This month we’re showcasing some great examples of work where the designer aims to create a painterly style using Xara Xtreme, for example the look

of an oil painting or a watercolor.

Raymond (Intbel on TalkGraphics)

We start with this classic image, which was shown in TalkGraphics back in 2006. It’s a recreation in Xtreme of a well known Millhouse painting - but at

17 layers and 8448 objects this is not a recreation that many could achieve - Intbel’s only advice being “patience, discipline, lotsa baccy, coffee and

Vladimir Konstantinovic

Our first artist, Raymond, was inspired by the work of Vladimir Konstantinovic who has recreated some famous Old Masters using Xara Xtreme. You can

find the xar files for both these images in the Xara Examples folder in the Clipart Gallery. This one is Abraham’s Sacrifice (mouse over the thumbnail in

the corner to see the detail in the main image).

Tim Seward (TimS)

There are two regular TalkGraphics posters who have successfully captured the look and feel of watercolor painting.  The first image is this still life of a

bowl of fruit from Tim Seward (whose work in a very different style we first showed in the February Outsider, though you’ll recognize the same great

feel for color and composition).

Tao Jones

Surprisingly we haven’t shown the work of TalkGraphic’s Tao Jones in Inspirational Art before, but his very distinctive work is well worth searching out

in the Xara Gallery. It’s been difficult to choose only 3 images from the many and varied images in the watercolor style. This first is a still life of his

window sill.

Here is a close up that will give you an idea of how it was done - that’s a lot of drawing and a lot of fills, but there’s no doubt that final result is

And this is Vladimir’s ‘Old Man in Red’ (again, hover over the small image in the top left to see the larger image in detail).  You can see a further image

by Vladimir in the September 08 Outsider.

Motor Race was one in a series of retro posters, created in Xtreme and in this case making use also of one of the Alien Skin plug-ins.

This one is Sunny Side of the Street, trying to capture the light and feel of a sunny day in Tao’s home country Australia.  As for how - Tao describes it

like this:  “how it was done was all with linear transparencies then I drew the lines here and there”. You can see the post on TalkGraphics.

images by attaching it to a placeholder.