After a few months showing the work of new designers it seems like a good time to feature some recent work from regulars in the Xara Art Gallery forum of Talkgraphics, so here we have our pick of recent images from Graham Ward, Tomas Kopecky and Gary Priester.

Graham Ward (Gray on TalkGraphics)

Graham is well known for his illustrations of planes but not having done any graphic work for a while he worked on this particular one “as a little practice”. Quite a practice! The plane (it’s a Black Maria of the No 10 Squadron Black Flight) is 100% vector illustration, done in Xara Photo & Graphic Designer, the background a mix of vector and bitmap. You can see the post from September 2016 here and more of Graham’s amazing illustrations in the Xara Artist Gallery on xara.com.

Tomas Kopecky (flyboj on TalkGraphics)

This is a lovely story as well as a great set of illustrations. Tomas created these illustrations for his daughter’s Christmas kindergarten fair. The parents were asked to do / make / cook something that other parents could buy, and Tomas created these cards as a memory game to help the little children remember the words. I’m guessing that not many other parents came up with something so original! Take a look at the thread on TalkGraphics to see the final result, 20 pairs of images - and you can learn a little bit of Czech at the same time.

Gary Priester

Gary was one of the designers who posted Valentine themed images in this month’s Stop & Post thread. Unlike many of Gary’s works there is no hidden image in one, but the image is stereographic, that is it has an illusion of depth which hopefully many of you can see: Even the text at the top and bottom has a sort of 3D effect applied to it, but so far as the hearts are concerned Gary explained “The 3D effect is a larger heart and a smaller one at 90 degrees to one another. I tried to illustrate this in the attached (the lines defining the hearts have Stroke Shapes applied).” At this point I’m departing slightly from the brief of showing images from the last few months because Gary’s heart reminded me of a stereogram he posted back in 2015 when he was having some fun with the (then) new Spiral SmartShape. This one does have a hidden image, I wonder how many of you can see it! That’s it for this month. If you have enjoyed these images then all Likes, Shares, +1s, tweets etc are most welcome. You can view back issue via the drop down menu at the top of this page.