It’s the first Xara Day here at Designorati:Illustration! The fourth Thursday of each month, Designorati:Illustration will bring you a feature article about one of the best illustration packages on the market: Xara Xtreme. This month on Xara Day we look at the Blend Tool in Xara Xtreme. It’s one tool with many possibilities!

Welcome to the first Xara Day at Designorati:Illustration! The fourth Thursday of each month, Designorati:Illustration will bring you a feature article about one of the best illustration packages on the market: Xara Xtreme. If you’re new to Xara, you’ll get some good insight into using the program. If you’re not new, hopefully you will pick up some tips and tricks to make working with Xara even easier. If you’re an Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Macromedia FreeHand user and want to switch to Xara Xtreme or add it to your arsenal of illustration tools, we’ll show you how Xara’s tools work to help make your transition easier.

The Blend Tool creates a blend, or morph if you will, between two objects, letting the shapes, colors, and even effects meld together with a series of intermediate objects. This blend was created from a small pink heart and a larger red heart. To make the blend, you click the object that is to be the start of the blend (the pink heart), and drag to the object that will end the blend (the red heart). They don’t have to be selected; just clicking on them with the blend tool is enough to create the blend.

When the blend is selected, you can see the path it travels along. On this one, it is just a straight line. When the blend is selected, and the blend tool is active in the tool box, the Blend Tool Infobar at the top of the work area will show Blend Tool settings.

The blend is live and can be changed using these settings. By default the blend will have 5 steps: one starting object, one ending object, and 5 intermediate objects morphing from the properties (Size, shape, color) of the starting object to the properties of the ending object.

In the Infobar, you can change the number of steps and the blend changes instantly. The more steps, the smoother the blend.

Clicking the Remove button removes the blend and gives you the two original objects:

If you want to make the blend again you can use ctrl + Z to undo the remove and put the blend back, or you can click on the two objects with the Blend Tool again.

If you want to change the color of one of the objects in the blend, ctrl-click on the object you want to change. I changed the large heart from red to blue, and the blend instantly updated with the new color transitions.

The Blend Tool Infobar lets you set the Fade of the colors of the blend between the objects.

Fade: a simple transition between the colors of the two objects; how smooth the transition is depends on how far apart the colors are in shade and how many steps the blend contains. This is the default.

Rainbow: a transition along the shortest path around the HSV Color Circle. Depending on the colors of the blended objects, this could run clockwise or counter-clockwise around the HSV color circle. The color circle runs Red-Yellow-Green-Cyan-Blue-Magenta-Red, so a blend from pink to red would take the shortest path, and use colors from Magenta to Red. A blend from green to red would run Green-Yellow-Red. Therefore, if your colors are close together on the HSV Color Wheel, Rainbow may appear to have little or no effect.

Alternate Rainbow: Fades along the longest path around the HSV Color Circle. This one will be colorful! A blend fromyellow to cyan will run Yellow-Red-Magenta-Blue-Cyan for Alternate Rainbow.

Position Profile: Position Profile sets how the blend steps are situated along the path. There are preset profiles, or you can move the sliders to get the effect you want. The straight line distributes the steps evenly between the first and last objects.

Attribute Profile: This works similar to the Position Profile, but it affects how the colors are distributed along the path. Again there are preset profiles or you can adjust the sliders. The straight line distributes the colors evenly between the steps.

1:1 (One to One) node mapping only affects the blend when both objects have the same number of points, like the rectangles below. When this is not checked, Xara will add or subtract points to make the blend; if it is checked, it does not add or subtract any points.

With 1:1 unchecked the two rectangles blend like this:

With 1:1 checked, the two rectangles blend like this:

Anti-Aliasing: With this turned on, every step in the blend is anti-aliased. When it is off, only the first and last step is anti-aliased. If you find a complex blend with many steps takes a long time to redraw, you might want to consider turning this off.

Blends don’t have to be straight! They can follow along a curve too. Draw a path with any of the path tools and select both the path and the blend. Click the Blend along a curve button and the blend follows the path. You can use the Position and Attribute Profiles to distribute the steps or colors along the curve.

By default the curve of the blend is oriented to the path; that means each step is aligned to the path at a 90° angle. If you click the Rotate button, the hearts will rotate to follow the curve.

Right clicking on a blend opens a popup menu with commands relating to blends. One of these is “Convert Blend to Editable Shapes”. Choosing this makes each step in the blend a separate object, with points and nodes like any shape you created. After converting the blend to editible shapes, you will need to go to Arrange > Ungroup to edit them separately, changing shape, size, fill or outline attributes, as well as adding bevels, contours, or drop shadows.

One last trick with blends before we close this week. You can edit the curve and change the flow of the blend. To do so, choose the Shape Editor Tool from the tool box, and you will be able to adjust the curve.

That wraps up Blend Basics for this week. There are many more options and more complex tricks that can be done with blends, such as adding highlights, and they can even be used to shade objects! Fire up Xara Xtreme and explore the Blend Tool. There are unlimited possibilities!