We have no illusions that this will be a simple task. Shaping and manipulating nodes is not exactly an intuitive procedure, and it is unlikely that you can draw on past life experiences that would make it easier. This is probably uncharted territory for you. It took us a good 30 minutes to complete, and it could very well take you two, three, or four times longer.

Here is our version of the seagull, with 24 nodes—as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Of those 24 nodes, 10 of them are cusp nodes and the rest smooth. In the above graphic, we blackened the nodes that we turned into cusps, for your reference. Note that we were successful in describing the severe curve above the beak with just two nodes (even though it is a sharp angle, it doesn’t change direction). On the other hand, we needed four nodes to depict the bird’s tail, what with all those sharp angles.

This exercise really drives home the point, so we’ll say it one more time: creating in DRAW is entirely different than actual drawing or painting, where you simply place ink or paint on a page.

You’ll find seagull.cdr, our finished version, on the companion Web page for this book on the Sybex Web site.

Going Freeform: Head for the Hills!

One alternative to the Bézier route is the Freehand tool. First, let’s distinguish between the two ways you can use it:

•  If you click from point to point, you are essentially doing the same thing as you did in the Bézier exercises earlier in the chapter. The difference is that you have to click twice on each node to connect them.

•  If you click and drag the Freehand tool, you are simulating use of a pencil.

There’s just one problem: your mouse is no pencil, and even if you used a tablet, the screen is no sheet of paper. In short, tracing or creating a shape by dragging a cursor across the screen is, at best, a tedious affair, and at worst, a graphical disaster waiting to happen.

The only point that mitigates this is DRAW 9’s new Freehand Smoothing tool (see the section “Draw Straight, Curve Later” earlier in this chapter), which does its best to eliminate unnecessary nodes and smooth over rough edges. Nonetheless, here is the best we could muster.

This drawing is significantly better than the pathetic chicken scratching we spewed forth using DRAW versions 8 and earlier, but even with Freehand Smoothing, it’s unacceptable. The most damning point of all is what the status bar tells us: 42 nodes, almost twice as many as needed. To refine this graphic, you would have to first determine which nodes to eliminate and then move the surviving ones to their proper homes. Or not...you could leave them where they are...and settle for a lower fidelity image...and hope that nobody notices.

No, this is one of those times when going the extra mile pays off. By taking the time to place the nodes properly, you tell your audience that you know how to create high-quality shapes with DRAW.

Autotracing: You Might Get Lucky

The final avenue of object creation is akin to a get-rich-quick scheme: you might get lucky...but probably not. If you need to trace an object, and that object can come to you in the form of a monochrome bitmap, you could try DRAW’s built-in autotracing module. Think of this as the microwave oven in the CorelDRAW kitchen. It can warm up a meal, but it won’t cook it. Unfortunately, in the case of our seagull, it didn’t even get it lukewarm.

We had a chuckle over the effort at the lower left: it’s as if Autotrace started to head to the right to go behind the tail, then said to itself, “Nah, forget it,” and turned back up the wing. We’d trade such consciousness for a bit of intelligence. Until then, you’re not likely to get much satisfaction out of Autotrace.