Going Interactive

The fountain fill has benefited from the move to interactive tools as much or more than any other feature in DRAW. The steps we outlined above for creating custom fountain fills aren’t necessarily complicated, but they are unwieldy, what with all those trips to drop-down menus, dialogs, and subdialogs.

With the Interactive Fill tool, all of the controls are on the property bar, and instead of working in a little preview window, you manipulate the actual object on screen. The following images show how quickly you can turn a plain rectangle into a credible sunset.

This first graphic is your starting point—a rectangle with a default fountain fill of black on the left and white on the right. We used some mountains from Corel’s clipart library, just so we could have the sun setting behind something.

As soon as you select the rectangle and choose the Interactive Fill tool, the rectangle sprouts special control handles.

By simply grabbing the handles and moving them, you can change the angle of the fountain fill. You move the start handle up from the bottom, as most of the lower half of the rectangle is covered by the mountains.

Changing the start and end colors and adding midpoint colors is the easiest of all: you simply drag and drop colors from the on-screen palette. You can drop colors on the start or end control points, or anywhere along the line. You drag yellow to the lower control handle and pink to the top handle. Then you deselect and admire your work.

The Last Word on Fountain Fills

Here is our parting thought concerning fountain fills: when in doubt, don’t use them! If you are undecided about whether the use of a fountain fill will add any value to your drawing, then it probably won’t. And it might very well detract.

In fact, if you output your final work on a 300dpi printer or reproduce your work on a photocopy machine, never use fountain fills with a high Steps value. Your laser printer or the down-the-street copy machine simply can’t handle the density of the dot patterns, and you will look like an amateur designer who tried for too much. The only fountain fills you should attempt in this case are ones with low Steps values, designed to have blunt transitions, or ones with very coarse dot patterns. The 600dpi laser printers can produce credible results, provided you keep the From and To colors close together—for instance, from 15 to 45%.

If you expect to use fountain fills regularly for projects destined for film, read the discussions about setting PostScript halftone screens in Chapters 26 and 30.

When desktop publishing first struck it big, you could spot an amateur job from across the building: it had large Helvetica type inside a rounded rectangle with a gray background. Today, the dead giveaway of a bush-league electronic illustration is the misplaced fountain fill. If you want to help rescue the community of electronic designers from this collective notoriety, approach fountain fills with caution and restraint.

Applying Complex Fills

The next four fill tools—the ones that produce patterns—constitute the frills. In fact, these patterns often go largely unused, even by very talented and skilled DRAW users. Pattern fills are like Web page backgrounds—they tile across and down to fill the entire object. Here is a brief run-through of the four tools that produce patterns for your objects.

Two-Color Patterns

Three types of pattern fills are readily available from the property bar once you select the Interactive Fill tool. They are also combined in a single Pattern dialog, available from the third icon on the Fill flyout. The two-color fills include several dozen bitmap patterns that can be quickly applied to selected objects. Try this:

1.  Create a closed object and make sure it is selected.

2.  Select the Interactive Fill tool, then Pattern Fill in the drop-down list on the property bar.

You’ll feel at once as if you’re inside a Gateway Computer advertisement (the ones with the cows and the big black spots). We wish for Corel to change the default pattern, as it doesn’t exactly put the prettiest face on pattern fills. Be that as it may, the graphic above shows the effect of choosing patterns and the controls that DRAW offers. Experiment with all four handles that appear in the graphic:

•  The one at bottom-left moves the center of the pattern.

•  The white square on top sizes the pattern vertically and is also where you drop a color to change the background.

•  The dark square on the right side sizes the pattern horizontally and controls the foreground color.

•  The round button at the top-right sizes the pattern proportionally.

Most of the controls on the property bar are all obvious and intuitive, starting with the drop-down list, from which you choose the type of fill, to the three types of patterns available and the choices available in the current pattern, colors, and sizes:

Transform Fill with Object Determines whether the pattern sizes when the object is sized. The default is No, meaning that the pattern stays the same size and the object acts like a window to the pattern: open the window wide, see more of the pattern; close it, see less.

Select Pattern We don’t know why this isn’t called Create Pattern, because that’s what it does. With it, you can turn on-screen objects into a pattern.

Tiling This governs how the pattern repeats. If you want to control the tiling of the pattern in more detail, you will want to work the controls in the dialog, available by clicking the far-left icon on the property bar.