Creating a vase with the Mesh Warp tool.
Suggestion:  This tut is long.  Read through it first.  You may not need to follow it step by step.
And I am sure you can come up with some great variations on this theme.

 
To find the Mesh Warp tool, click on the triangle next to the deformation tool on your toolbar.
Then click on the Mesh Warp icon.  The deformation tool will be dimmed out and not available
until you have painted something on your canvas.

Creating the design tube for your vase.

Open a canvas with transparent background.  On a layer paint an area with the color that you want to be the main color of your vase. In my case, I used dark red painted with a square sponge brush tip that I made. Then paint over that with the lesser colors that you want to find in your vase.  "Merge visible" the layers if you used more than one layer.

To start warping my design, I opened the mesh warp tool and set the size to 24 by 24.  I pulled the nodes inward in a number of areas. Hint: You have to start with the node closest to the center, then pull in the next closest node.  Only 2 are marked here with arrows.  If you have pulled an area inward and can't pull it any further, click on the check mark to apply the change and then you will be able to make further changes to an area.  Do this as many times as you want.  Click the check mark to "save" you changes.  Then......................................................................change the mesh size setting.

This is the same design as above after I reset the mesh settings to 5 and pulled the nodes again in a number of areas.  This setting gives you the ability to make changes over a larger area at one time.

Then I clicked the check mark to apply the changes, and made more changes with this result.

When you finally have a design that you would like to try out, click apply on the mesh warp a final time and then save the design as a tube.  That is done by going to File>Export>Picture Tube.  Fill in a name for your tube and click ok.

Return to Holder's Computer Art  http://www.glhold.com

On to the next page....Creating the body of your vase.

These images and this page belong to:
© Susie Holderfield 2004
http://www.glhold.com
Links to this page are welcome with a notice given of original ownership.
Do not make a link which hides my page address.