Drawing a comet

Dear Corel Users

Can you suggest a good way to draw a comet - not using a bitmap glow, but in pure vector on a dark background?

I attach a Photo to show more exactly how it look like ...

Regards,

Erik

  • Erik Vestergaard said:
    Can you suggest a good way to draw a comet - not using a bitmap glow, but in pure vector on a dark background?

    Various objects in various transparencies with various fills. here's a try:

    • you could try using the drop shadow effect on different shapes to make up the head and body.  Play around with the interactive transparency tool.  Or perhaps take this into PhotoPaint and work with some layering and effects there to achieve your goal.  here's my sample.

      • Pretty nice, thanks Jeff. Good idea using several objects with various transparancies. Eventually the glow at the comet's head can then be created with a circle or ellipse with radial fountain fill with transparency too.

        Regarding the stars which are a bit bigger than just a point: You might want to make a glow around it. The same with a Sun. Today I was working in Illustrator, although I actually hate it, and I am not very good with it. The problem was I couldn't import a certain file into CorelDRAW, so I had to do a Little Work in Illustrator. The was however one thing I found pretty nice in IL and it was the gradient fill. You can apply transparency (even different ones) to every point on the gradient slider. It made it quite simple to produce a star with glow, as shown below:

        Now I tried the same in CorelDRAW. It is not so simple, I find and I have trouble getting it to look realistic. I made a White Circle on the blue background, then Applied the transparency Tool and placed several points on the Fountain Transparency line. I cannot seem to make the White fade out continously into the blue. When using the Edge Pad option in the context Toolbar it helps, but I don't find it working very well. Maybe I have overlooked something? I use CorelDRAW X5, by the way. 

         

        Erik 

        • Like Ariel says, try a Mesh fill.

          There's a feature that was new in X5; Transparency in meshes.
          This means you can create the stars from a circle with a mesh of only four fields (2 x 2), where the center is an opaque white and all the nodes along the circle's edge are transparent.
          In combination with the, also new, "Smooth mesh color" (button in Property Bar) the effect will be similar to what you showed from Illustrator.

           

      • Mesh fill with transparencies

        • Just curious, does the comet need to be vector? I have always had better success with Bitmaps in PhotoPaint, example included.

          As for the Halo effect, here is another suggestion which is done After Ronny's description of the transparent nodes in the Mesh Fill. 

          • WOW, what a beautiful comet made in PhotoPaint! How did you create it?

            Actually I like to know how to do it in vector as well as in bitmap. Mostly I Work in vector, though. Great idea by Ronny too. I did not know about the possibilities with the Mesh Fill Tool, but will test it. Maybe that technique can be used for more arbitrary shapes too?

            Thanks for all the input. I appreciate it!

             

            Best regards,

            Erik

            • Erik Vestergaard said:

              WOW, what a beautiful comet made in PhotoPaint! How did you create it?

              Actually I like to know how to do it in vector as well as in bitmap. Mostly I Work in vector, though. Great idea by Ronny too. I did not know about the possibilities with the Mesh Fill Tool, but will test it. Maybe that technique can be used for more arbitrary shapes too?

              Thanks for all the input. I appreciate it!

               

              Best regards,

              Erik

              Personally I look at it like this sometime we tend to go a bit too Hollywood like if you look at a comet you dont see any color

               

              • Actually there often is color! It has to do with many optical phenomena. As a Mathematician and Physicist I know that although the light from the Sun is White, the Sky looks blue, because of scattering of light on molecules in the atmosphere. The "blue part" of the light is scattered more effectively than the "red part". Another example is sunsets looking yellow-reddish, because when the light travels a long way through the atmosphere from a low altitude, a big part of the blue light is removed from the White light, yielding what we see. Stars are redshifted and if you look up images of The Halley Comet via Google, you will find quite a few of them having colors (bluish, even purple edges). Not all of these are artwork, but real Photos. They may have been saturated a bit in Photoshop, but still there certainly are colors in the Sky!

                Pretty nice Picture anyway. I have troubles making it Work with the Mesh Fill Tool, but I probably need practice.

                Erik

                 

                 

                • White is in any case purely an optical illusion. Pale pink, pale blue, pale green and pale yellow will all look white if surrounded by only black or stronger tints of the same colour so that the brain has no other colour reference.

                  The brain always sees what it thinks it should see, but that is not necessarily what is actually there.

                  • Thank you for the explanation Erik

                    Looking at a visible comet from us on Earth would you still see colors.

                    Good exercise for all of us in Corel and a good coversation as well,I added some color to my next comet. 

                    • Erik Vestergaard said:

                      Actually there often is color!

                      Erik

                      Hello Erik; I see you got a lot of good answers for your question, and OF COURSE there's color with Comet, at least in the US of A, there's Green, Yeloow, Gold and White. Big Smile  lol

                      George

                       

                       

                  • hello Erik

                    I think you can do what you want in CDRaw But you will  probably need to convert items to bit map and use some effects the attached is all cdraw vector object with lens, gradient, gaussian blur,.

                     Background is rectangle converted to bitmap then  Creative-particles filter on bitmap menu

                    Gas clouds are shapes with nebulae texture fill plus transparency.

                    The Galaxies are ellipse with distort- twister- convert to curve -use shape tool to move spiral arms- gradient fill - bitmap-Gaussian blur, colour is a lens on top 

                    The comet is 5 elements    1. shape with gradient then gaussian blur then apply effect bitmap- art strokes-scraperboard    2.  white shape for head - Gaussian blur  3. duplicate first shape apply colour  then transparent lens  4. drop shadow using grey for colour then gaussian blur

                     it doesn't take that long you can add the colour like you photo duplicating the tail adding lens and colour as you wish.

                    Are you involved in Astronomy?

                    Ross Blair