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Artwork for greetings cards


William Overington

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The concept of auto-trace got me thinking.

I often put on YouTube videos  Sometimes an advertisement pops up and I usually skip them.

But the other day one came up and I watched it all the way through, wondering how they managed to do that. I made a note of the link to the business. In particular because they do custom kits from a customer-supplied photograph.

https://masterpiecebynumbers.com/products/masterpiece_by_numbers_custom_paint_by_numbers_kit

https://masterpiecebynumbers.com/

The online auto-trace to which Andy05 kindly provided a link also displayed the colours used in the image in a sort of palette area below the image.

I am wondering how they get the numbers into the image and remove the colours.

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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Some readers might like to know that the poem featured in the first post in this thread and in some of the early designs is the poem in the following chapter of my first novel.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_034.pdf

That chapter is part of a story in the novel that continues over several chapters and if you want to follow the story after the above chapter the chapters are individually linked from the following web page.

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

On a separate matter, the twelve inks used in the framed prints may include such colours as light black and light light black. I was wondering why and I am thinking of including in a future artwork an area in CMYK colour format with K=1 and everything else zero in order to discover if at that low value of K using just four ink colours whether a speckled pattern of dots will be noticeable as maybe one dot in 100 will be solid black, so approximately one dot every 10 in each axis. At 300 dots per inch that might mean black dots just under a millimetre apart.

Having a light light black ink in a 12 ink system would I am thinking avoid that happening.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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I have this evening been unpacking the card from the cardboard sleeve in which it arrived.

It arrived on the Thursday of the previous week, but I have only opened it this evening as it was in quarantine for a week as a precaution due to the pandemic.

The print quality is superb.

The sixteen language-independent glyphs are really solid black.

As expected, the colours are darker than on the on-screen display in this thread.

The colours go right to the edge of the card in the style of the commercially printed greetings cards that are available for purchase in shops and online.

As the card has thickness, the card has a spine where it is folded from the original flat print and the colours cover the spine.

The colours on the left side of the card are really solid and bold. The colours at the right side have various, (depths, is that the word?) as a result of the water colour effect of the virtual brush provided by Affinity Designer. With the exception of the yellow area, brush strokes are clearly visible. However, checking back to the original artwork as displayed in page 1 of this thread, there is not much in the way of brush marks in the right side yellow area, yet there is the quite prominent arc at lower right of the yellow area, but I could not see it even knowing where it is, though I tried again tilting the frame this way then that and I think that I did catch a glimpse of it in the expected place.

At the right side there are five areas where a later colour of the rainbow has been applied over the previous colour of the rainbow.

Orange over red shows strongly as a deep orange.

Yellow over orange is hard to make out, but is there if I look closely.

Green over yellow is much the same but a bit easier to see.

Blue over green I found very hard to detect as the blue is quite dark.

Magenta over blue is about the second strongest, but nowhere near the strength of the orange over red, but the strength of the blue itself makes it look as if the blue is over the magenta.

On the inside, the text has printed really clearly.

I have framed the card using one of the following frames.

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/251929289

Total cost £8.26, being £3.50 for the card, 76p for postage, £4.00 for the frame.

The frame is not, unlike most of the others available, listed as a photo frame.

They are probably intended for framing an A4 size certificate. So they were probably not intended framing a smaller card, but I have found that such use does work well.

I used five sheets of A4 white card behind the card and in front of the back piece of the frame works well. Fortunately I had an almost full pack of A4 white card handy, having bought it in a specialist stationery shop maybe fifteen years or so ago.

William

 

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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I have now placed an order for a print of Software Unicorns reflected in a Lake.

I produced the jpg file by setting up an Affinity Designer document 2171 pixels wide by 1571 pixels high, which includes the bleed areas. So a card 7 inches wide by 5 inches high.

I placed the gif file and it was 565 pixels wide y 397 pixels high.

So I changed that to 1695 pixels wide by 1191 pixels high, which is exactly 3 pixels for each original pixel linearly in each direction, so nine times (9 = 3 x 3) the area of the original.

I then aligned the image centred in the document both horizontally and vertically.

I then exported as 300 dots per inch.

I expect that the colours will be darker on the print than on the computer.

I uploaded the image to the Papier website and I added some text where the greeting appears when the facility is used to produce a greetings card. I used Garamond for the text.

Here is the image. Of necessity given the scaling process that I used a bit blocky but I will get something. The image is 300 dots per inch so maybe it will look reasonably good, maybe better than that. I am hoping to frame the result. That does mean that the text inside in hidden but it does give the framed image provenance as to title and so on.

I am hoping to produce an improved version based on the vectorized version of the original image that Mike kindly supplied.

300dpi_unicorns1.thumb.jpg.edc36643ef0c1b76f7384fdfbbc01752.jpg

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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The software unicorns appear in my recent novels, one completed in 2019, one over half completed..

For example, in the following.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_021.pdf

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_author_note_after_chapter_021.pdf

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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In another thread, colour is being discussed.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/140122-colours/

In this thread, if I used Pantone colours in producing artwork and then produced a jpg file for the purpose of sending it to Papier to print, would the fact that they are Pantone colours be lost in producing the jpg or would Pantone information go through?

The greeting cards do not go through a varnish process as do cards from at least some other suppliers, which is why I use Papier. Also having Papier on the back as an imprint is fine, it adds provenance. I would not want some of the 'hip' names used elsewhere as an imprint on my art.

Though I suspect that that is not the same as coated and uncoated as used in Pantone swatch names.

So if I check whether the card used by Papier for these photo greetings cards is coated or uncoated, if I use the Pantone CMYK palette or that type of paper, would the Pantone names simply be a feature of the source file rather than the jpg file,?

In a similar sort of way that grouping object in an Affinity Designer afdesign document does not go through to the jpg.

I am thinking that using the Pantone CMYK palette might be a good way of documenting my artwork.

I am new to this, so I may have got it muddled.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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I have just checked on the Papier website and the Paper Quality for the two card templates that I am using are listed as follows.

> High white premium quality paper (350gsm) with an uncoated finish

So I would be using a Pantone uncoated palette, probably the one with CYMK in its name.#

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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Though looking through it there do not seem to be the bright colours that were on the card with the poem that was in language-independent glyphs.

I am wondering why, or have I missed them?

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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7 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Though looking through it there do not seem to be the bright colours that were on the card with the poem that was in language-independent glyphs.

I am wondering why, or have I missed them?

‘Pantone CMYK’ sounds like PMS (Pantone Matching System) colours. If you’re restricted to colours within the CMYK gamut it should come as no surprise that bright colours are unavailable, as previously discussed.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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Well the card with the colours had quite bright colours on the actual printed card. A bit muted from the one's displayed on screen, some more muted than others.

There does not to seem to be greens in that swatch, maybe it is me or this computer or maybe I missed them.

William

 

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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4 minutes ago, William Overington said:

There does not to seem to be greens in that swatch

What swatch, William? If you’re referring to a CMYK palette, my understanding is that bright oranges and greens are missing (which is why Hexachrome, or CMYKOG, was introduced).

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Well, orange and green are often two of the extra colours in 12 colour archive printing.

But the hardcopy print of that poem with the colours (my third card) has the green quite good. More the apple green of some of the LNER locomotives than the green of some British Railways steam locomotives in the 1950s, which I think may have been the same green as used by the Great Western Railway. One or both was, I think, called Brunswick Green.

On that card, at the right part of where  the orange watercolour brush effect overlaps the red watercolour brush effect  it is quite like an orange fruit.

Now it is supposedly CMYK. I suppose that it is possible that it got printed with something more exotic if that is the word. Maybe, just maybe, someone saw it and gave it an upgrade, or maybe every card has that upgrade. In any case the printing equipment is probably in a different league to what is usually available in a home or office setting.

William

 

 

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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Ah, you asked what swatch.

It is the Pantone CMYK one for uncoated.

But I cannot look it up at present  to get the precise name becaus somehow I have got Designer into a mode with just the image and nothing else and I don't know how to get out of it.

I closed down and restarted but it is still the same.

How do I get back to Designer in its normal layout please?

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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1 hour ago, William Overington said:

One or both was, I think, called Brunswick Green.

Well, so long as it wasn’t Camberwick Green or Soylent Green!

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

somehow I have got Designer into a mode with just the image and nothing else and I don't know how to get out of it

If you mean you’ve hidden the UI, it works the same way as DrawPlus, etc: just press the Tab key on your keyboard to get it back again.

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I have just accessed this thread again so as to add a post, but find that the posts are all squashed to the left and there is a column over to the right with some details about the thread. Is that going to be there all the time now or can I get rid of it somehow please?

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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7 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I have just accessed this thread again so as to add a post, but find that the posts are all squashed to the left and there is a column over to the right with some details about the thread.

Instead of leaving your observation buried in an unrelated thread, please post about it here:

 

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I am now hoping to produce an image for a card, probably portrait format, that shows the sixteen glyphs that I designed to be emoji for language-independent personal pronouns.

They are shown in the first two chapters of my third novel, which is a work in progress.

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

Yet the illustration there are 72 pixels by 72 pixels at 96 dots per inch.

So I need to draw them again, for 210 pixels by 210 pixels at 300 dots per inch.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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12 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Yet the illustration there are 72 pixels by 72 pixels at 96 dots per inch.

So I need to draw them again, for 210 pixels by 210 pixels at 300 dots per inch.

How did you draw them, William? If the originals are in vector format you can simply export them again at the desired DPI setting.

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Just now, Alfred said:

How did you draw them, William? If the originals are in vector format you just need to export them again at the desired DPI setting.

I drew them in PagePlus X7, some years ago on a computer that has since broken down and put them on the web. For the novel I got the png files back from the web. Two had a minor fault and I redrew them. I added the 'singular they' as a new design not used before.

They are 72 pixels by 72 pixels but there is a one pixel wide transparent edge all the way round.

They are constructed by bars 10 pixels wide by 30, 50 or 70 pixels long, and pales 10 pixels wide by 30, 50 or 70 pixels long, superimposed as necessary for each design, working in pixel mode and using the transform panel to precisely position them..

First I produced the background light blue square, then copied that for the base of the others, then constructed components such as a green hollow square and so on and then built up the designs.

I need to look into the colours, as those designs are RGB for the web, and I need to produce CMYK so I want to try to get the colours right by running some tests.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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28 minutes ago, William Overington said:

They are constructed by bars 10 pixels wide by 30, 50 or 70 pixels long, and pales 10 pixels wide by 30, 50 or 70 pixels long, superimposed as necessary for each design, working in pixel mode and using the transform panel to precisely position them.

How did you work in “pixel mode” in PagePlus? :/

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2 minutes ago, Alfred said:

How did you work in “pixel mode” in PagePlus? :/

Well, I just set the measurement unit to pixels. Perhaps 'pixel mode' is not the correct term. It was all drawn using Quick Rectangles and having a zero width line, so vector items with pixels as the unit in the transform panel, I set the reference point for the measurement as upper left corner and basically did it all with integers in the transform panel, not doing placement 'by eye' with the pointer at all.

PagePlus X7 is not on this computer, but if I remember correctly it is under Tools Options Rulers or Rules and there is a drop down menu offering a choice, including inches, millimetres, pixels.

William

 

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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2 minutes ago, William Overington said:

PagePlus X7 is not on this computer

Is it accessible on your other computer, or can you install it on the current one?

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6 hours ago, Alfred said:

Is it accessible on your other computer, or can you install it on the current one?

Yes, the other computer is now working, and PagePlus X7 is on that computer. The only problem on the other computer was that the wifi was not working, but I managed to fix it by getting a .exe file to install a new copy of the wifi driver from the Lenovo website using this computer then transferring it over using a USB memory stick.

I cannot install PagePlus X7 on this computer without going out of the S part of Windows 10 S. I have decided not to do that as my most critical need for a computer is to order my grocery deliveries.

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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