Art of its own genre - but there are problems in producing it!

[William Overington]

So I decided to start a small project that I decided to call Art of its own genre.

The aim is to present some clip art made by me in a Share your work thread and hopefully some people will try to produce  some pictures using the clip art.

I decided to draw the clip art in Affinity Designer (version 1) and then export each image as a png file with a transparent background.

I started with an A4 landscape document, with a transparent background, scaled in pixels.

First I produced the tree, two items and a bounding box, all three items grouped. Fine. Ready to export as a png file.

I then tried to produce a sun. I spent quite a time drawing it using the Pen Tool and moving points to multiples of fifty pixels, colouring it r=224, g=224, b=0 so a yellow that would show up on white paper.

But something has gone wrong when I tried to add the bounding box. I cannot seem to get back to the sun itself and thus cannot change its colour. I am reluctant to delete it and start again as setting the points of the sun so it looked right to me took quite a while.

What has gone wrong please? Can it be fixed please?

William

 

aoiog001.afdesign

[R C-R]

I do not see anything in the file that looks like a sun or has r=224, g=224, b=0 color values. There is a sort of spiral curve shape in the top group, but it is easily selected so its bounding box shows, & its colors are r=255, g=0, b=211 so it is unclear what sun shape you mean.  It might help if you labeled everything in the layers panel & re-uploaded the file.

There also seems to be a superfluous double group for the tree(?).

[William Overington]

18 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I do not see anything in the file that looks like a sun or has r=224, g=224, b=0 color values. There is a sort of spiral curve shape in the top group, but it is easily selected so its bounding box shows, & its colors are r=255, g=0, b=211 so it is unclear what sun shape you mean.  It might help if you labeled everything in the layers panel & re-uploaded the file.

There also seems to be a superfluous double group for the tree(?).

Thank you for replying.

Well, er ... , the "sort of spiral curve shape" is the sun in this clip art.

I am hoping to add some clouds, some water as in a pond or lake, etc..

The idea is that each bounding box for a grouped unit should be an unfilled rectangle with a zero width stroke, so that each item of this clip art is an exact mutiple of one hundred pixels in size in both x and y directions and has a transparent background.

Perhaps there is nothing wrong and I have just got it in a muddle.

William

 

18 minutes ago, R C-R said:

There also seems to be a superfluous double group for the tree(?).

Thank you. I will try to fix that.

William

 

[Alfred]

32 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I do not see anything in the file that looks like a sun or has r=224, g=224, b=0 color values. There is a sort of spiral curve shape in the top group, but it is easily selected so its bounding box shows, & its colors are r=255, g=0, b=211 so it is unclear what sun shape you mean.  It might help if you labeled everything in the layers panel & re-uploaded the file.

There also seems to be a superfluous double group for the tree(?).

The ‘sort of spiral’ curve appears as (r=224, g=224, b=0) here. If it were (r=255, g=0, b=211) it would be magenta, not yellow.

3 minutes ago, William Overington said:

The idea is that each bounding box for a grouped unit should be an unfilled rectangle with a zero width stroke

The bounding box for the tree group is unfilled and has an unfilled stroke, but the stroke is 1 pt wide.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, William Overington said:

The idea is that each bounding box for a grouped unit should be an unfilled rectangle with a zero width stroke...

Not sure what you mean because bounding boxes are not objects so they have no strokes.

[firstdefence]

33 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I do not see anything in the file that looks like a sun or has r=224, g=224, b=0 color values.

Didn't look very hard and it's an abstract sun.

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, firstdefence said:

Didn't look very hard and it's an abstract sun.

Yeah, I realize now that I had the wrong color well selected & for whatever reason it was showing r=255, g=0, b=211. 

Anyway, for future reference it would be a good idea to label curves and/or groups for things like this to make it clear what is being talked about.

I'm still not sure why this abstract sun curve, such as it is, is a child of a rectangular curve shape.

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

But something has gone wrong when I tried to add the bounding box. I cannot seem to get back to the sun itself and thus cannot change its colour.

I think @R C-R may have explained why you’re having problems:

4 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I'm still not sure why this abstract sun curve, such as it is, is a child of a rectangular curve shape.

The yellow spiral is nested to the bright green rectangle, so the easiest way to select it is via the Layers panel. If you expand the rectangle layer there, you can select the spiral child object.

[firstdefence]

5 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I'm still not sure why this abstract sun curve, such as it is, is a child of a rectangular curve shape.

People like to put things in boxes  but I agree re layer labelling.

[Alfred]

1 minute ago, Alfred said:

The yellow spiral is nested to the bright green rectangle, so the easiest way to select it is via the Layers panel. If you expand the rectangle layer there, you can select the spiral child object.

Alternatively, double-clicking the spiral on the canvas should leave it selected.

[William Overington]

Thank you all.

I managed to fix it by copying the sun, pasting it elsewhere on the canvas, then deleting the original and the strange box, then move the copy of the sun to the original position.

I have now labelled items and exported three items of clip art so far and I hope to proceed to start a thread in the Share your work forum when I have made a picture using the clip art items.

Then hopefully I can add more clip art items.

Please find attached the second version of the clip art source file.

William

 

 

aoiog002.afdesign

[R C-R]

14 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I managed to fix it by copying the sun, pasting it elsewhere on the canvas, then deleting the original and the strange box, then move the copy of the sun to the original position.

Since the "strange box" is just a rectangular curve, you could have just dragged the child curve out of it on the Layers panel & then deleted that rectangular curve.

18 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Please find attached the second version of the clip art source file.

It is still unclear to me why you have the extra groups, rectangles, & curves that clutter up the layers panel. Consider this aoiog002 simplified.afdesign version & its fully expanded layers panel:

Is there anything about it that you want to avoid in your more complex version?

[William Overington]

Thank you for replying.

14 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Is there anything about it that you want to avoid in your more complex version?

Yes, the clip art items that would be exported do not have a bounding box that is in size an integer number of times one hundred pixels in both x and y directions/

That feature helps when scaling the clipart precisely.

The clip art items and a picture produced using them are now available in the Share your work forum.

William

 

 

[R C-R]

You can scale each object's dimensions precisely using the Transform panel to anything you want, including any integer numbers with or without using expressions for X & Y field inputs.

So I do not understand why you want to add the other items.

[William Overington]

There is now a thread in the Share your work forum, where the clip art items are available as well as two pictures made using the clip art.

The ,afdesign file for the second picture may, upon analysis, be found to be interesting to some readers as I included an extra item in the .afdesign file that is not printed yet served a useful purpose.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/197707-art-of-its-own-genre

William

 

 

Edited January 27 by William Overington
I forgot to include the link

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, William Overington said:

There is now a thread in the Share your work forum, where the clip art items are available as well as two pictures made using the clip art.

Link?

[William Overington]

My mistake, I have now added the link to the post.

William