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Inspirational Art

You may remember that in an earlier edition of The Outsider we featured an astonishing astrolobe image created in Xara3D by Mike Sims (if you missed it find it here), but you may not have seen this image of the Falkirk Wheel created in a similar manner:



An amazing piece of engineering, just like the Falkirk Wheel itself (it's a rotating boat lift in Falkirk, in case you're wondering). Now, we wouldn't claim for a minute that Xara3D is really meant for this sort of work, but nevertheless Mike's challenge has been taken up by Anas bin Handle and we can't resist showing you the result:



These images should probably carry a health warning, they can't be created in Xara3D without considerable time, patience and skill, but if you enjoy a challenge and would like to try your hand, then you can find a tutorial on the Xara Xone from Anas showing how he created this using Xtreme and Xara3D - http://www.xaraxone.com/guest/guest65/

Which isn't to say that you can't create some astonishingly 3D-like images in Xara Xtreme alone, for example these classic images created by Gary Bouton:





...and this by Du�an Kastelic:



These 3D effects are created in Xtreme using bevels and shadows - you can find this file in the clipart gallery of Xtreme (if you're running the trial, click GetClipart and it will be downloaded into one of the two Xara Example Drawings folders). You may have seen it before, but I bet you didn't know that Du�an was one of the first to experiment with the limits of Xara3D: And here's his Xara3D version:



Another master of the 3D look is José Campoy, and you can follow his tutorial this month to get an idea of how he creates images such as this Xara logo in Xara Xtreme.

Now I know this looks as if it's been created with 3D software, but actually it's pure Xara Xtreme. José Campoy the artist says that no 3D software was used at all in the making of this image, and here's the .xar file so you can see for yourself.

Oh and another interesting thing about this image is that it uses linked colors, so you can instantly re-color the logo to be any color you like.