing an excellent online Xara tutorial each month for the last three years, and continues to do so, in addition to editing an informative online newsletter (see the tutorials and the news-letter at http://www.xaraxone.com/). Many other enthusiastic, skilled and helpful Xara illustrators can be found on the TalkGraphics Xara forums at http://www.talkgraphics.com/. For those who would like to try Xara X themselves, a downloadable fully-functional 30-day trial version of Xara X is available at http://www.xara.com/. The software is currently selling online (a CD-ROM is also posted to online buyers) for US$159. 

If you want to talk about Xara X or other drawing programs, come along to the Graphics SIG. We meet at 7.30 pm on the third Monday of every month, in the Melb PC SIG room.

Links to products mentioned  
CorelDRAW  http://www.corel.com/
Adobe Illustrator  http://www.adobe.com/
Macromedia Freehand  http://www.macromedia.com/
Xara X, formerly marketed as
CorelXARA 		 http://www.xara.com/
Serif DrawPlus  http://www.serif.com/
Real-DRAW PRO  http://www.mediachance.com/
Deneba Canvas  http://www.deneba.com/ 
Creature House Expression, formerly
marketed as Metacreations/Fractal
Design Expression  		 http://www.creaturehouse.com/ 

Reprinted from the July 2001 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia