This month I thought it would be good to focus on images posted in the Art Gallery Forum of TalkGraphics during 2016. I’ve picked 4 different artists whose names will be familiar to regulars on TalkGraphics, but I chose them to demonstrate the very wide variety of styles and skills amongst Xara users, from photo realistic to completely abstract. We hope their work will inspire you to add your own images in the coming months, new members are always very welcome!

Graham Ward (Gray on TalkGraphics)

Here’s another top quality aeroplane image from the master! This is a Douglas DC3, the aircraft in the foreground is totally vector, the background image is partly bitmap. You can see the original post here, and you can also see more of Gray’s images in his selection in the Xara Artist Gallery.

Mark Beckemeyer (Buckobeck on TalkGraphics)

Mark has recently posted some amazing macro photos of insects in the photography forum on TalkGraphics (Insect Photography, Rapid Wolf Spider – why not add to the 22,000 views). Compare and contrast with this vector illustration of a spider recently posted here in the Art Gallery forum. Unless you have a particular fear of insects you won’t want to miss the complete thread, which has been running since last year (you might also remember his fly and grasshopper illustrations published in Inspirational Art last year).

Fred Van der Zee

We love the unique style of Fred van der Zee’s Buddhist images. Fred recently posted these illustrations in this thread in the TalkGraphics Art Gallery forum. They are both works in progress, you can actually follow their progress on Fred’s Facebook page here. The first is Green Tara with offering dakinis, and the second Lama Tsongkhapa. You can see one of his earlier illustrations in our March 2014 Inspirational Art and a wider selection of the digital thangkas he has created since 2008 in his Facebook Gallery.

Igor Vojtela (Igor01 on TalkGraphics)

Igor is one of the most inventive artists we’ve ever seen on TalkGraphics. You might remember the selection of illustrations we posted from his ‘Life in a Square’ series back in the September 2015 issue - well, here are a few more images picked from a couple of his other epic threads. X I X Joker has been running since Sept 2014 (with 119 posts and 25,000 views), but even that is outdone by Playing with Shapes & Colors (186 posts and 41,000 views since August 2014), from which we’ve picked just 3 shapes from more than 100 in the thread. Igor also posted a mini tutorial on the Xara Xone here, showing how he created a typical shape and including a few example .xar files so you can give it a go yourselves – which looks like a very therapeutic way of improving your Xara Designer skills! USA to USB, cat & mouse and night goggles come from 2016 posts in XIX Joker. And the shapes come from 2016 posts in Shapes & Colors. That’s it for this month. If you have enjoyed these images then all Likes, Shares, +1s, re-tweets etc are most welcome!