*** From the Archives ***
This article is from December 17, 2002, and is no longer current.
Expression 3: Illustration Tools Meet Natural-Media Brushes
If you’ve never experienced Creature House Expression, be prepared for a stunning tour de force in creative illustration. If you are already familiar with this program, you’ll want to invest in an upgrade to version 3, which includes amazing fringe and embossed fills, plus a worthwhile collection of new tools and interface improvements.
The revolutionary technology behind Expression 3 is its ability to apply graphics along a vector path. The graphic can take any form and have multiple attributes such as color and opacity. More importantly, Expression allows both lines and fills to have the soft, blurry, blendable edges so necessary for creating the realistic effects that are the hallmark of image-editing programs such as Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop. Lines in Expression may look like natural-media strokes (brushes, ink), repeat as patterns of shapes, or consist of gradients or bitmaps (see figure 1). But unlike the strokes in Painter and Photoshop, Expression’s strokes remain completely editable.
Figure 1: A plain stroke with a variety of effects applied. Notice the red editable nodes, which let you reshape the path at will.
Different Strokes
Expression’s natural-media strokes are comparable to those in Corel’s Painter. That is, you just choose a brush — watercolor, oil, chalk — and start painting. However, if you aren’t happy with a stroke in Painter, you are constrained to using the Undo key, because each stroke is composed of individual pixels. But in Expression, all the strokes are vector paths, so editing is simply a matter of adjusting the nodes that make up the path (see figure 2).
Figure 2: A path with a fish stroke applied. To tweak the fish, just edit the path nodes.
The program ships with an abundant assortment of predefined strokes, but of course you can design your own. You can, for example, set start- and end-points and define which portions of the stroke repeat or remain constant (see figure 3).
Figure 3: The central car is set to repeat, so a long stroke produces a train with multiple cars and a single caboose and engine.
You can also define multi-view strokes that are useful for exporting as Flash files and animations (see figure 4).
Figure 4: This stroke is actually composed of ten different views. This figure shows the first stroke, or frame. The entire stroke can be exported as a single Flash file or animated GIF.
The mind-boggling assortment of adjustments lets you fashion incredibly complex effects that can be emulated only with difficulty in other drawing programs. For example, you can vary opacity, add paper textures, change blending modes, set soft edges and blurs, apply fringes, adjust the light source of an embossed fill, apply reflection maps with variable widths, colorize, and adjust the stroke’s shear, joints, twist, and corner treatment. And we are talking here just about the path outlines. Expression has another whole set of magic for fills.
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I have to say that as of 2009 I have yet to find anything close to the power expression 3 exhibits, even Xara Extreme 5 brilliant as it is fails to stand up to expression. I have tried Microsoft’s rework of this program but as is the norm with them they have made a complete hash of it. Adobe well no thanks illustrator is an excellent program but it just can’t match the adventure playground that is creature house expression.