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In 2003, Microsoft acquired a small company named Creature House which had invented and patented a technology they called 'skeletal strokes', an amazing vector graphics technology capable of creating artwork that looked like it was done in natural media (pencil, watercolor, oils,...) while retaining the ability to edit and change the properties of all of the strokes that the artist had used to create the artwork. With this technology, Creature House created a powerful graphics application called Expression that was a joy to use. Expression 3 is available for free here. This program and the skeletal stroke technology formed the basis of what has evolved into Microsoft Expression Design™, the Beta 2 version of which is available for download. It combines some of the cool vector graphics capabilities of Expression 3 with the ability to save pictures in XAML so that they can be incorporated as graphical front-ends into new Microsoft applications. I've been using Expression since it was first released by Creature House. It takes a while to understand what this program is capable of, but once you start defining your own skeletal strokes, bitmap strokes, fill patterns and fringes you'll find there's nothing else quite like it.
I hope you find the .xpr files, strokes and reflection maps below helpful. Hopefully they'll provide a glimmer of what is possible using this technology and encourage you to explore further.
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![[Microsoft Expression Graphics Designer]](Expression/EGDbanner.gif)
