Transcripts
1. Intro to Affinity Designer Easy Retro Flowers for Beginners: Hi guys and welcome. My name is Dolores
Nazca and I'm coming to you from sunny,
Manitoba, Canada. It's a beautiful day
out there today. So today I'm bringing
you the first-class in my program for learning
Affinity Designer. I call it a program
because this is going to be a ton of
different courses that I'm going to put
together that will offer the full spectrum
of what you can do in the Affinity
Designer program. I truly believe that when
you're learning new software, the funniest way to
do that is by having projects that are
interesting to look at. Easy to do. There are thousands of different
functions in the Affinity Designer program. It's an incredible program and
so worth it for the price. I pay for a subscription
to the Adobe Cloud. And when I started using
Affinity Designer, I couldn't believe
how great it was in comparison to
Adobe Illustrator. It can do everything that
I can do in Illustrator, with the exception of a
couple of little functions that I can do using
an app or something. We're gonna be going
through so much of this in the future. And like I said, wanted to keep it simple. There's only about maybe ten different functions
that we're going to go through and use today. And the project is super fun. It's kind of a throwback for me to The 70s and that was
the formative years that I had when I first started to really look at art as
a possible career, I was in high school taking
commercial art and I worked part-time at
a wallpaper store, first of all, and then
later on at a fabric store. So I started to get really exposed to surface
pattern design. And I think that,
that influenced the rest of my life
when it came to art. So the pattern that we're
gonna be focusing on today is a throwback to the 70s. It's a really vibrant
floral pattern. The flowers are super
easy to create. We're gonna be using
shapes that are built right into the program with some alterations to
make them look like the quintessential
eighties florals. The color scheme that
we're going to use, we're going to grab right from inspiration from the
seventies and eighties. And you can do any
era that you'd like. I think it would be fun
if we all end up with very different patterns
and colors schemes. This is your first step to
learning Affinity Designer. And it's actually part of a three class series that
I'm putting together. This three-plus series. We will feature whatever
we do in the first class. We'll use that in the second and the third class to
do different things. In the second class,
we're gonna be using the layout that we created in the first-class to
do some topography. And in the third class, we're going to be using
all of the symbols and flowers that we've created to do some surface
pattern design. So by the end of this, you're going to be shocked and amazed at how much
you accomplished with these simple
flowers that we create in literally
less than an hour? Because this sound
interesting to you. I had a blast with
this assignment, so I can't wait to
share everything that I've learned while
using this program. Now if you haven't
done so already, I'm going to suggest that you click the follow
button up there. And that way you'll
be informed of any of my new classes as
I release them. I suggest you also
get your name on my website mailing
list because that's where I will post
alternate classes on the alternate weeks that I
don't post on Skillshare. And some of those might
be really right up your alley so you
want to check it out. Are you ready to get
into the project? I assure him, Let's get to it. I'll see you in lesson one.
2. Lesson 1 Overview, Inspiration and Colors: Hi guys, welcome to lesson one. And less than one here we're
gonna do a little bit of an overview and I want
to talk to you about bringing colors into
Affinity Designer and creating a swatches palette. Let's get to it. So this class is going to be my intro to Affinity Designer. And I wanted to break
it down for you in a really fun and easy way. So I've produced three
different projects, which we will take three different classes
to learn how to do. So I can break it down into really small
digestible bites. I figured that is
the easiest way. And I know for myself that if
I have a fun project to do, I'm more likely to stick with the program if
you know what I mean. This is the idea
that I had and I had seen something that kind
of inspired me for this. Well, two things. Actually. I was looking through
some photo albums at my mom's the other
day and I came across a bunch of
pictures of us, myself and my sister is dressed in some really funky closed during the seventies that had some really great
floral patterns. So that kinda got me
to thinking about it. And then the second thing
was in playing around with the shapes here in
Affinity Designer and altering some of
the built-in shapes to make flours made it really easy to come up
with all these flowers. So I thought, well, hey, that's something fun and
manageable, digestible. The scary thing about
Affinity Designer, of course, is all of these
different settings. So if you press on that
question mark at the bottom, it shows you all of
these different tools and there are lots. And within each of these tools
are numerous other tools. And then on this side are
what they call the studio. So you see the word studio
after each of these. And these studios work in conjunction with whatever
you're doing on this side. To even add to the confusion, there are different
persona's here that you can use in
Affinity Designer. So you've got the
vector persona, which is what I've got
going on here right now. And that's what these tools
are all four and the studios, then you've got
the pixel persona. So that would be similar to drawing with a program
like Procreate. So it's a raster based
portion of this program. And you saw that as
soon as I switched, see that's vector and raster, all of the tools and all
of the studios changed. So there's those two
persona's as well as the Export persona
to learn up here, there are just so many sort
of hidden things within this program that make it really hard to digest when
you're first learning, let's face it, learning
new software is hard. And the hardest thing is
that you get looking at the software and without a
tangible project to work on, it's really easy to just
throw up your hands in frustration because there's
so many things to learn here. So I want to make it
as easy as possible. The three different projects
we're going to do are, first of all, just learning
to draw the flowers. So that's going to
be today's class. Then we're going to do a layout with the flowers that we create. And the cool thing is
we create and place all of the flowers into something called the
symbols gallery. And with this simple studio, we can then recycle
anything that we've drawn and use it
in different documents. That's what made this
one a lot easier. And then finally, doing
the surface pattern, repeat also using everything that I have in my studio here, my Symbol Studio, and you can
see I've added a few cents. The other document. The cool thing about doing
Surface Pattern Design here in Affinity Designer is that if you move something in this document, and this is the one art board. If you move something
in this art board, it's reflected in all of
these different symbols. So we have created
this as a symbol. And I know I'm already starting to sound confusing even to myself that we've created
in the layers palette, something called a symbol. And that symbol is this
big orange section here. Anything that we put
into that one here, one art board is
reflected in all four over here because these
are also this same symbol, if that makes sense. So you will work
your way up to this. So that's why I'm
not starting with this project as
my first project. We're going to start by simply creating the shapes and
that's going to be flowers. And that's how we're going
to put together this. And our Symbol Studio, which I'm gonna be showing
you how to create. And we're just going to
have some fun creating just a fun and funky retro
style of floral pattern. I'll take you to the inspiration here that I was looking at. These are the kind of
florals that I grew up with. So in the seventies
and eighties, this was the kind of
florals that you would see. All of these are
really symmetrical. I mean, they are all
necessarily in the same style, but we're gonna focus
on this kind of floral. You can take a look at some of these to get some
really great ideas. I'm gonna be doing a
really basic flowers, but once you get the hang of it, you're going to want to be doing things like this where you're layering your flowers can
make them more interesting, things like that, like that. And I'm gonna be showing you in Affinity Designer how you can really easily put
outlines on things. So different than a
raster based program. And this is the look that
we're going to be creating. So here's one that is the rough idea of what
I'm going to be doing. And obviously, as you can
see from this Etsy shop, this is something
that you could create and possibly even
sell if you were trying to make some
extra money with sales of your assets on
sites like Creative Market. Now, as I flip through here
and we were looking at these, and of course, I've got seventies flowers as
my search parameter. You could see very quickly the kind of color schemes that we used to have
back in the seventies. So I did some searches here. Let's take a look at all
of these and you'll see a predominance of
brown, turquoise. I've often also seen this kind of a color scheme
but with lime green instead. So remember back, I don't know, maybe ten years ago or more, there was that color scheme that came out that was
chocolate brown and teal. And that was a throwback
to the seventies. So these things
come around and I think now we are
seeing a lot more of these colors being
re-introduced into fashion and things like
home decor and accessories. That's the reason why I
think it's just one of those fats and trans that
just comes around again. So those are the kind of color schemes that
we're looking at. I'm gonna be showing you how
to bring those swatches or create those swatches right
there in Affinity Designer. So it's ready for us when
we're starting our flowers. So as far as creating
a color palette, you can use sites like coolers. I also use color.adobe.com and there sites that you can use to generate color schemes. Now, personally, I just
found it as easy to import an image here and create
my color scheme from it. So that's what I'm going
to show you how to do. You can use my color scheme. I will give you this image. What you need to do
with the image is go to Place Image and I'm going to import it from photos because
that's where I saved it. So I went to Pinterest and
found this color scheme. And you can see that
those are the colors that I indeed used for this document. What we're gonna do is use this eyedropper here
to sample the colors. And this is the first studio
that I'll introduce YouTube, and that's the color studio. With the color studio, you can use your color wheel, which is what I'm most
comfortable using, is a great way to mix and
sort colors and so on. You can use sliders. If that's more up your alley, you can use all these
different sliders. I'm personally going to just
use the color wheel here. And throughout the class
you'll see me using it more. And now the swatches
that we put in will end up being stored here. So these are the
colors that I sampled and created my
color scheme with. So to sample, you can either use this eyedropper here or you could use this
eyedropper here. I'm going to just grab this one. And you see as soon as I
clicked on that color, this swatch changed color. Now here you see two
little swatches. And at first it might
seem confusing, but what we do when we're
creating vector shapes, we draw and we can
specify whether we want to fill or the
outline to be colored. So we could create a shape here just for a quick reference. Right now, it's got, I'm actually going to add
an art board here first. I don't want to confuse
you, so I don't want to be creating too many steps
for you to go through, but to create an art board, we go into this menu here. Art board and we can draw,
that's art board one. Well, I didn't have an
art board for this one. So what we can do is
work on art board one. This is off to the side anyways, we're not really going to
be using this document, but I want to show you really quickly different settings here that you see in
the color studio. So right now I've
got just a fill, so that rectangle is filled. Now to move anything around, you need to grab that Move tool. Now if we were on the desktop, there are shortcuts for
all of these things. I will be showing you some
shortcuts as we go along. Not very many, but as far as the tools that
we're going to be using, we're going to be keeping
it really simple. So we're going to
use the Move tool, the Node tool going to be
using the shapes here. So right now it says
Rectangle tool that we will be doing other shapes
besides the rectangle, we are using the color
picker tool as we speak. And we're gonna be
using the color studio. And I'll show you real
quick the Stroke Studio. We may not need to
use that today. You will, of course, use the layer studio because we're gonna be organizing
our layers here. And then we're going to
use the symbol studio. And that's really all I want
to do for today's class. We will use Transform
off and on for resizing. It's really simple, but I
really want to keep it down to very few tools
to start out with. Now here in the
bottom corners you'll see that there's
an undo and redo. So you don't have to go into
a menu anywhere to do that. And then there's de-select here that we'll be
using once in awhile. We won't even use snapping today and we've got the delete, which will help us to delete items we don't
need or delete points. Now, every time we do a
different function here, we will have a different
context menu here, contextual menu. So anytime that
there's something here that I need you to see, I will definitely pointed out, but let's go back here
to the color picker. And the one thing
I just wanted to show you here before we end this lesson is that you can also choose a color
for the outline. So right now I've got the
outline, this dark brown. You can barely see it
because I've got no is two, it is 0.2 here. But if I go into the strokes, you can see here that I can
add an outline so easily. So that's the advantage
to Procreate right now. Right away. No, I don't want to really compare to Procreate
throughout this process, I probably will a few times. Now, you can go into the
Advanced menu here and you can make changes to things
like the corners here, how they are shaped. Whether or not you want
this stroke to be on the inside or the
outside of your lines. So there's all kinds of little things that
you'll learn like that. Now again, four will go back to our color studio for the
next color we could choose. Now I'm gonna go back
to my fill here. We could choose this orange. You'll see the fill here. And because that was
selected, it changed it, and then I just
need to add it to the palette going
into this menu. So we're going to
add current fill to the palette and you can
see it's added there. So that's the basic steps. I've given you some
really basic stuff here. You can experiment
for a couple of minutes before coming
to the next lesson. And just see how you feel about just those
very few things. Remember that you can always go to this question mark here. If you're trying
to find something or you just don't know
what the name of it is. Alright, so let's meet in the next lesson
where we're going to start playing
around with some of those flowers. I'll
see you there.
3. Lesson 2 Document Set Up and Starting the Flowers: Hi guys, welcome to lesson two. Lesson two here we're gonna
get started on that document. So we're gonna do
this setup for that. And then I'm going to show you some really quick
flowers to start with. Let's get to it. Okay, so I wanted to step back and show you exactly what you're dealing with when you
start Affinity Designer. So you're gonna be
greeted with this screen, which then turns
into your gallery. In this gallery, you'll
see all of your documents. There are methods to
do something like this where you group a bunch
of documents together. But for now let's just set up our basic document that we're
going to use for today. So up here in the
corner you'll see a plus sign and that's
what you're going to hit. And there are a lot of
different options here. At this point, we can
ignore all of these. We will eventually,
as we go through this entire affinity program that I'm designing or creating, we will eventually hit on
every one of these things, I promise you, but
today all we need to worry about is
a new documents. So click on that or tap on that and you'll be
greeted with this screen. This screen also looks
a little bit confusing, but basically it boils down
to the size of your document. You can base it on whatever
hardware you're using. So I could at this point, this is exactly right for me. This is my iPad that I have, which is a 12.9 inch iPad Pro. But if you've got the
smaller versions, you can just decide and
pick one of these and it'll create the document based
on the size of your screen. Personally, I like going
to the print preset here and setting it up to be a
half by 11 or nine by 12. It's kind of a basic shape. You can choose what
increments you want to use. And I usually use inches here. That is just a little bit
easier for me to visualize. So this is actually set at
very close to 8.5 by lab. And we could probably just
go with this size here. If you want it to be
exactly 8.5 by 11, you can click on the circle there and you can actually
put in your measurements. And since we change it
to inches over here, you can just put in your inches. Actually, I'm going
to change this, I'm going to do this. You can actually change
the size here as well. And that's what I was doing, is accidentally
scrolling through that instead of which
is what I wanted to do, which was this, I
want to backspace and put in 11 because I want my document to be in
landscape format. So 11 for the width
and for the height, we're going to put in 8.5. And so this will be a letter
size sheet that we can print if we'd like at the end. Alright, I'm gonna
leave it at 300 DPI. And that's gonna give me a really good quality
document which is not even important in Affinity Designer as it is in procreate because it's not
a raster based program. So even if we did
it at 100150 dpi, we could enlarge or reduce the document without
losing any detail at all. In Affinity Designer,
it's only important when you are using
your pixel persona. And today we're
gonna be focusing on our vector persona so
we can leave it at 300. If you have a
smaller, older iPad, you might want to change this
to 150 or something just so that you're ensured
that your document won't she slow down
your iPad at all. Alright, so we're
gonna hit Okay here and our new document
will be created. So at the moment, if we were looking at the art boards here, we don't actually
have an art board. We can work without doing that. But I just wanted to point
this out that if necessary, we could add an art board
here or more than one. If we were working on
something like say, surface pattern design where we had a repeat pattern and we were working with the symbols like I showed you in the
previous lesson. So right now we don't
need to worry about that. Let's just leave it alone because I really want
to move into the fun stuff. So what we're gonna do today is we're going to
be creating the flowers, like I mentioned in
the first lesson. So what we're gonna
do is we're going to use these different shapes. So if you were to do
a long press on that, you would see a bunch of different shapes that
we can work with. The cool thing is that every one of these is highly customizable. So let's start with a square star because it's
a great base for a pattern. Now, you saw that
I just lost my, all of my menus and stuff. If that happens,
you can just click on this and it'll
bring them back. Some people like to work, especially if you're working in really large, you're
illustrating. You can take all of that off your screen and just focus
on your illustrating. We're going to, so we've grabbed that tool and what
we're gonna do is we're going to just pull to create our shape now
to keep it perfectly constrained to the
same proportions as when you first drew it. You put two fingers
down on your screen. There are a bunch of instances where I will show you
the shortcuts are the additional things
that you can do by different touches
on your screen. Just like in procreate to
undo three, we'll redo. And of course you have
those over here too. You can go back or
forward to undo and redo. So as I drew this. You probably notice
this little menu, and it's a context menu or contextual menu that
came up on the screen. Now, this will change based
on whatever you've got here. For this particular one. What it will allow us to do is add more sides and
it's infinite. And you can see here
that what I'm doing is I'm just dragging to the
left and to the right. You can I think you can
go up and down as well. So moving further away
from the circle gives you more and staying
closer gives you less. The other thing you
can do is you can increase the depth
of the ketones. So here we could
bring it in really tight or we can have
a very short cut out. And that very short
cut out is what would control what will be the size of the petals
that we're creating. So for this first one, let's land about there. I just wanted to
point out a couple of things that we see here on this part of our shapes. So here we have a
control that is basically doing the same
thing as what we did here. You see how it's changing this number as I
make adjustments. And so right now it's still
fully editable using these, or these two settings. I'm going to convert
it to curves though. And the reason I'm doing that is because I want to be able to change these to look
more like a petal shape. So now that I've done that, you can see that these
controls will not work. But the cool thing about
that is if we go back to our move tool or our
story node tool. So these are the two tools
that you're going to be mainly using today that the Move tool does exactly what you'd expect. It moves the entire shape. What the node tool does is it allows you to move
separate nodes. Now you notice right now
we've got just a gray fill. So if we were gonna go into our swatches here or
our color palette, we could change to any
color that we want it. So I don't have my
color scheme in here because I didn't
make it a global color scheme when I created it. So you could go in and just
pick a new color here. Or you could go through that process of
bringing into picture, which I'm gonna do
now because I really want to use that color scheme. I'm going to import it from
photos where I have it. And then I'm going to drag, grab that eyedropper
or color picker tool and go through the process
of adding it to my swatches. So I'm gonna go to my swatches here just to keep
myself organized. I really want to create
an application palette. And the beauty that is that I can use that palette then throughout other
documents that I create. So I'm gonna go to the swatches
here and up at the top, I'm going to add an
application palette. I can rename this and I'll
probably do that later. But for now what I wanna do is just import those
different colors. Okay, so I've got
this palette here and I am going to do exactly
what I showed you. We're going to take
that color picker tool. We're going to, I'm
de-selected there. I'm going to take
the color picker and you can see that
that color has come up. I can just go to
this setting here or this little menu here and
add it to the palette. So I've got my
first color there. Let's do that again this
time with the brown. And I'm going to follow through and do that with all of these. And I will speed that up for you so you don't have
to watch the whole process, but basically the steps
are always the same. And you don't have to
go back and forth to the tool, it'll stay selected. So you can see that
as I did that one, it worked just fine. So now I've got my colors
here and I'm ready to get to work on customizing the flower. First of all, changing
all of these two curves, and then we can start working with color
as we're doing that. So I'm going to delete
this palette for now. I can just highlight it and click the little
garbage can in the corner and we're set and ready to go for
our next lesson.
4. Lesson 3 Flowers from Shapes and the Symbol Studio: Hi guys, welcome
to lesson three. And less than three
here we're going to continue with creating flowers from those shapes
and the shapes studio, I want to show you all the
different ones that you can do really quickly and easily. And then I want to
also explain to you the use of the
symbols gallery. We're going to be creating symbols studio as it's called
here in Affinity Designer. And it's going to include all of the flowers that we create. This makes it a very
versatile documents that when copied, can be used to set up multiple documents
with the same assets. Let's get to it. Okay, so in this lesson, I
want to show you a few things. I wanted to rename
my color palette. So once you have the palette, you can just go to this little
menu again and rename it. And I'm going to call it retro, retro 70s one because I
may create other rituals, pellets at some points. Click Okay, there, it's renamed, you can see the name here. And I also just wanted to
point out that you can have your color swatches show
like this or just like this. And you may find that
eventually most of them, you're going to
have this way just because they'll give
you more space. Now I wanted to, in this
lesson goes through a few of the other shapes that we
could use to make flowers. And you remember
that this one we did convert to curves so
we can't adjust it anymore using those
particular contexts options. But I wanted to point
out that you could go through and create smooth
points for all of these. So you could select all
of these and then hit Smooth and it'll instantly
converted to a flower. You will find that there's
always one spot that doesn't quite work or do what you
want it to do, which is okay. I mean, I think it's nice to have a little bit of
variety with your flowers. So right here, right now, we've already created
our first flower. And that was using the,
which one did we use? The square star
tool. That's right. So remember I talked to you
about creating symbols. And one of the things I want
to do here is just quickly show you how to add new symbols. So this is the studio,
is Symbol studio. When you've got a
shape selected here, you can simply add
it to your studio. That's all there is to it. Now if you ever wanted
to use that again, you could just insert and it's going to give you
a version of that. So we're going to do some
things to these flowers, adding centers and
that sort of thing, which is you may want
to wait for that before you start adding
them to your samples. But I wanted to point
that out real quick. Okay, so we've done
the square star. I'm going to show you
the basic ones that I use to create really
fast flowers. So let's go into the cog here. And the COG is sort
of like a big gear. If you put your one finger down, you can keep it as
a perfect circle. And they remember that
these are going to change based on
what we have here. So let's increase
the number of teeth, which is the number of
petals that we'd have. We can adjust the radius. And the cool thing about
this one Is it ends up with that circle in the
middle automatically. So I actually use
this one quite a lot. You can increase the
size of that as well. And remember that you can go and make a lot of your
adjustments here. So in this particular shape, you can pull and change the shape of
the petals right here. Also the circle
that's on the inside. You can change the size of, I've curved the sides already. You can widen or narrow. This is a really great one for producing pointed
petals like this. I think I'm going to
reduce the amount of petals actually. Yeah, this is just a
really great one for creating an instant flour. So that's number two. Let's take a look
at the Star Tool. Now. The star as well, you can hold down your one finger to keep
it perfectly symmetrical. Let's change the
color of this one. Whatever we do for
colors, by the way, is what we'll show in the symbols palette
once we save it, it saves it full color. So you're not just creating a black and white version
like what we would do, sort of like a stamp
brush in procreate, you can assign the
colors and the colors, stay with them the whole
time. For this one. If ever you drop it or move it and you don't have
those controls, just double-click on it and
they'll come back here. We can also increase
the number of, we'll call them
pedals and adjust the inside diameter of where
those petals will end. You can click to curve the edges and you can go right in
here to do those changes. Now, right now, this is round. You can sometimes have different options
here now I think because I've already rounded it, it's just going to
keep it as rounded. So that's something
to keep in mind. Now at this point,
when you select it, you can also convert
it to curves, which will take away our
little control points, but give us these separate
nodes that we can move around. So if you wanted to make a flower that was a
little bit more organic looking like you
had drawn it by hand. You might want to
have these controls because you can do
things like this. Now, you may be wondering
what the heck are these little lines that
go across the end. These don't print
just so you know, they are there simply to control the size of the
curve and the shape. So you can go through and individually adjust
those little nodes. And here you have the
control to change the sides. So that's something
that is pretty amazing in comparison to
a raster based program. With a raster based program, have to redraw it if you want it to be shaped differently. You can't change the initial
shape other than maybe using something like liquify
or a distortion method. But this allows you a ton of control for changing the
shape of your petals. So this one is a little
bit less symmetrical, which I actually very much like. So that's something to keep in mind that can be a
very cute flower. Now if you wanted to
add a center here, you would want to
get your ellipse. So that's the second one
from the top of the list. And you could again hold down a single finger to
make it a perfect circle. And in this case we
could change the color. I'm actually going to create a cream color and I want to
add that to my swatches. And I also want to make sure
that there's no outlines. Now this, you can change
by dragging over it. I'm going to put the stroke or the outline here in front
and then select this, which removes the stroke. So that's the way to do that. Now with this color, actually that was so close to this one here that I think
I'm going to change it. So let's go in and
do that first. I'll lighten it even
more so that we have alternate kind of
a light cream color. And then I'll go back
to the swatches here, and I'll just simply add
current fill to palette. And now we have an alternate
very light cream color. Now with this one here, you can't change
the inside circle. You have to convert it to being a regular shape rather
than a compound shape. So a compound shape is like
a doughnut where the color or their opening here which show anything else
that's underneath. So that's one of the things
to keep in mind when you're using this particular
technique to draw the flowers. So for that, what you
need to do is go into this menu and go down to
what let me select it first, I guess, and go down
to separate curves. And now you can see it's
filled with the same color, but you can now go and select it and fill it
with a different color. So there's three
that we've done. Next, we're going to
choose the Cloud. That one's probably the
one that seems like the most obvious attorney
into a flower shapes. So two fingers to keep it
perfectly symmetrical. And here we can control
the amount of petals. We can change the inner radius. As you can see. You can, you can easily create really funky flowers
that looks so different. You wouldn't even believe
that they were created by the same shapes. So notice I'm dragging
from right to left. So dragging right is making
it smaller and shorter. Dragging it back to the left
is making those deeper. So you could use this one to create five or six
different flowers. Like I said, that
don't even look like they were first together, that they belong together. And remember of course, that you can use the controls here. Once you've done that, you can also convert it to
curves and go in and use your node tool to make
individual changes throughout. So the other thing
is you can select everything like the entire
shape by dragging over it. So note that when you are
de-selected like this, if you've got the Move tool, you are selecting
the whole shape. If you've got the Node tool, you're basically doing
individual points. If you wanted to
do something here, whatever you're doing is only
going to apply to that 1. So if we were to, let's say curve it like this, it's only going to
apply it to that 1. So if you were to select it with the move tool like I have here, you're not able to make those changes easily
to everything. So here, if I do smooth
than I'm giving, Given a bunch of
additional points here, which make this way
harder to shape. It's harder. But then again, it could be exactly what you
need because you may be wanting to put a divot in the middle of each
petal like this. So remember that, keep that
in mind because that can produce a pretty neat flower in itself that looks a lot like, I don't know what flower. I guess. A lot of dahlias have
that kind of an end. And remember that
you can combine shapes to make the inside. So you could use that
again to draw the middle. And you notice that that
when I had one finger down, I'm pulling from a corner. It's drawing just
from the corner. If I have two fingers down, it's drawing from the center. The neat thing about that is
if you go into the center here and you hold
both fingers down, you're getting that
drawing from the center. So this might be a
really cute center without even doing
any changes to it. Or you could of course go in
and reduce the amount of, we call it bubbles here. And you could almost remove that bubble shape or you
could be really extreme pay. So what I'd love to see you do here is take the
time to do a bunch of experimenting and
create half a dozen, maybe a dozen flowers. Because once we've got those attitudes are
symbols, library, we're gonna be able to do
all kinds of fun stuff with either our pattern creation
or just our layout. In general. We're gonna do a
layover this class. That's all we're gonna do
is just a fluoro layout. And in the following class, we're gonna be working
with texts to make a completely new
layout but using the same symbols that
we've just created. And then in the third
part of the series, we're going to be doing
our pattern repeats. Okay? So make a few, add them to your
symbols library. Remember to do that, you just simply click
on that little menu once you have it selected
and hit Add symbol. Now, do you see what
happened there? It has put them in
here as separate. I'm going to explain
in the next lesson how to avoid that problem. Alright. I'll see you there.
5. Lesson 4 Additional Methods and Making Leaves : Hi guys, welcome to lesson four. Less than four here I'm gonna
be showing you how to make additional assets,
including leaves. And these are still
being done using the shapes gallery.
Let's get to it. There's a few extra things
that I'm going to throw into this lesson that I
haven't explained before, things like getting
this symbol into the Symbol Studio
all in one piece, I'd like to show you how
to do gradient pills. I want to show you the
leaves, of course. And at the end, I'm also going to address
alignment issues and such. So we've got a few things here. We might as well throw these
all into the same lesson. So the issue with this
particular one going in, in separate pieces is
that it wasn't grouped. And in order to group them, what we'd have to do is go
into the Layers palette here. And this little thing
that looks like a puzzle piece is what
we'll group them. Now you see in the layers palette here
that it's two parts, but they're now together as one. And so if we go back
to the Symbol Studio, we can go in here
and just add it. And you can see now that it's
added this as one object. I'm just going to keep those anyways because
a lot of times these little plain ones
are great for fillers. And you'll see that later when I start to compose my layout. I want to also talk
about creating leaves. And that can be done
really quickly and easily with this teardrop shape. So you could keep
that exactly as is, or you can make adjustments to it and you
can see what's happening there is the sides of it are
expanding or contracting. The tail position can
be moved so it can be changed so that it's not a
perfectly symmetrical leaf. There is a control
here called band. So this is what the band does. You see how it part of the line. And essentially this can be
used as leaf exactly as is, but we can now
convert it to curves. And I'm going to show
you something else here. So we can take a node
tool and click on that node that's at the
opposite side of the point. And now this menu comes up
here, the context menu. And if we hit sharp here, we have created what looks like a more traditional
leaf shape. At this point, we can't
use those same controls to change the shape of
the band and whatnot. But you can see here that if we click on the
individual nodes, they all have handles. And like I said,
these don't print, but the beauty of
those is you can go in and really
customize your shapes so you could create leaves of every different
shape and size. So that's one of the ones I
wanted to point out as well. This polygon is another
one that can be altered. You could use it to create
this sort of shape. And I use this a lot for doing
the inside of the flowers. So that's something that
you could experiment with. You can add sides so you could increase the amount of sides here according to what you want. And once you've changed
the amount of sides, just experiment a little bit
with how you can change it. And then you can also do this, which is smooth points, and you can convert
it to curves. Again, remembering that
the node tool could be used anywhere in here to make
adjustments to your shapes. So that's a lot of the
different things that you need to create a flower. I'm going to also show you how to use the pencil tool
so that you could draw. It's gonna get rid of that leaf. You don't realize how
many steps you go through until you've
tried to undo. And then you realize, oh my God, I did 20 steps, I could
have just deleted. That would have
been a lot faster. So there's two other things that I want to make sure I point out to you before I get
out of this lesson. And that's alignment features, which I don't think
I've showed you yet. So let's just make
a quick star shape. I'm going to increase
the amount of sides. Change that inner radius
curve, these little guys. So that's one layer of what's going to
be a layered flower. I also wanted to show you the
gradient as we're filling. That's one of the things
that I didn't show you too. And so I created
a gradient here. And I want to show
you this control. So now that I'm on
the gradient here, it shows the different types
of gradients you can have. So you can have a solid
that's just the solid color. You can have a linear gradient. So from side-to-side,
so if you had this flower field just with
a solid color, no gradient. And if you wanted to
change it to gradient, you would grab the fill
tool and just drag. Once you have that initial
gradient in there, you can change the
type and I'm gonna change it to an
elliptical because I want it to be dark on the outside and
light on the inside. And that's how you control
the darkness and lightness. Now, you can go to the middle dot there and you could
lighten it even more. And really if we wanted to stay with our colors that
we're working with, I would go to a dark color on the outside and then
grab that same, that middle dot and then go
to the lighter version of it. So these are the two
greens that I am working with that aren't
in my swatches palette. That's a fun thing to do for
a couple of the flowers. So let's just make a
round center here. And at the moment, of course, it's going to fill it
with the last fill, which is of course the gradient. So here we would have to
change the color of it. And what about if we also use the star tool to make some
lines within our flowers. So I'm gonna go back
to how many points, 123456788 points. I am going to bring that
inner radius all the way in. Let's go with a yellow just so that you can see
what's happening here. You can, of course,
control it here. So we've got what will be the lines that we're
going to put on there? I'm actually going to do
these into the dark green. Of course, they are not aligned. You can see that
very clearly there. I wasn't very careful, so I would select
all three parts. Start with one or two
year direct select or your Node tool and
click on one of them. I'm holding down two
fingers and I was able to select all of them. And I want to go into
this transform studio. That's where we did the flipping and made changes for
positioning and whatnot. Down here you've got alignment
options you can go into, and then you can align
horizontally and then vertically. And you've got all of your
parts here and together. Next thing I'm gonna do before I even get off of this selection is go into the Layers
palette and group them. You can still make changes
to the individual parts and they would still
remain aligned. So if I wanted to
change the shape of that inner trim or let's say I wanted to
bring that to the front. I could do that here
in my layers palette and grab it and pull
it up to the top. And I liked that because it
kind of hides the center, but it really gives detailed to that set of lines that we've
got just as an accent, you could at this
point experiment like maybe double the amount
of lines might look good. You can still go in and
reduce the size of that one. It's now going past the
edge of the main flowers. So here I'm holding down
two fingers so that I can enlarge and reduce it
from the center point. It's very subtle here,
but quite interesting. So that would be another
one that I would then select and add
to my symbols here. So this isn't my main
symbols document. I would go into that
other document, and here's my main
gallery of symbols. So I would just paste
there it is right there. But then I would take that
and I've pasted it in, inside the symbol here. So that's why I can't
drag it off the screen, but now I can because it's
not in the symbol anymore. Now I can go into
the symbols gallery, add symbol from selection, and I've added to my
main library of symbols. This symbols document
then has to be my master. And if I ever wanted to use the symbols again in
another document, I would have to duplicate the document to get the symbols. I still think that's a win-win because
you've got the symbols. You can definitely
take everything off of your art board and still have the symbols here in
an upcoming class. I'm definitely going to explain the Asset Studio because
with the Asset Studio, you can actually
make it global so it will open in any new
document you create. I just wanted to give you those last few pointers on
creating alternate flowers. And I really hope that you take the time to experiment with all of those different tools and probably some of these
other ones could work. I just haven't tried them yet, so yeah, let's meet
in the next lesson. See you there.
6. Lesson 5 Making a Stem with the Pencil Tool: Hi guys, welcome to lesson five. Less than five here is gonna be your first introduction to
the vector pencil tool. Here in Affinity Designer. Using the pencil can be a
little bit daunting at first, but I'm gonna be showing
you some of the ins and outs of settings
and all the things you can do to make it as
easy as possible to adjust the shapes when you're
done. Let's get to it. Now. I want to show you
this pencil tool, a vector pencil tool, is very, very different than the pencil tool
that you'd find in a raster based program. When you use the pencil tool, what you're doing is laying
down a series of points. So right now because I have
no outline on my stroke, it's hard to see
what I'm drawing. So I'm going to add a stroke here just so you can
see what I'm drawing. And I'm going to increase that
stroke width a little bit. So that as I'm drawing, hey, that's not a little
bit, That's a lot. So as I'm drawing,
you'll see my shape. And you see as I'm drawing, I'm laying down all
of these points. And you look at this
and think to yourself, Wow, that is the worst
stem I have ever seen. But there are of course, ways to improve the
look of the stem. You could also specify
whether or not you want this to fill with the color
that you have selected. So I'm going to add that
right now so that you can see that I'm filling with
that other color here. And then also these
little triangles lead to advance controls. And the stabilizer here is what you want to take a look at. So I'm going to put it on stabilizer and there
are different choices. This is something
that you should experiment with
because they both do a different method for
stabilizing the rope stabilizer. It's like you're
pulling the point around using this little
control that you saw. You'll see that you can control the length of that rope here. So if I go low by pulling
to the left here, you'll see that my
rope is very short. If I go right to the end, you can see that my rope is
really long and that takes a little bit of getting
used to how to control it. So experiment with that. Now with the Window Stabilizer, there are also
different controls, are different
degrees of control. So if you go all the way up, you see how it changes. So I would experiment really, there's no real standard way
that I can tell you to go. I usually use the
rope stabilizer myself and I keep
it fairly short. So the rope that's pulling
is not super long here. I could even go smaller. It just depends on how
you want to work with it. Just remember that with
vectors in general, what you're doing
is you're creating the path on the outside. And then that path is filled. And the fill is whatever color
you specified back here. Or you could go to no fill
at all one way or the other. Your basics for every shape, everything that you do in
a vector-based program is to draw the outline
of it with a fill. The Window Stabilizer
just looks a little bit different and behaves a little
bit differently. So experiment with
that and just see what works well for you
for drawing your stems. Now you can see that as
I draw a convex curve, the fill will be on that side
until I continue drawing. And as I continue drawing, you can see that the
fill will follow. Now if you get to the end
here and you just stop, you can see by the stroke that we haven't completed
our shape here. So in order to
complete the shape, you could do a couple
of different things. You can grab that node and just bring it
to the beginning. And you see now it's closed. That's probably the easiest way. So might be the way you
want to do it for now. And you can make
adjustments to this, of course, with that node tool, anywhere along the way, you'll find that the more
points there are though, the harder it is to
get a smooth curves. So I generally go through and delete the points
that I don't need. You can use the trash
can to delete the point. So I'm going to use
the trash can here to take any of the extra points off that
I don't need really. All I need is the
one at the bottom, the one at the top, and then one in the middle to
control the curve. And you can see that as
soon as you do that, your curve is a lot
easier to get smooth. In this case, I would take
away that point there, move this one to the middle, and then use my handles
to get the smooth curve. Now in this case,
this handle here also controls the top
part of the shape. What I would do is actually
connect that to a flower. Figure out how I
want it positioned. And here you have this
little control at the top to allow you to rotate. And so in a case like this, I would take that
stroke off of it. So we're gonna go into
the color palette here, click on the Stroke and
just hit that no stroke. Now you've got those
two and you could either take all of
this and group it. Layers palette, which
I recommend for any of these flowers that you're doing that have multiple parts, always go in and group them. Otherwise, when you
go to move these, you're trying to do
your full layout and you go to try to move it. The inside part
won't necessarily move with it unless
you've already done that. The other thing
you can do is to, I'm going to make a
slight adjustment here to those two petals. But the other thing
you can do is select both of the shapes. So at this point
because it's grouped, it's selecting all of it. I'm going to ungroup it for
a moment because what I wanna do is just
select this and this. So we see how I held down my finger to
select both of them. Then I would go into this menu here and go to the
geometry section. This has a lot of different, what they call Boolean
functions for today. The only one that I think
we'll be using is this ad. Ad. You see what it did here? Is it made it all into
one continuous shape. At the moment, it
has moved it so that the circle ended
up in the back. But all you have to do
in your layers palette here is to move it down and then this would be
a great opportunity to swipe to the right, have them both selected and create a single group from that. And then of course, what
I would do is go in and add that into my symbols. So you see how quick
it will be for you to go in and fill up
your symbol library. And this is an unbelievably
valuable thing for you as you start to learn
more about layouts, and especially when you're doing surface pattern design that
you'll have these features. Are these symbols just
available for you at anytime? It's almost like
creating brushes, like stamp brushes in Procreate. It's just so handy. So yeah, like I said, now that you've got a
couple more functions that you are able to do here. I would suggest that you go through and create a whole
grouping of flowers. I'll go ahead and do that. I've got that other
symbol library from the other document
that I think I'll make. I'll combine with this one. I could do that easily by just selecting and then copying. So for copying in this program, you have to go into
the menu and hit Copy. Then I would go back
to my floral layout. I think it was this one, yes. And paste. So go back to that
menu and paste. Now I've got these extra
flowers here that I can add to the symbols library
for this document. Okay, So I'll meet you
in the next lesson. See you there.
7. Lesson 6 Additional and Optional Challenges: Hi guys, welcome to lesson six. Less than six here
I'm gonna be showing you my layout and
everything that I've done to really spice
it up and get it ready for the next class, which is going to
be on using it for a typographic layout.
Let's get to it. Okay, so I just
wanted to show you the sort of end products
I reserve the right, of course, to make
any other changes. And I'm sure that once I go to start incorporating
my type here, I may want to adjust
or move some of these indifferent areas
are into different areas. And yeah, I mean, that's the way it works
most of the time. You can see here that
I have a massive, massive, massive amount
of objects here. And one of the things that you're going to find
really cool about Affinity Designer as opposed to procreate is that you have an
unlimited amount of layers. You can keep going. It's never going to stop you. One of the main things
that probably is different here than what you saw me working on is the
fact that I added a couple of other colors
here to my swatches. So you can see now
I've got a really dark brown as well,
and we're ready brown. And I've got two shades
of the lighter brown. I found that that was
really nice for adding these sort of
background elements. So you may find that hard
to see on your screen. But I found that that
really kinda added to what would give the
appearance of depth. I almost forgot. Show you something that
is probably one of the most valuable things about using a symbol from
the Symbol Studio. The cool thing is that
if you take Assemble, which let's just
drag this one ends, It's an unchanged version
from the gallery here. You know it's a symbol when you go into the Layers folder, should be on the top
here. Yes, it is. And you see that it's
a symbol because it's got the orange line on it. So check this out. This is one of the
things that I think is one of the most important
things about symbols. And that's that
you can go in now, you can isolate and just work on one part of the
image if you want. So I've got just the
center chosen there and I can go into my swatches and
change the color of it. And did you see what
happened there? Every other version of
that flower changed. See that? So that's one of the things
that is super exciting about this because
I could change this symbol now and everything made with that
symbol is going to change. So I think that's one of
the most valuable things. And of course, it
will reflect that in the symbols
gallery here as well. The next thing I want to
talk to you about here is just this background that I've done and I've got a bit
of a gradient on it. So let's review that. Let me go to it because I think I've got it
locked at the moment. The rectangle at
the bottom here, I'm going to unlock wherever you do want to lock something. I found that I kept moving that rectangle out of the
way in order to lock it. I'm not sure if I
mentioned it earlier, but it would just go into the layer settings here
and you can go to lock, to unlock it, you can just
simply click on the lock. Now you can see here in the Layers and I know
I called it a palette. I either call these
galleries or pallets. It's really hard to get used to the fact that these are studios. But here you can see
that I have a gradient. So let's go and check that out. The gradient is very
light at the top here, what I could do is make
adjustments to it. Now, this is the
gradient control that I have on here right now. This is linear, so
I could turn it to have the gradient
go from side-to-side. So that would be like this. This probably wasn't
noticeable when I was doing it the first time, but you can adjust from side-to-side as well
on a linear gradient. Now here, on the
gradient you can also use that little
kind of a line in the middle to adjust where the gradient actually kinda
changed his position. And did you notice that there
as soon as I clicked on it, I was able to add another point. So if I wanted to go in here and do something crazy like add, I wouldn't do that, but
if I wanted to, I could. So the other thing
I could do is go to my color wheel here and make adjustments to it if I wanted
that to be less visible, plus I could go in and work this until I
was happy with it. So I could have something
like that going on, which is quite
interesting as well. So that was one thing
I hadn't showed you. I'm going to undo because
I still like that brown. You can see the potential
for that delay. This one, I might
go a little bit lighter and then
just kind of work these points over a
little bit till I get to what I like and I feel like
that really gives it depth. So that was one of the
things I hadn't showed you. There was the different Brown
elements that I had put in. Also these little
dots that I've added, those are kinda fun to
for a little fillers. And all I did there
was the pencil tool. I had the stroke
set at about 3.7. You can experiment
with that of course. And then you can just drop
lines, dots in there. Now I'm on the dark areas
so you don't see it. But if you drag them like
currently with the shape that I have specified in my strokes palette in the advanced here, these settings might not be
what you're looking for. You could go to around on
both ends kind of shape. That's more what I was after. So you can play around with
that just to add interest. And then one other thing that I just want to
remember to tell you, because it's something
I really wanted to include in the class, is that when you are working on a shape and
you have expanded it, I'm going to take the stroke
off of that and I'm going to color it just in a bright
color so you can see it. Remember up here I can just flip upwards to get the
stroke off of it. And I'm going to color it just a lighter color
here for you to see when you expand
it to curves. And let's say you wanted
to make some changes. Course you can do that,
That's not a problem. I just want to also point out that anytime you
want to add a point, you can just click onto the line and you can
put additional points. And so that might be a way to do something like adding a stem. Now this looks like a
cauliflower or something. But I just want to
show you that this is a possibility for doing
things like stems as well. So these are all just little pointers
that I want to give you along the way so that when
we are in the next classes, you've got that and I
will keep repeating it. And anytime that I use
it, I pointed out, but sometimes just
knowing in the back of your mind that that's a
possibility is a good thing. So overall, I am very happy with the way my layout
has turned out here. I think I am ready
for that next stage. I don't have any gradient
flowers or anything in here. I think maybe before
the next class, I might take some time to experiment with
different possibilities. And gradients are just one of the ways that
you can add interests. Eventually I'm gonna be showing
you how to add texture, all kinds of advanced functions, but we're going to work our
way slowly towards that. For now, just experiment
with creating this layout and try
to keep most of your flowers around
the perimeter with a nice open
space in the middle that you can use for your lettering in the
next class that we do. I really hope this class has been kinda fun for
you because that was really my goal was
to teach you a lot of the basics just with
a fun little project. Alright, I will meet
you in the wrap-up, I guess. See you there.
8. Lesson 7 Wrap Up, Upcoming, and Next Steps: Hey guys, welcome
to the wrap-up. Now what is it that a
fun and easy class. You've learned some of the really basic steps for
using Affinity Designer. And you've learned how easy and flexible the symbols
studio can be. You've learned how
cool it is to be able to use the symbol studio to make alterations that apply to all of the instances of
that symbol in your layout. This can be a super
powerful tool. In our next class, we're going to be using this document for a
typographic layout. That'll be really fun and I think that you're
going to learn a lot more about the
Affinity Designer program. So make sure you
stay on this course here and you've learned
everything there is to know I'm gonna
be producing a ton of clauses to put
in this bundle so that you have everything
over time that you need to know for using this program
on a day-to-day basis. I really believed that
every artist should be able to use both raster and vector based programs to create art and fulfill any job
requests that you get. I'm so glad that you
were hanging out with me today to do this. Now if you didn't do so at
the beginning of class, make sure you hit that
follow button up there. That way you're
informed of any of my new classes as I post them. Also put your name
on my mailing list on my website because
that's where I produce alternate courses that I don't necessarily post
here on Skillshare. I really hope to
see you in all of the follow-up classes that are going to come after this one. I'll say bye for now
and see you next time.