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Inspirational Art : Food

This month's Inspirational Art is guaranteed to make you hungry. We have a collection of images from two popular posters in the TalkGraphics Gallery on the theme of food - which just happens to be our Outsider contest theme this month.

And appropriately enough, our first two images are from Derek Cooper (aka Masque in TalkGraphics), winner of the first Outsider contest with his 3D Crash image. Well, here's something very different, a classic photo realistic drawing of tomatoes that requires a second glance to even realize it's really a vector drawing.





The wireframe makes it clear that this is a vector drawing and you'll get a better idea of how the image has been constructed.



This fantastic drawing uses the full range of Xtreme features: Note the more distant tomatoes and the flower pots are blurred - this is done using the blur Live Effect (on the Enhance controls) to give a depth of field effect. Note also that the flower pots themselves, again very photo-realistic, are vector designs with a variety of textures, blurred:



They look even better with the blur removed. Look at the water drop on the top of the right pot!



The shading on the tops of the tomatoes and specifically the green textured stalk is outstanding.



The realistic shading of the stalk uses a combination of textures, such as fractal textures, combined with feathered overlaid textures of various colors to create the richly detailed, highly realistic natural effect. The shading on the tops of the tomatoes and specifically the green textured stalk is outstanding.



Here's the stalk and some of the overlaid shapes that go to make it up. These use the Fractal Cloud transparency feature of the Transparency Tool with various colors. The right-side shading is created by overlaying a couple of shapes (2nd along) that use elliptical transparency.

So all in all a great example of the photo-realistic vector drawing capabilities of Xara Xtreme from a great artist.


This second image from Masque is something different again, with a lot of interesting things in the overall composition. The look this time is not of outright realism and the image somehow has a mysterious or magical feel quite typical of Masques' images. Take a closer look at the background for example. Great use of colors too.



Staying with the idea of fruit and still life, the next two images are from Steve Ledger (aka Sledger on TalkGraphics). Tempting as these mangos look, we actually picked this image from Sledger's fruit series as much for the leaves as the fruit.





The second image from Sledger is this mouth watering pear. Steve described his techniques: "The spots were drawn using nested, feathered circles which I then randomly duplicated into a rectangle. From this I created a bitmap copy which was used as a fill. The water droplets were all created from the one [droplet] drawing, simply duplicated, resized and rotated ad-hoc."

You can find the thread in TalkGraphics, simply search for Sledger's topic title 'a nice pair'. On which the editor makes no comment.