For The Artist In All Of Us

DrawPlus X2 is a full-featured drawing program (vector type*) that includes many drawing tools, each with a wealth of options. The program is useful for creating business brochures, event posters, school project covers, logo designs, greeting cards, artistic masterpieces, and much more.

Start your projects from scratch or jump-start them by using the included design elements and adding your own decorations and text. Or you can use one of the professionally designed templates as is or customized for your needs. Templates cover the gamut from concert posters to wrapping paper to food related items to Web banners, family trees and much more.

Whether you start from scratch or use a template, the many draw and design tools are the same. One such tool is the pen tool for drawing lines and creating other objects, and a pencil tool is available for simpler lines. Another basic tool is the brush tool, which is available in dozens of variations such as charcoal, water color, felt tip and more. Any object you’ve drawn can be customized in various ways, such as by adding color or gradients. The shape of your objects and lines can be smoothly changed using control handles that appear when you select items. Rulers and scales allow precision work if necessary. Then there is the erase tool for, you know, erasing.

The Quick Shape option in DrawPlus X2 lets you create 30 different shapes instantly. These include simple circles and rectangles, hearts, arrows, stars, speech balloons and more. These shapes can be sized and rotated to your needs and filled with colors, patterns, gradients, bitmap photos or the more complex mesh fill. You can use transparency effects for depth and realism. Better yet, the related control nodes let you change the shape, making the Quick Shapes more flexible than similar clipart. But standard clipart images are also included and range from cartoon animals to splats, from school images to scrapbooking and more. A fun effect is the addition of a colorful and eye-catching Chain Line to your project. This effect creates a line of tiny objects that can be straight as in a border or curved along a path. Included are stars, flashes, footprints, arrows, hearts and more.

Text can be added to your project in one of three modes: the Artistic Text mode allows you to stretch, twist or curve your text, making it suitable for special displays, headings, cool logos and such. Frame Text is designed for text in a neat square or rectangular format for easy reading. Shape Text is a special type of Frame Text that’s designed to fit inside a shape such as a circle, triangle, heart and more. Corrections, changes in font size, attributes or color can be done for any type of text.

Any of your static projects can be exported for various print or Internet uses in a variety of formats such as .jpg, .bmp, .gif, .tif, .png and others. A Dynamic mode shows you how your exported work will look in a given format given the settings you specify. Don’t like it? Change the settings, that easy. DrawPlus X2 also provides animation tools that can add some zip to your Web pages or e-mails and are just plain fun to use. Animation can be of the traditional "stopframe" variety in which you individually create every frame in the animation sequence using backgrounds and overlays. Or you can do animation using "keyframes" in which you create a few strategic frames in the sequence and the computer does the work of creating the in-between frames. The animations can be exported in ShockWave Flash, .avi, ,wmv, .gif or Apple’s Quicktime formats.

DrawPlus X2 has remarkable features and is suitable for most of your graphic needs--and then some. It is easy to use for some very simple tasks, but any slightly more complex projects will take time and patience. Expect a long and steep learning curve, but you’ll find lots of help in the form of on screen tutorials, on-line help, a 250-page printed manual and many Tips & Tricks on Serif’s Web site.

* Graphics 101: There are two flavors of graphic programs, bitmap and vector. Bitmap images are composed of tiny individual elements called pixels. The pixels are arranged in a regular grid pattern, and each pixel contains information about the color and brightness of that pixel. Displaying thousands or millions of these pixels together forms a picture. Bitmaps are good for displaying images with lots of color variations and shading, such as a photo. Bitmaps don’t always enlarge well because the computer has to make an intelligent guess to fill in information for additional pixels, so you lose resolution and may get a pixilated effect.

Vector images are made up of objects such as a line or circle. Mathematic formulas describe each object along with color, info for fills and positional relations. Vector images are not good at easily depicting the smooth continuous color tones and variations in a photograph and are used mainly for illustrations requiring smooth, clean lines and solid colors. If you need the image enlarged, there’s no problem, since the mathematic formulas just recalculate for a smooth, clean image. That said, newer vector programs such as DrawPlus X2 can import bitmap photos to use in a design and even perform some limited adjustments such as brightness, color balance or red-eye reduction. Newer bitmap programs such as Photoshop can import vector designs to incorporate in an image.