Palette Tutorial

Dual ColorCaps Operation

It is convenient to keep the number of layers in a drawing under 10 or so. However, when adding items of "additional interest" like trees, the number of layers can temporarily get unwieldy, and the display becomes confused.

One solution is to start up another instance of ColorCaps to process and hold the trees before passing them into the main instance.

In the Pritzker drawing, the trees were scanned in from Ernest Burden's Entourage, A Tracing File. A page contains several trees and one or more is considered for use in the drawing. So, in the second instance of ColorCaps, the page is scanned in at 600 dpi and comes in as a layer of color pixels. Select Layer/Extract/Pen Lines to convert the layer to a layer of line pixels. Then, duplicate the layer and crop to get separate layers for the various trees of interest. Resize the trees to get something close to what is needed in the drawing. The line color for the trees was changed to a dark bluish gray.

The trees came from two or three different pages, so there were quite a few layers of trees.

Copy a tree to the clipboard and then switch the the main instance of ColorCaps and paste it into the drawing. Resize it as needed, optionally flip it horizontally, and move it around to find the optimum position. This composing is done without the clutter of extraneous trees. They are in the secondary instance, waiting their turn.

The main instance can have a few layers of trees to work with and these can be duplicated, flipped, resized, cropped and composed to get a desired arrangement. So you still have a few layers of trees active in the main instance, but you don't have the full clutter of new pages being scanned and processed, etc.

As the drawing becomes composed, groups of trees can be combined. In the final drawing, there is a combined layer of trees on the left and another on the right.

You can also use a second instance to load a second, reference drawing. Copy layers from it. Examine colors, lighting settings, etc.