Creature House Expression 3 review

Most vector-based drawing packages offer a huge amount of control, but the end results often look clinical and computerised. Expression is very different. As its name suggests, this is a program that attempts to put human expression back into vector drawing.

Expression 3 might be an unusual drawing program, but it's still built on the foundations of lines and shapes. New options include a Star-Polygon-Twirl tool, as well as the ability to round rectangle corners and draw ellipses from the centre. You also have more control over shapes, with the ability to numerically size and position them. This is all welcome, but not exactly ground-breaking.

What makes Expression unique is the way it handles the paths that define these lines and shapes. In most PostScript-friendly drawing programs, these strokes might be solid or dotted and dashed, but that's about it. With Expression, it's possible to turn any object into a brush and drape it along the skeletal stroke (path). It may not sound revolutionary, but it takes Expression into completely new areas. In particular, you can create truly artistic, pressure-sensitive brush strokes, which remain fully editable because they're vector-defined. So it's possible to retrospectively redraw or recolourise the stroke, alter its weight or change to a new brush type.

Skeletal strokes are central to Expression's success and, after version 2's bitmap-based brushes, I was looking forward to what version 3 might bring. First, bitmap strokes have been brought more into line with their vector counterparts, with the ability to set up head and tail anchoring and control multipart repeating body sections. If you had a scan of a caterpillar, for example, you could set it up to still look realistic, however long your stroke was. It's also possible to independently control the variability of transparency and width along the stroke. Again, both enhancements are welcome, but aren't exactly killer features.

More development effort has been put into improving the way Expression handles fills. In addition to the existing choices of flat Colour, Gradient and vector-based Pattern, there's now a new Bitmap option. Expression comes with a small range of tileable textures - you interactively drag these into position and scale and rotate the effect with the new Transform Fill tool. The ability to load your own images, complete with alpha transparency, opens up a number of masking-based creative options.

Another major innovation in version 2 was the ability to control the edges of fills. Enter a positive value and the edge is given a soft feathering, enter a negative value and it's raised to produce an embossed and bevelled effect. In version 3, you're now able to choose from a range of Fringe Textures to roughen soft edges, and there's even a range of Reflection Maps to make embossed fills look like liquid metal.

Of the two, the Fringe Textures will prove more useful, as they enhance the naturalistic art quality. Even more handy in this regard is the new ability to use skeletal strokes to interactively roughen your artwork. This is achieved through an Eraser mode that cuts through all underlying objects on the current layer. This mode is also ideal for producing the common cut-away art effect, where you scratch a surface to reveal the colours beneath.

Expression 3's bitmap fills, pixel-based soft edges and bitmap-based skeletal strokes help produce more naturalistic and artistic end results, but they cause a problem. Unlike vectors, bitmaps aren't resolution-independent and scalable. So, like Real-DRAW PRO, Expression should be seen as a vector-based environment for producing bitmap-based output. As such, its new ability to export PNG files with transparency, and PSD files with layers, is the most likely output route. However, if you stick to vector-only handling, Expression's AICB clipboard support makes it an excellent partner for Adobe Illustrator (see Reviews, issue 87, p182).