affinity designer Artwork for greetings cards

[William Overington]

3 hours ago, Alfred said:

I think it might be better if the snowflakes were a bit smaller so that they didn’t collide, but otherwise that all looks fine to me.

I have yet to  try the other five.

The glyphs within the overall design are of various widths, the one for cloudy is quite wide.

Yet the codes for interoperability seem to be quite elegantly chooseable..

For example,

It is raining.

is

!162

and

It is raining heavily.

can be

!1612

and similarly for the other six, by inserting a digit 1 after the digit 6.

William

 

[William Overington]

Here are all seven of the new glyphs.

William

 

[William Overington]

Here are two more poems, written today.

Hopefully some readers will enjoy trying to understand their meanings in any language of their choice and thinking of what images would be appropriate for language--independent greetings cards displaying these poems.

Poem 2

 

 

 

 

 

Poem 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

William

 

[William Overington]

As well as the photo greetings cards - where I am pushing the envelope because I am getting some and framing them as works of art. They advertise it all as photos, but they accept my artwork.

Papier also does framed art prints.

https://www.papier.com/photos/framed-photo-prints/

The sizes are different from the sizes of the greetings cards and it appears that I need to allow for a bleed area and also for an under-the-mount area.

The overall size of the ones labelled as small appear to be a bit larger than A4 size.

An interesting aspect of the framed prints is the following.

On the page https://www.papier.com/photos/framed-photo-prints/quality/ there is the following.

> We print your photos using premium printing techniques and 12 colour archival inks for lifelike quality that really lasts. Every print is lightfast for 75 years – no fading or discolouration.

I wondered what the twelve colours would be and on the web I found the an interesting page. This may or may not be the same system as used to produce the Papier prints, but the article is very interesting, particularly the number of black inks included.

I cannot find the page now but the colours were the standard CMYK four, plus light cyan, light magenta, four blacks, orange and green.

However the wikipedia article indicates that the twelve colours vary by manufacturer, so I am unsure which system is used for the Papier prints.

The generic term is giclée printing.

(I seem to be having problems inserting links using the Link facility - so here are just text versions)

https://www.creativebloq.com/print-design/giclee-printing-11121324

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclée

William

 

 

 

 

 

 

[William Overington]

Some readers might like the artwork to the same size, the first landscape format and the second portrait format, using Serif PagePlus

Both were used to produce greetings cards at the Papier website. Both are now framed. The first one displayed on the wall. The finished cards are seven inches by five inches.

The following link has information about the font.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_author_note_after_chapter_046.pdf

Here is a link to the novel with the author notes included.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/novel_plus.htm

This image is of the glyph corresponding to the letter G in one of the fonts available from Collection 2 that is linked directly to the following web page.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/font0000.htm

William

 

 

 

[Alfred]

5 hours ago, William Overington said:

As well as the photo greetings cards - where I am pushing the envelope because I am getting some and framing them as works of art.

If you’re framing them you aren’t pushing the envelope, you’re doing away with the envelope!

[William Overington]

Actually they do not arrive in an envelope as such but in a rather nice quite thick cardboard pack that can be opened by pulling a tab at one end. One side of the pack has Venetian blind style blue bars printed on it. It is very well done. The package has a blank envelope included as the presumption is that one has produced a greetings card to send to someone else. There is an option to send the card direct to a recipient when it is sent in an ordinary envelope. This is a useful facility.

William

 

[William Overington]

I have a picture of which I would like a printed card version from Papier, with the intention of framing it.

I can use the following template and make my jpg file as 2171 pixels by 1571 pixels, 300 dots per inch and CMYK.

https://www.papier.com/landscape-photo-313

I can change the greeting to be a description of the image and add the date of the image and the date of the card design.

The image is one that I produced in 1998 and which has been on the web since then.

It was adapted from two pieces of clip art from Microsoft Office on a Windows 95 computer that had a screen resolution of 800 pixels by 600 pixels. The file is a gif file, 565 pixels by 397 pixels. I think that I made it using PowerPoint.

I am wondering what is the best way to process that image to get the best possible result with the printed card.

I am not currently using the computer that has the Affinity software on it, so I loaded the image into Paint and resized by 300%.

The result looks a bit chunky but is larger than the print will be.

Given that it is probably best not to start from here, but I need to do so as that is the image that I have to use, what is the best way to approach this in Affinity Designer, bearing in mind that I would like a print please?

The image is the final image in the following web page.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/euto0008.htm

William

 

 

 

 

 

[Smee Again]

First off, I'm a debt collector and skip tracer by trade -- so I'm not the most popular guy in town, or even on the block.

Was looking at those glyphs(?) again a couple of nights ago. Wife walks in and looks at the screen for a second, then says: "Oh, someone you know from work?" Then she points at this one:

"Must have made an impression on him. He flipped you off with both hands and circled it!"

 

[Alfred]

9 hours ago, William Overington said:

The image is the final image in the following web page.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/euto0008.htm

In other words, this GIF image:

It’s already quite ‘jaggy’ at its current size, so enlarging it by a factor of three is going to make the problem noticeably worse. I’m afraid I can’t see an easy answer if you’ve ruled out the option of redoing the whole thing as vector.

[MikeW]

Here's a quick auto-trace. It's an ok start to a vector version.

WO-art.afdesign

[William Overington]

26 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Here's a quick auto-trace. It's an ok start to a vector version.

WO-art.afdesign 196.41 kB · 12 downloads

Thank you. That is amazing!

How did you do it please?

I searched in the Affinity Designer help but did not get any results for the key words that I tried.

William

.

[William Overington]

I am starting to think that I can try to produce two cards, one using just the original image magnified, fairly promptly, and then try to produce a new version as a longer term project.

The basic design for the landscape, as supplied as clip art, was vector. I learned quite a lot while producing the final image, as I ungrouped the as supplied image so as to place part of one of the software unicorns behind the tree at the front. I deliberately made the image like that so that the reflection in the lake could be seen yet not all of the direct view.

I suppose that means that it might be possible to produce a vector version of the fourth image in the story page and use that as a component in a new image.

The software unicorns appear in my novels, the first one, started in 2016 and completed in 2019, and in the second one a work in progress at this time.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_060.pdf

William

 

 

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, MikeW said:

Here's a quick auto-trace. It's an ok start to a vector version.

WO-art.afdesign 196.41 kB · 12 downloads

Was that auto-race produced using Affinity Designer please?

William

 

[Alfred]

11 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I am starting to think that I can try to produce two cards, one using just the original image magnified, fairly promptly, and then try to produce a new version as a longer term project.

Why does it need to be a longer term project, William? Mike has provided you with a (more than!) “ok start to a vector version”. The main things that are missing are a few tiny details such as eyes and nostrils, all of which can be quickly and easily added.

[Alfred]

Just now, William Overington said:

Was that auto-trace produced using Affinity Designer please?

AD doesn’t have an auto-trace feature yet. DrawPlus does, but I believe that Mike has access to some better alternatives.

[William Overington]

2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Why does it need to be a longer term project, William? Mike has provided you with a (more than!) “ok start to a vector version”. The main things that are missing are a few tiny details such as eyes and nostrils, all of which can be quickly and easily added.

Basically because I am learning and I want to do it thoroughly. I am thinking that I might be able to get the first one, the original magnified, with an explanation as the greeting, ordered by Saturday.

William

 

[William Overington]

Also, I can have a look at whether I need to adjust the shape of the stars or whether that is best not done.

William

.

 

[MikeW]

17 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Was that auto-race produced using Affinity Designer please?

Was done using Adobe Illustrator. Serif DrawPlus can be used too, which you may have.

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, MikeW said:

Was done using Adobe Illustrator. Serif DrawPlus can be used too, which you may have.

Well, I have got a version, but not the latest version, but it is on a disc somewhere, but that computer has very little space left on it.

On that computer I have the three Affinity programs, and also PagePlus X7, FontCreator, Scanahand, and little else otherwise.

This computer is also full as it is a basic machine that I got when the other one lost its wifi capability, but using this computer to download a new copy of the wifi driver enabled me to fix it by copying the .exe file over to the other machine, which was still working well apart from the wifi,  using a USB memory stick.

I got this one because I need to be able to order grocery deliveries as a priority need and this computer is good for that and many other things but there is little of the 32 Gigabyte memory available and it is a Windows 10 S machine and I have thought best not to unlock it from the S version due to that priority need.

William

 

[Andy05]

An alternative might be using online vectorizers/tracers like https://www.vectorizer.io/ 

Depending on the source file, the results can be quite a good base for finetuning.

[William Overington]

5 hours ago, William Overington said:

Well, I have got a version, but not the latest version, but it is on a disc somewhere, but that computer has very little space left on it.

I just got my Legacy product keys and the latest DrawPlus I have is DrawPlus X5.

I had wondered if there might be a download, but they are only for X6 and X8.

Maybe X5 did not do autotrace anyway. Does anyone know please?

I certainly have not thrown it away, so if I have a look I may find it quickly, not at all, or somewhere in between.

William

 

[William Overington]

3 hours ago, Andy05 said:

An alternative might be using online vectorizers/tracers like https://www.vectorizer.io/ 

Depending on the source file, the results can be quite a good base for finetuning.

Yes, I just tried it on the two graphics of the software unicorns.

The results look very good.

It is a pay service, but the cost is £10 for 100 credits, each download costs a credit, but the credits expire after a month, so if I bought a minimum quantity most would be wasted.

William

 

[Alfred]

6 hours ago, William Overington said:

I had wondered if there might be a download, but they are only for X6 and X8.

Maybe X5 did not do autotrace anyway. Does anyone know please?

I have a copy of the installer that another user kindly supplied to me. If needed, I can look into what I have to do to share it with you in a readily accessible form.

The DrawPlus X5 User Guide has a section on autotracing here.

[Andy05]

10 hours ago, William Overington said:

Yes, I just tried it on the two graphics of the software unicorns.

The results look very good.

It is a pay service, but the cost is £10 for 100 credits, each download costs a credit, but the credits expire after a month, so if I bought a minimum quantity most would be wasted.

William

 

Yes, indeed. Although it might be worth keeping it in mind. As even if one doesn't need 100 credits, it might still be worth paying that sum once for a project after all needed images have been gathered together. Depends on the project, of course, if it's worth spending more for it—considering that one invested valuable time into it already.