*** From the Archives ***

This article is from August 28, 2001, and is no longer current.

Expression 2: Natural Media the Vector Way

Skeletal strokes can consist of either bitmaps or vector objects, but you can control the appearance of a stroke in many ways. For example, you can specify that certain parts of a stroke repeat or stretch, and you can define a multi-view stroke that consists of several strokes applied in consistent or random order.


In the top portion of the screen above we are defining the central car as repeating. The stroke underneath shows the result.

Strokes may vary in opacity, color, edge softness, and width (both static and variable). They may be assigned embossing, paper texture, and blending mode, and you can break them at joints to form a picture frame.
Expression 2 ships with a nice variety of skeletal strokes to get you started — including various natural-media strokes, numerous direction strokes such as arrows and pointing hands, fun animal shapes such as fish and a mouse, and many others — but half the fun is developing your own strokes, which can be organized into library folders (Version 2 also supports strokes created in version 1). Expression supports a pressure stylus and does so with exquisite sensitivity. We were continually amazed at how much this program resembles Corel Painter, except the strokes are vector paths and so may be continually adjusted and transformed.
Expression has two other kinds of strokes — basic and gradient — along with three types of fills: basic, gradient, and pattern. The attributes of both strokes and fills are controlled via the compact Paint Style and Attributes palettes.


The compact Paint Style palette lets you control the appearance of both strokes and fills.

You can draw with a freehand or Bezier pen and with polyline or B-spline tools, as well as rectangles and ellipses — all available via the Toolbox. Each path has handles for adjusting the shear and thickness, or you can use the palettes to change these attributes. Combined with rulers, grid, and node snap, it’s possible to create illustrations with an excellent degree of precision.


Stroke width and shear can be instantly adjusted with Expression 2’s convenient handles.

Previous 1 2 3 Next

>