Affinity (by Canva) – Level 2, the Next Step – Vector Made Easy

1. Intro to this Next Steps Affinity Vector Course: Okay. Not only is Affinity free now, but it's the most incredible all in one graphics package, which is so good for pros and hobbyists alike. In this course, you'll learn how to turn your ideas into powerful visuals for your business, clients, personal brand, or hobby. In this level two section, we're going to be concentrating on the vector side of things. And obviously, like everything else, there's a lot of overlap between the different studios. I'll take you through everything step by step in easy bite size videos. Hi. I'm Tim. I live and work on a beautiful barge traveling the canals around London with my wife, Allie and our cat, Fuji. Before becoming a professional designer, I worked as a CSI photographer for Scotland Yard in London. Since then, I've spent over 30 years working with design software and have trained some of the world's top companies like BBC, Disney, the Times newspaper, and many, many more. This course will help you bring your ideas to life through visuals that inform, inspire and express your unique vision. What are you waiting for? Start right now, and let's get creating together. 2. Duplication - Intro: There is so much powerful stuff in duplication in Affinity, and I want to take you through it. So not only can you just duplicate a simple shape, but you can take that and repeat it, and you'll get these really cool effects. Now, although those are just effects, this is so useful for so many things that you're going to be creating using Affinity. 3. Power Duplicate: One of my favorite features in affinity is duplication. There's so many things that you can use it for. I want to show you all the ways that you can duplicate. Now, I'm going to start off by doing some simple duplication with this little rectangle, so I'll take a rectangle like that. I want to duplicate it. So what I can do, and you can do this in a few ways, is I can go along to the edited menu and I can copy it, and then I can go along to the edit menu, and I can paste it straight in like that. Now, it looks like there's just the one, but in fact, it's duplicated. You can see there are two. Let's get rid of this one over here. I'm going to bring up my layers so that you can actually see when I've got two and when I've got one in there. Now, this whole duplication thing, that takes a while going along to copy and then paste. So let's have a look at how we can do this in a much better way. And we're going to do this with a shortcut. So I'm going to select that. And then if you're on a Mac, it's command. If you're on a PC, it's Control and J. So Command J or Control J. What that does is it just makes a copy of what you've got selected and places it right on top of the other one like that. This is one of my favorite features. I really like that Control J. Now, let me get rid of that top one. I've just got one once again over there. Now, the second thing that we can do with this is if you hold down the option if you're on a Mac or the lt if you're on a PC, you can just drag a copy like that very, very quickly, and you can see I've got two of them in there. Of course, taking this on to the next level is when we want multiple copies. So if I take this and I hold down the Alt or the option key and drag that along, now when I use Command J or Control J, this is called Power duplicate. I can then make another copy of it over there and then once again, Command or Control J to keep going. Basically, it does the last thing that you did over there. Let me just do that again. Taking my shape, I hold down the Alt or the option key to make a copy, and it's Command J or Control J to make more. You can do it with multiple shapes as well. I can take these shapes here, hold down the Alt or the option key, drag them down so let's do them at a nice angle like that. And then once again, Command J or Control J to keep making more copies in there. Try it out. It's really, really useful, and you'll see we'll be using it so often later in the course. 4. Power Duplication & Registration Points: Now let's have a look at this with rotation. I'm going to take a little shape over here, and I will use a rectangle. Make a little rectangle shape like that, and then I want to rotate copies of this around. So if I go along to my move tool and I'm going to do Command and J, that makes another copy of that, and then I can rotate my second copy around to where I want to go. Now, if you look by my cursor, you'll see that there's a little R for rotation, and it's going to sort -17 -21, et cetera. I'm just going to go up to, well, as close to 20 as I can get, which is not quite there, but it's close. And then if I use Command J again, it will keep repeating that and I can go all the way round. Now, because I didn't quite get to 20 degrees in there, you can see it doesn't line up properly in here. So this is a bit of a problem. So let's see how we can get around this issue here. Now, to do that, we're going to be using the transform panel. If you can't find it window down to your vector and sorry, down to general and find your transform panel in there. I'm going to pull mine out so you can see it a bit easier over here. And we've got different things that we can transform in here. So before we start rotation, let's just have a look at the other bits. There's an X and Y. If I move this around, you can see that we've got the X and Y moving. If I move that right up to the top corner, let's move that out the way a little bit over there. Right the way to the top corner over there, you can see we can sort of get it to the Y being almost zero in there. I'm going to keep going over there in eventi, if I put that in the middle, I'll be able to get it to zero, zero. It's measuring it from the middle of the shape. Now, we've also got a width and height in here. You'll see if I change the width, I'm changing the width there if I'm changing the height, obviously, I'm changing the height over here. We've then got rotation in there, so I can rotate things around. There's a little slider that I can do that with. And over here, we've got another option, which is skew, so we can skew objects around. That's kind of cool, too. But let's look at rotation in here. So I'm going to take the shape. I'm going to use the same technique again. I'm going to use command or Control J. That's made the copy. You can see we've got the copy there. But now, when I start to rotate it, you'll see that we've got a rotation angle in there. I'm actually going to change that angle to be accurate. I'm going to say minus. Let's go with 30 in there. And I'll press Enter and it rotates it -30 degrees. You can go plus 30, as well. And then I'm going to use my Command and J again to go all the way around. Now, that's absolutely fine. Yours might not do that, so I want to do this again and show you how it can go wrong. Let me do this again. I'm going to make a shape over here, and I don't know if you remember a moment ago, I showed you the X and Y, and I moved this to the top corner, and when I went to the middle of the shape, it was zero, zero. And that's because this little icon here had the middle selected, that one there. If I were to select the top left hand corner, now if I pop that up there over there, it's measuring from the top left hand corner, obviously, if I did the right, bottom, et cetera. Now, very often, this is actually the default. So if yours looks like mine does, what would happen with rotation? Well, let's do it. Command and J to make a copy, go in here and put in my degrees. I'll put in 30 degrees once again, press Enter, and you can see it's rotating from that point over there. So when I do Command J, it will rotate around that point in there. Not always what you want. So do be careful where that rotation point is over there and make sure it's right in the middle if you want to rotate around the middle of an object. Let's do this again. I'll get rid of that. I'll use a different shape this time. So I'm going to go with this triangle. I'm going to make a little triangular shape, like so over there. Actually, I'll make it a little bit smaller than that. Let's move that down to the bottom. And I want to rotate this around, but I want to rotate it around this top point here. So you'll see if I click over there on that top, let's just move this up over there so you can see that that's zero, zero. So this is now my registration point in the middle. I'm going to use Command and J. To make a copy, and then I'm going to put in the degrees that I want. I'll do 20 degrees this time, press Return, and then Command J or Control J all the way around to get that really cool big top type of feel that Zoomed feel over there. Looks really good, doesn't it? Let's just scale it down a little bit over there and place that up the top there. Let's do another one once again with a different registration point. So this time, I'm going to go over to an ellipse. Put in my lips in there. And with the elliptical tool, I want to use the center. So I'm going to command J to make a copy. Make sure I've clicked in the middle to use the center. I'm going to put in my degrees in here. Let's put in 20 degrees, press center, and once again, Control J or Command J. Around the outside. And I'm going to go over to my colors over here, get rid of the fill, and just leave the stroke on over there. So let's go to the stroke and increase the stroke. You can get this really sort of cool effect like that. Let's make that one a bit smaller and place it down there. One last one, for some reason, I tend to use this one quite a lot. I don't know why I make quite so many suns. I want to make a little sun graphic in there. I bet you know how I'm going to do it. So I'm going to take a rectangle, like so. I'm going to go along to my color. I'm going to flick these around over this. I've just got to fill. I'm going to fill this with sunshine color. Same again. I'm going to go along, and I'm going to use the center point on this. I'm going to use Command and J, Control and J, and put in my degrees. This will be 30 degrees on this press enter. Command J, Control J, all the way round. And then I'm going to select all of those, go up to the top and unite them into one shape like that. And then to make the sun, all I've got to do that doesn't really look like a sun, does it? I, taking lips. I'll draw in my elliptical shape. I'm holding down the shift key, so I'll get a perfect circle. Over there, let's place that right in the middle. You can see my smart guides have kicked in. Like so, select both of them and subtract the front one. You can do this for things like clocks and dials, those type of things. And one more to make this a sun. Let's go over there, and I'll just place that in the middle, like so. Anyway, have some fun with that, but most importantly, get used to using this little transform, particularly with rotation to get some interesting effects when you're rotating around, and don't forget this little item over here when you can place where you want your registration point to be. 5. More Power in the Transform: Et's mix this up a little bit. What I'm going to do is use a combination of transform options. So I'm going to start off with a little rectangle over here, and I'm going to hold down the Shift key so I get a perfect square. And then what I want to do is I want to use Command and J to make a copy of that square. And then we're going to go in here and we're going to adjust these settings in here. So first of all, I'm going to adjust the width and height. So the width at the moment you can see is the same as the height. I am going to link them together and lock them in place. So it's that little linkage tool in there. So it's set to 47.8 at the moment. I'm going to take this down. I'm going to say, I want this to be 40. And when I click off of that, you can see the other one's 40 as well, and we've now got this as a slightly smaller square. Of course, over there, I could just do Command J, and I'll continue to get smaller ones all the time, but that wasn't actually what I wanted to show you. Let me do it again. So once again, another shape over here. I'm going to be a little bit more accurate this time, so I've made my shape, and I'm going to make this shape exactly I get rid of that. 60 millimeters square. And remember, make sure that that is linked. So when you press the enter key, you'll get 60 by 60. So once again, I'm going to do Command and J to make a copy of it. Going to my copy, I'm going to make it smaller. So let's take this one down to well, I think about 55. Will probably be about right. That's looking good. And then I'm going to rotate it. Now, to rotate it, if I did this, you can see how it's rotating around its middle over there, and that's going to minus four degrees. So I just want to make sure it's rotated to the right position over there. Really, I'm just looking here, so I want you to touch the other rectangle in there. And let's now try Control and Jane, see what happens. Look at that. It continues to get smaller and it also rotates at the same time. I'll just keep going with that. Because the stroke is so thick, you can't actually see those middle ones. So I'm going to go along to my stroke and just make my stroke a whole lot smaller, so you'll see all the details in that. It's really, really cool, lovely looking effect. Well, of course, you can just go wild with your shapes. Let's do another shape. I'm going to make an ellipse over here. This is 102 millimeters by 14 millimeters. So the outer one over here, I'm going to make slightly bigger. I have unlocked those two I've forgotten to do my Control J or Command J, so I'm going to do that. Then I'm going to go in here, and there's 102. I'm going to make that 120. And this one over here, these are separate. I can do them individually. I'm going to change that to be ten. Over there. And you can see it's kind of changing the size but not proportionately. And once again, I can go over here and I can change the rotation. We can sort of experiment and see what we get here or you can change to a different registration point. So now when it rotates, it'll rotate around a separate rotation point. So it's putting in a bit of rotation like that. Ready, have a bit of a play with these, see what you can do, try all of them out as well, and then I'm going to use my Command or Control J and repeat that and you can see how we're going to get an interesting result, which is because I've used the S down here, it's flattening itself off as it goes. I don't particularly like the one that I've done in there, but you get the idea. You can just have a play and get all sorts of wild and wonderful things going on. But do have a bit of a go with some items like this using a combination and then just go completely wild. 6. Move the Point of Rotation Manually: I've got a little shape over here, and as you've seen, we can, in the transform options, decide which point of these we want as the main registration point. But we can also do it manually, and I really like this way of working because I can put a point wherever I want it. Going up to the top here, we've got our little bar over here with some options. I'm going to go over to the COG. Click on that, and I'm going to say enables transform origin. And you can see now there's a little circle that appears in the middle. Now, if I were to rotate, it will automatically rotate around the middle as it's always done. But if I move that point and say, let's put that point out here, now when I rotate, it will rotate around the point over there. Let's move it again. I'll place it up there, and once again, it will rotate around that particular part over there. So do have a look for that. It's well hidden and it's up in the little cog enable transform origin. 7. Rotate Around Middle WIth Ctrl Cmd J: Now, I bet you could see this next thing coming. I'm going to go and take a shape, and I'm going to go down to my heart tool and just draw in a little heart over here. And I want to rotate a number of hearts around this middle section over here. So back to my move tool, I'm going to go up to the little COG enable transform origin. I'm going to move that down, and you can see as I'm moving it. The smart guides are showing me that I'm absolutely lined there is the point of origin. Now, I want to rotate this around, but I don't want to do it on this one. I want a copy, so I'll use Command and J to make a copy. You can see in my layers, I've now got two of those. And then I'm going to go down to my rotation. In here, I'm going to put in 30 degrees and press Enter. And you can see how it's rotated at 30 degrees around this point here. Of course, you know the next stage, Command or Control and J, and I can go all the way around the outside like that. Let's do another one. So we'll just make it a bit smaller, place that up the top. I'm going to take a rectangle over here, and I'm making it a perfect square. In fact, I'm going to go into my width and height, and I'm going to make this, I think, exactly 50 millimeters square. 50 by 50. There we go. They're linked together. Now, with my point of registration, I'm going to move the point of registration down to here, so right outside the box. Command and J to make a copy of it. And then I'm going to go to my width and height, and I'm going to scale this down. So I'm going to say I want the next one to be 40 millimeters, and you can see how it's made the copy outside the original one. And if I keep going Command and J, it will keep making more copies going down to that registration point in there. You can make scaling copies based on any registration point you like now. Try it out. Have fun with those two. 8. Using Expressions: A I do understand that not everybody likes maths, but we're going to have a look at a little bit of something called expressions, where you can use a bit of maths in your shapes. Now, if you want to ignore this bit, that's absolutely fine. Have a quick look at it because it's not that hard. But you can work without it. But for those of you who do like maths and like doing mathematical functions in here, this is ideal. We're only going to touch the surface of this. It's not really part of this course, but I want to show you where you can find these expressions and how you can work with them. So we're going to use an expression in the transform box over here. So I'm going to take a little shape over here, a rectangle, and I'm going to draw in a rectangle, and I'm going to make my rectangle. I think I'm going to make it 50 wide over there. So it's 50 millimeters wide. Now, let's say that I want the height to be double the height of the width. What I can do is I can go to the height and I can say, use the width, which is W for width and times it. I'll just put in a little time symbol there. By two. So the height is going to be double the width. And when I press Return, you'll see now it's double the height of that. So from 50, we've gone up to 100 let me undo that over here. So maybe you want to take a little bit further, and you can go fairly complex with the functions. What I'm going to do this time, I'm going to say, I want to take this, and I want to have another box which is two thirds of the size, two thirds of the height of this one. So I use Command and J over there to make a copy. So I've now got two of them. Here's my second one over there. Now, I don't need that one anymore. I just want it there so you can see the difference between these two. I'm going to take this one, and over here, I can then say, I want this to be the height. That's what we want to work with. And I want to divide it by, so forward slash three which you'll give me a third and then times it the little star by two, which you'll give me two thirds in there. Once again, I press return, and there we go. We've got something which is two thirds, you can see one, two, three, the size or the height of that box over there. How do you find out about the expressions? Well, if you go along to help over there, and I'm going to do it via the Window menu down to help, and I will use help in there. What you can do and I've just brought it up so you don't have to see me searching for it is just have a look for expressions in field input. In fact, if you just start typing in expressions in there, that's one of the options. And down here, it'll show you what you can do with them. So for example, by putting in times two, we'll double the size over there, divided by two, et cetera. Can see over here, we could say the width plus 20 or the width times two. I think I did W times two, so the other way around, but it still works the same. There we go. That's the one I used, which was the width divided by three times two to get two thirds of the size. And there's so many options in here that you can use. You can see it gets fairly complex as you go further into it. Also see that the colors denote certain things. So just near the top here, it says red. This denotes an arrow so that you can see very quickly that it hasn't recognized what you've put in there. The green, the variable has been recognized or orange, which is, for example, when I put the W in there, it's valid, but it's waiting for you to press the return key. Anyway, I'll leave you to look into that if it's something which appeals to you. You can still do all the things that we're doing. And basically, you don't have to use that. It just speeds things up sometimes. If you don't like it, don't worry about it. 9. Stroke Options - Intro: Now, strokes, they sound really simple a line around the outside of a shape, but there's so much more to them. For example, we can use dashes, we can control the dashes. We can put in multiple strokes on an object, and you can see, I've got a little example over here with some dashes and multiple strokes all on the one shape. Let me show you. 10. Stroke Options: Caps, Mitre, Joins, Align, Order & Scale: I'm going to go and just do a quick new document over here, just a landscape one and create the document. And what we're going to do now is we're going to look at some of the stroke options. Now, I'm going to just take a little shape like this. I'll use a rectangle, draw my little rectangle in there, and let's go over to the stroke. Once again, if you can't find the stroke there, you know where to go. Go to the window menu, and you'll find stroke down here. If you can't see it in the general settings over there, think about where it might be. So in this case, we're in vector, so go over to vector, and there's your stroke down there. Now, with the stroke options, we have got different styles at the top, so there's no stroke at the moment on this, but I could choose to have a solid line. I could have a dotted line or I could have a brush. Now, we'll look at brushes later on. But for now, if I just increase the width of that, you can see we've got some sort of brush in there. But if I go down to my path brushes, you can see we can get these sort of wild and wonderful brushes. Now, I'm going to go over back to my standard line in there, we'll deal with brushes at a later stage. Now, when it comes to our width, pretty obvious in there, over to the caps. Now, you can't actually see anything to do with the caps on this particular shape. So I will just draw in another line. I'm going to very simply use the pen, and I'm just going to go click, click, click. And once again, I'll go up here and increase the line width on there. Now, caps are very simple. It's just the rounded corners or rounded ends that we've got there, and I could then choose to have no caps at all or no rounded caps, or I could have an extended cap. The extended cap is where it extends out from the last point, the same distance as half of the stroke. And you'll see as I change the stroke weight, this distance gets bigger and it's half of that one in there. Let's just close that one again. And I'm going to move on now to my joins, but just before I do that, there's something we have to look at very quickly. If I just go over here to my dots, just be careful because the caps affect those as well. So if you can't see something, you may be over there and you can't actually see your dots, you might actually need to just change it to a different cap for that. Anyway, onto our joins, and there are these corners over here. So if we make that a bit bigger, you can see I can have rounded corners. I can have cut off corners, or I could have corner corners in there. But there's something else in here that I want to show you, and that's called the mitre, which is the angle. Now let's have a look at this because it doesn't make any difference on that square shape. But if I use the pen and I'm just going to go click, click, click, and I'm going to just take these back to standard cap and over here, you can see that I've got in my joins. I'm on this join here, but it's still cutting it off. If I was on that one, it's cut off. Why doesn't that work? Well, it's to do with the angle. See if I took this little tool here, my node tool and I selected this point and I did that. Now, you can see we get this really nice corner point, and there it cuts off. But the moment that I make this corner more acute, more sharp, it cuts it off. Now, if that happens, you think I really want that sharp point back again, you can go to your mitre and you can increase the mitre. I'm just going to put in ten in there, and you can see it's brought it back. So now, because I've got a mitre of ten or just a larger number, to be honest, it will keep going, and at some point, it'll just cut it off. There we go. It's just cut it off like that. Once again, if I thought, I really want that pointy bit to go up there, I can go and increase this mitre limit. Over there, it's put in 20. There we go, and that's working now, as well. Now, the reason this exists is because sometimes you might have something where two lines are almost parallel but not quite, and you don't want them to go shooting off over the page on top of your other artwork. So just bear in mind, the mitre cuts off that corner. Over there, let's go move that back a bit, like so, rather than you having to actually manually cut it off when the corners get too sharp or acute. Now, as you can see, I've changed my graphic on here, and that's for the settle align option. If I click on this shape over here where I've got a thick stroke and change the align, it doesn't make any difference at all. The alignment is only when you are on a closed shape like this. So now I can go and align that to the center, to the inside, or to the outside. Let's have a look at this one over here, this is the order. Now, the order is the stroke above or below the fill? It seems a bit odd, I know, but have a look at this. If I were to say, for example, do a dashed line, and I'm just going to make that standard dash like that. You can see at the moment the order is that the stroke is on top of the fill. If I click on this one, now the fill is on top of the stroke, and you can just choose which one you want. The last thing that I want to do over here now is probably the most important of all of these items, and that is the scale with object. At the moment that is switched off. If I scale the shape, you can see the stroke remains the same size. If I switch this on, it will scale it down as you change the size. So why is that so important? Well, if you've created a graphic and you've got a stroke in there and you think, Oh, this logo looks lovely, but I want to make it smaller and you scale it down. If you have that switched off, your stroke will not scale proportionately to the rest of your object, and it will look really, really strange. You might have seen that already with some artwork. Anyway, there's the little button over there. That's the one that you should not forget at all. Try these out. I 11. Arrow Heads: Which Direction is the Line: Now, I'm going to make a little line over here. I've started there, and we're going to finish up here, and I'm just going to click for point to point using the pen tool. And I've made this quite thick. And with a stroke, I've also gone along, made it quite thick, and I've made it quite bright, so you can see the line itself. Now, what I want you to notice is on the line, there's a little red bit. Let me go and get my node tool. And you see, there's a little bit red bit over there. You might have noticed it pop up on strokes before. What that does, it tells you the direction of the line. This line goes over to the right like that because I started there and I finished there. So if I started here and finished there, you'll see the red line will be on the other side. So what does this mean? Well, when we go over to our stroke and we go over to the arrows, we've got a start and an end point in there. Let's get rid of one of these. So over to the stroke, once again, have a look at this. If we go to the start point, you can see, as I'm going down here, it's putting them on the starting position, which is that. I want to go on to the end position, the one with the little red one, so I can see at a glance. Aha, that's the ending. So if I go to my end, and I can then put my little triangle in there. I'll go to the start, and for the start, I think I will have this little circle. Now, let's move that up a little bit over there. And that's why that little red line is quite important to know which direction the arrow is going in. But what about if I thought, do you know what? I should have done this the other way round and I should have had the circle up there and the arrow down that side? Well, in this little bar over here, you'll find there's an option which allows you to reverse the direction of a curve, and it's this button here. If I click on that, it reverses the direction. So now the red line is there and it starts here and ends over there and reverses where the arrow goes. They're fairly straightforward, in there, really. But what I want to do is I want to go over here and have a look at some of these options over here. You can see we've got a little option here where the arrow is actually inside the line, so it kind of goes over there and the point is where the line is and the end of the circle is there. If you click on this one, then it actually takes it from the extended an extended sort of cap type of distance over there. So you can see it kind of goes into that and then around, same again, it goes in half the distance of your stroke, and then you put on the well, arrow or circle or whatever you want over there. Over here, we've got a little button, which once again changes the direction of the arrow. However, this is really important. This is different to that button there. This one actually reverses the direction of the curve because it's not just for arrows that you need this direction. Whereas this one here just reverses the arrow on there. So you can see, that's my endpoint there, but it's actually put the arrow the other way around on there. So just bear in mind, you can use this if it's for an arrow, but this is actually the one which will reverse the direction of the curve. Finally, we've got a little bin over there, so you can just click on that to very quickly get rid of your arrows, start and end. Have a little bit of a play with that, and don't forget that little button over there. Click on it to see how your line gets reversed. Try it out. 12. Dashes & Dash Patterns: Et's have a look at the dotted lines or dashes. I'm going to go over to the dashes here, and you can see when I click it just put some dashes on there. Obviously, they get bigger and smaller with the width. But what we have here at the bottom of the dashes is the order that we can have these in. So at the moment, it says one, one, zero, zero, zero, zero. So what I could do is I could say, Well, I want the line to be twice the width of the gap. So if I put in two in there, now you'll see we've got two and one, two, and one, two, and one. And I could make any sort of pattern I like. I'll just make them smaller so you can see more of these. So I could have two and one. And then over here, I could have four and then maybe a gap of two over there. You could just build these up. I'll make it even smaller still, so it's a bit more obvious. So we've got, two, one, four, two, two, one, four, two all the way around. So those little areas there just allow you to build up a custom dash. We've got one more item over here called phase before we have a look at that, try this out, have a little bit go with that and see what you make of it. 13. Dash Phase: I've made some more shapes over here. Have a look at this rectangle one. And when you look along here, you'll see that I've got my pattern of dashes, which goes along. And we've got corner, and this corner looks different to that corner, which looks different to that corner there. If you switch on the little button on the right hand side, what it does is it balances out that pattern over there so we can have the corner, corner, corner corner, all looking exactly the same. Now, what about on something like an ellipse? By the way, I've just putting an arrow because this is the area that I want you to particularly notice. Well, at the moment, my pattern starts there. So remember, my pattern is 2142. So you've got two, one, four, two. And if I then go to the phase, if I switch this on, by the way, it just pops out in the middle. It tries to make the whole thing work all the way around there. But without that on, I can go to my face and I can actually change where the pattern starts in there. If I go in there and I put in two, for example, let's just press Enter. You can see how it's moved across. Let's do four over there. And once again, it's moved it over to that section in there. So you can change where your pattern runs from just using the little phase in there. If you just switch it off, it will pop it in for you and try to get this to work out perfectly. The problem with this button here is that that gap and the dashes are not always perfect. If I wanted them to be perfectly the same distance, with dashes and gaps, well, looking at this one here, without that on, oops, let's try this one again. Without that one on, those would be perfect. That's one, four, two, four. And the whole reason, if I change the size, you can see it keeps it absolutely perfect like that. Whereas when you switch this on, it tries to make them look as good as possible, and sometimes those gaps will change. You can see the distance of that as I'm moving this is actually getting slightly shorter and longer, so it's not as accurate. It's up to you which way you prefer to work. Most people actually prefer to leave this switched on because it looks better than being perfect. It's up to you. Try it out so you know what that does and try changing the phase so you can actually see how you can move things around a little bit as well. Give it a go. A 14. Appearance Panel Multiple Stroke: Let's take a little shape over here. Absolutely, anything I'm going to go with this heart shape and draw that in. Now, you can see as I'm drawing this that I've actually got my dashes on. I'm going to switch that off and go for a straight line for the moment. What I'd like from this hard shape is to have a few different strokes on this. Now, you could try and do it by actually just making copies of this, making them slightly smaller. Wouldn't work very well, but you might be able to do it that way. Or, and this is the way that I go about it, you can use the appearance panel. I'm going to drag it out over here so you can see it a bit clearer. So I'm going to start off with the base color that I want. So on my stroke, over here, I want to use that red in there. I'm going to go over to my strokes, and I'm just going to increase the size of that stroke in there. Now, I'd also like to have another maybe darker stroke. In here. So I'm going to go along, and in the appearance panel, I'm going to add another stroke to the same shape. You can see I'm now on this one here. Bear in mind that these are almost like separate objects, but they are within the one object. So make sure that you know which one you've clicked on. Now, I'm on this stroke here, so I'm going to add another color stroke. You can see there's none on that at the moment. I'm going to make this a bit darker. Over there, go to my stroke, and I can then just change the width of that like so. So I've now got two strokes on that heart, but I actually want this to be on the inside. So in here, I can choose my alignment and line that on the inside of a dam. And what about this corner in here? Well, I'm going to go over to the join and use that join in there to make sure it's a nice, pointy corner. I'm going to make this a little bit bigger, as well, so we can get two shapes like that. Let's put in a third one. So I'm going to once again go over here, add a stroke you can add, keep adding strokes as much as you want. Let's go to the color in here. I'll choose a different color for that. And once again back to my stroke, increase the size of that one and do the same thing again. I'll make it a pointy one. And well, this could go on the outside or go on the inside, or I could even go in to my dashed line and make it into a dashed line, and let's round off the corners over there so we can get something interesting going on like that. Over there. Right, do try that out with different strokes in there. See how you get on. 15. Save Appearance as a Style: Now, maybe my whole design called for a few more, well, shapes in here. So I want to use that same effect that I've got with those three strokes on a different shape in there. Let's just take a little ellipse like that. Now, you see, when I draw my elliptical shape in, it just does one of those strokes in there, and I'd have to then rebuild that appearance, but I'm going to click on the heart. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the window menu down to Vector and Styles, because we can take that and we can save it as a style in here. You can see there are some already default ones for you, but I want to take this heart and pop it into the styles in there. So what I'm going to do is make sure it's selected. I'm going to go to the top over here, and in here, we can then just create our own styles. And I'm going to say add style from selection. There it is. There is my new style. Now, if I click on this shape here, I can then just apply that style to it very, very quickly. This style is now completely independent on here. If I thought, you know what? I really don't like that dotted line on there. I want to make it a bit smaller. I could do that, or I could remove the stroke from that, as well. Now, obviously, you've pretty much realized that what you can do here is you can add in different fills as well, and we'll look at that when we start to work with patterns because we can build up our patterns with multiple fill patterns at the same time. But try that out, save it in the appearance panel. 16. Patterns - Intro: In this next section, we're going to be looking at patterns, and I want to show you how to take your pattern and make it look not quite so robotic. And we're going to take that pattern and then we're going to add other patterns to it so we can have multiple patterns on the same shape. And we'll also look at things that might be quite useful like stripes, how to do stripes. They're done as patterns. Let's get started. 17. Make a Simple Pattern: I like to make a pattern to go in the middle of the shape that I've created. If you've gotten rid of your shape, just make a simple shape. It's absolutely fine. Anything will do. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new document. So I'm going to go to File New. Now, in here, I want to do a new document, and I want it to be in pixels. So rather than choosing one of these sort of existing canvases where things are in inches or centimeters, et cetera, for speed, I'm just going to go down here to something like video and web click on one of those, and that takes me to pixels in there. You can change from your inches, centimeters, et cetera, to pixels should you want. I'm just doing this because it's quick and easy. Now, I want this to be square, and I'm going to do 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels. If you want yours to be 2000 by 2000 or 3,000 by 3,000, absolutely fine. Anything will do as long as it's square. And I'm going to say create document in there. Now, we're going to keep this one really simple. All I want is some dots. So I'm going to go over here to my shapes. I'm just going to do a little ellipse in there, and I'm going to fill that ellipse with red. I don't want a stroke on there, so I'm going to get rid of the stroke from around the outside. And I'm going to just move it roughly to the middle. Doesn't have to be perfect. You'll see it'll work either way, but I'm putting mine in the middle. And now what we do is we go and save this. I'm going to go to file and save as, and we're saving it as a JPEG or a PNG. Now, if you just use save as I've done in there, you'll find all it does is save things as an AF file format. So you really have to export this rather than save it. So I'm going to go to file down to export over here. And now we can choose from all the other options in there. Now, we can use JPEGs for this. We can use PNGs for this, especially if you have a transparent background. We don't have one at the moment, so I'm just going to use JPEG and click on Export. Let me rename this. I'm going to call it Dot. And I'll just click and save it. Wherever I can find it again, I've put mine on the desktop. Now, let me go back over here. What I want to do is I want to fill this shape with that dot. I'm going to click on my shape, and I'm going to go over to the fill tool, which is this one over here. Now, the fill tool, we've used for gradients before, but I can choose to fill either fill or the stroke over there, but it's the type that I'm interested in. Now, we've got the different types of gradients here, but what I'm interested in is the one called Bitmap. And when I choose Bitmap, it says, Okay, where's the bitmap that you want to use? Bitmap being pixel image. That's all that it means. There's mine. It's called dot dot jpg or yours might be dot dot png or anything else dot PNG. Click on open and you can see my dots come in. Now that doesn't look quite right. So let's grab a corner and just scale the whole thing down. And look at that. You can see it'll just take that shape and allow me to pop it in, rotate it around. We can make it as small or as large as we like. So it's really simple. You just save out your square shape and bring it in as a bitmap and fill the area, and then use this little slider over here, really, grab a corner, and you can rotate and you can scale all at the same time. Try it out. 18. Make Stripes: Okay let's do another one. We're going to do stripes this time. So I'm going to do a new document. Make sure it's square, so thousand by thousand, click on Create, and you won't believe how easy this is. I'm just going to take a little shape like this, and I'm going to drag that shape over half of my document. You can see as I get to the halfway point, the little red line appears, so I know that I'm exactly on the halfway point. And well, once again, I'm going to go with the red in there. I'm going to hold down the option key or the old key to make a copy. I'm going to place that copy up the top there, so I'm making sure that just snaps up to that. And this one will make that a slightly different color over there. So, let's export this out. So export, we're going to be choosing JPEG once again, and I'm going to just export it where I can find it, stripe, click on Save. And let's go back. Oh, you don't have to keep these open. By the way, you can close them down. Let's go back to this over there. I'm going to go to the fill tool. Once again, I'm going to Bitmap in there, and I'm going to choose the stripe. Click on open, and you can see now it usually comes in really, really big if it's the first time you've done it, but you can then just adjust that to whatever sort of stripy bit you want. I'm holding down the Shift key, by the way, so I can actually get this to change, but still be horizontal. Anyway, I kind of like it like that. Actually, maybe an angle. I don't know. I can sit and play for hours with these patterns, but do try that out. Try it a stripe because a stripe is actually really quite useful. I just want to give you a sneak preview of something we're going to be doing later in a project. So I want to open up this one, and we're going to be doing some drawing, and we're going to be using a pattern in there, and I want to show you where we're going to be putting in this little stripe. So we're going to be creating something like this. We're gonna be drawing it from scratch, and we're going to be using a pattern to get that stripe on the top in there, and this is the technique that we're going to be using all that. Anyway, have a bit of a play with that and try any other shapes you like while you're at it. 19. More Complex Patterns: Et's do a slightly more complex pattern this time. Now, what I want to do is I want to get rid of the stripe. So I'm going to click on there. If you are in this fill tool, you can go straight up to the top where it says Bitmap. You can just go up there and choose none to get rid of it, as well. Now, we're going to make a new document now, and I want to fill this next one with lots of different size hearts, but I don't want it to be too well, dull, too robotic. Okay, so 1,000 by 1,000, that will do me nicely. I'm going to click on Create in here and I'm going to make a little heart shape. So once again, using a simple little shape like this heart in there. So we've got the first heart over there. I think it's a bit too wide. I'll just make it so and I will give that some color. Now I want a few of these hearts around. So I'm going to hold down the Alt or the option key, make a copy, go to make that one a bit smaller, and I'll place it over there. Once again, alt or option key to make some more copies like that. So that's okay, Ish. Let's have a look at how this looks as a pattern, it's not gonna look great yet. But we're gonna go to file and export, export this as a JPEG as per usual. I'll just call my HE for heart, click on save in there. And then let's go back over to here and fill this in the usual method. So over to type, bitmap, choose my HE, click on open. And let's make this a little bit smaller like that. Now, you can see straightaway that it doesn't really work that well because everything is very robotic, that one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, we want something which is not quite so obviously repetitive. So let's have a little look at how we can do that. I'm going to go back here. What we actually want to do is we want to get these items, so it's over there, and that one is over there. So they actually repeat themselves rather than just being inside the square. Now, how on earth are we going to do that? Well, what I want to do is I want to take a shape and I want to put it right in the corner there. So I'm dragging this particular shape until the outer box dot shows there, and it shows there. Now, let's hold down the lt or the option key, and make a copy of that, and I'm going to put the same one over there. You see, so here on this corner, I've got this on this side, and this is the other side there. Now, down the bottom here, we want to use the top section. So this one, I'm going to drag in, so it's the top quarter over there, and this one will be the opposite quarter in there. So all of these bits over here are going to be the quarters of that shape. Let me do that again for you very quickly. We'll just get rid of this, and I'll do it with the same size that I've got here, so I'll make this a bit bigger. Over there. So I'm going to start off by making a copy of that. I'm dragging it so it snaps. And if you don't have your snap switched on, make sure that is actually switched on. Over here. You can go up to the top to make sure that all your snapping is switched on. So we've got that quarter there. Let's hold down the old key and make a copy of that and snap that one, so it snaps there. And there let's get another one down here. So hold down the alter the option key, snap this one. Over that side and a last one over here like that. Now that we've got those four pieces, we'll get a much better non repetitive pattern going on. And I'm going to go along to the usual file export export this as a JPEG. Let's give that a name over there. And just so that you can see both versions. If I just got rid of that and that and that and that and I'll also export this one. And we will call this one heart not so good. Right, let's go back in here and have a look at those two. So first of all, go to my fill tool, choose Bitmap again. I'm going to go with the heart not so good. And you can see how they all line up in rows and columns like that. But if we choose the proper one where we've got the four corners, now you can see how they actually look. Well, they don't actually repeat themselves because what we've actually done is we've created a pattern from that little square in there. It looks so much better when you're doing things like this and you're just using the corners, the four corners to repeat the pattern. That out. If you want to have a bit of a go with a really simple one to start off with, and then what you do is you just take a copy of that, hold down the alter the option key. Don't forget, drag it until it snaps. You've got to see that green, the red line, and that point there and this point here. There we go. There's the red line there. Must snap right in the middle over there. If you have something weird like that and it says slightly off, you're going to get a weird result out of that. Just one last thing. I'm going to undo that until we get back to this version here. If you want to move these around, you can if you select all four of them because they are all relative to each other, you could do something like that, and that would still work because you're seeing all four parts of that. It's just the hearts happen to be closer to this one than they were before. Anyway, try it out. I know I've made it sound probably more complex than it is. Once you start playing with it, it becomes so much easier and you'll love it. Try it out. 20. Add More Patterns to the First: Let's make an even more complex pattern. Once again, I'm going to just click over there and get rid of this one. So what we're going to do this time is we're going to go along to file and new. And we're going to make a new document in here, 1,000 by 1,000, and I'm going to switch on transparent background in there. So this is not going to have a white background. We're going to save it out so PNG with a transparent background. And we'll click on create document. So you can see now it's on a transparent background. Now, let me get those hearts in again because that's what I was using. So I'll just go and find the heart over there, draw in the little heart shape. Bio will make it a little bit larger and we give that some color. Okay, so I think we'll now do exactly what we did before. Hold down the alter the option key, make a copy, drag your copy, and snap it into the right position. Same again on this side, snap it into position. I always find that I've actually got to hold down the old key and drag it first before I then start to use the snap. So hold down the alter the option key, drag a copy, let go, then I move it, and it snaps better that way. Once again, over to there, release it. And snap that on there. Now, let's export this. Now, you can see this is still looking very, very similar to what we did before. And if you do want to put in any more shapes inside here, that's absolutely fine. You know, maybe you want to put in a circle or something like that. You could do that. If it goes out one side, it must go out the other side as well. Let's go and export that now. So File Export. I'm going to use not JPEG this time, but PNG because I want the transparency in there. So with PNG, I'm going to click on Export. And let's call this TR heart. I'm going to click on Save. Now, let's go back in here. So I'm going to go to my filter. I want to fill this, so I'm going to fill it, and I'm going to fill with a bitmap, which is going to be the stripes. So I'm going to pop in my stripes, first of all, in there. Now, I'm going to pull that down a little bit so we get more of those stripes coming in and maybe angle it around as well. Now, in here, I'm going to add another fill. So I'm going to add a second fill above that first one. Click on this fill. And then once again, in my fill tool, I'm going to go to Bitmap for that. I'm going to choose my transparent heart, open that up, and it comes in on top of that one, so I can now scale that one down, and we've got a combination. Of those two all on the one pattern. You can add as many of these in as you want. Now, once you've added these in, you can also change the order of them so I could take my fill with the hearts on and drag it below the stripy fill. Obviously, you can't see them through there. I'm going to just drag that one above that again. You can also go in here and we can adjust the blend modes. Now, we haven't really talked about those yet, but you can see this says normal. If I click on normal, I chose multiply. I can then see both of them together. It's multiplying those together. And there's so many different options that you could try in here to get different results. I'm going to leave it on color burn, and I think I'm just going to adjust those little hearts. So they're sort of lined up like that. Have a bit of a go and have lots of fun, add as many of these patterns in as you wish. 21. Brushes - Intro: A In this section, we're going to be looking at vector brushes. Now, you might be an artist, you might be an Illustrator, in which case, brushes are really important. But if you're doing things like icons or logos, brushes are also really important for that type of work. So we're going to be looking at different types of brushes. There are going to be vectors, so you're going to be able to manipulate them after you've created them. But rather than just single colors, we're going to have multiple colors in there. We're going to be using gradients. We're going to be using photos in the brush. Anyway, I'll stop talking so we can try them out. Have 22. Vector (Path) vs Pixel Brushes: Et's go and get a new document up here. So I'm going to go to File and New. I'm just going to choose from the page size, RGB and landscape. Click on Create Document. Now, I want to clean up all of my panels, so I'm going to go to Window panels, and I'm just going to say reset to reset them all back to their starting point. And you'll find if I go to pixels, then I could do that there, same with layout over here because it's done on a studio by studio basis. But let's have a look at some brushes now. There are two types of brushes that we get in affinity. The one are vector brushes, which really is the domain of the vector area, and the other are pixel brushes. So let's have a little look. I'm going to go to the window menu and go down to General and you'll see, ah the brushes in there. And you click on the brushes, and we have some brushes. Up here. Now, if I were to go along and find my path brush tool and I were to click on one of these brushes and start to paint, doesn't look like much of a brush. Let's click on this one. Start to paint, still looks exactly the same. You see, these brushes here, even though they've appeared in the vector area, are actually pixel brushes. If you want to use these brushes, and you can click in there, you'll find this all sorts of different types of brushes, inks, markers, oils, you need to go into the pixel layout over here, and then you can use the brushes. Now, if I can't see them in here, I will just go back and reset this panel. Over here, and brushes should be around. There we are. There they are. So I could use a paint brush, click on one of these brushes, and I could then start to paint with them. You'll see as I change the brushes, we'll get a different result from them. I'm just going to undo those two in there. So be careful. Brushes are pixel brushes. So how do we use vector brushes? Well, vector brushes, if we go to the window menu, are down in the vector area, and they are actually called path brushes. Now, this shows that they're actually up, so there they are over there. Once again, if I click in there, you get very similar brush sets. So you've got oils in there. We've got markers. We've got inks. Let's just choose oils for the moment. And now I go and I use my path Brush tool. I can click on one of these and I can start to paint my shape in. The great thing about this, because it's vector, you can go along to your node tool, and you'll see it's actually put the brush onto a vector shape, so I can just grab those points, pull them around, move them about as much as I need. I can also, while I'm in here, change the brush. So I say, Well, let's try that with a different brush in there. Maybe I don't like the oils, maybe I want something like inks, and I could then try an ink brush on there. So the important thing here to remember is a vector brushes, you're using the path brush, and it's the path brushes that you want. If you just go to the brushes, then you should be in pixel mode. Not necessarily always, but you should be in pixel mode, and you're using pixel brushes. So you can't change them with your node tool. Anyway, try it out and just make sure that you understand the differences between those two before we move on. 23. Path Brush Settings Inc Stabilizer: Let's have a look at some of the brush settings. So I'm going to just take my brush, and before I start anything, I'm going to go up to the top here and change the color. So let's go with a pink color over there. The size, I can adjust in here. This is the width of the brush, and then I can adjust the transparency. So first of all, let's just start off with something like that. We've got the color. Over here, let's go and change the width, do another one. You see the difference over there, and let's change the transparency over here and we'll do another one like that. That's not light pink. It is semitransparent. You can see if I go over the top. Now there are more settings. We're going to come to these later on. But for now, let's have a look at the stabilizer. Now, you can see when I'm actually painting with my brush, there's a little red line that pops up sometimes. I'm going to just undo all of those. And that's the stabilizer line. So what it does, it smooths out your brush stroke. And there are two versions that you can use of the stabilizer. Let me start off first of all, by just resetting these, making my brush a little bit thinner. Over there, and the stabilizers switched off. So if I were to now click and draw, you can see it's following exactly where my curse is going. If I switch on the stabilizer, and I've now gone across to the first one, it's called rope mode. Now, watch very closely what happens. When I click and start to drag, it's kind of like a little rope, can you see that rope there? So when I'm pulling, it's like I'm pulling the brush on a rope, which is smoothing things out for me. So even though I might waggle around a little bit here, it's not going to waggle the brush too much. So this is the rope stabilizer. Now, over here, we've got a setting. So if I take it up to 128, you can see my rope is even longer. If I go with something a lot less, my rope is going to be a lot shorter. There. The second one over here, the second stabilizer is called Window mode. Now, they say the input positions are averaged over a flexible window produces a smooth flame input. Honestly, that doesn't make too much sense for me. So the way I like to think about this is that that is like a rope, piece of string. This one is like an elastic band. Just increase the amount. So you'll see when I do it, if I'm pulling and I stop, and the brush then sort of tries to get up to me. So when I'm pulling it out, if I go really fast, that elastic band gets really big. So once again, I'll go really fast. You can see that elastic band comes in and then catches up with my brush. And obviously, the higher the setting in here, well, the more that elastic band will go. Away from my brush. Very, very uncontrollable to use this and try and paint something if you've got a really high setting on there. So I'll just take that down a little bit like so. Do have a bit of a go with these settings. The color is obvious, the size is obvious, and the transparency is obvious. But switch the stabilizers on and off and experiment with the two different types of stabilizers you get. Sometimes you might want to use one, sometimes you might want to use the other. It depends upon entirely what you're doing. Try those out and have a go with the setting. 24. More Settings Including Pressure Sensitivity: Have a look at this Me button over here. So if I've chosen one of these brushes, and I'll click on more, what we have over here is the brush width, and we've got a size variance. Now, it's important to know that these work with pressure sensitivity. So if you've got a Wackem tablet or oian or one of those tablets which has pressures where you can press down to get wider brushes, that type of thing, then you can use the pressure sensitivity on here, and you'll see that we can based on pressure, change the size of the brush as well as the opacity of the fall off. Now, if you don't and you go to none, then it just goes back to a normal brush over here. If I change some of these settings, you'll see once again goes back to what will happen with the pressure. I'm just going to take that back to none for the moment. If you go down over here, this allows you to actually have something which is going to be the beginning and something which is going to be the end of the brush. So the way that it works is you've got this little shape here, and on the left of the red line, it says, this is going to be not change. It's going to look like it does no matter how much the brush gets stretched, and it will stretch between that line and that line over there. You'll see if I move this over can you see how this little bit gets bigger as I do that? So I'm saying this bit of the brush doesn't change, but the rest of it gets stretched along like that. I could do the same with the end, so I could pull this over over there. So now it's saying, keep this, which is that bit there, keep this, which is that bit there, and this bit gets stretched between the beginning and the end. You can have a play around with these and see what you get, and they're all slightly different based on the brush that you've got. Anyway, do check those out. If you do not have a precious sensitivity, don't worry. We can still create some amazing stuff. 25. Pressure Sensitivity for Non Tablet Users: Now, one of the things that you might have been wondering about is when you've actually created one of these brushes, you've applied it to your line, why can't you go in and get it to apply the pressure option that it gives you in here? And as I mentioned in the last video, we can work with pressure sensitivity. So what about if you don't have a Wacom tablet? Let me close that down. Well, Avints thought about that, and what they've done is they've got a little option over here. Now, it's well hidden. If you don't know that it's there, you'll never find it. In the little cog on this display here, there's some options down the bottom. That says the controller. So I'm going to switch pressure on in there. Let's just get rid of that one. Now, if I do this again, and I apply, you can see we've already got the pressure option on there. And if I apply one of these and double click it, now that size variation will work directly on what you've done. So you just need to switch it on, delete what you've done, and then go in, and from that point onwards, it will be switched on and you can use this size variation in there. Try that out. It really will make a difference to your line work. 26. Copy Path Brush & Customize: Now, these path brushes can be a little bit tricky, especially if you're trying to save out your own version. You've made some changes and you go back to it and it goes back to the original again. It really is a little bit of a tricky one. So let me show you how to do it. I'm going to start off by using this smooth square pastel. So I'm going over to my brush and I'm going to use the path Brush tool. I'm going to make sure that I'm on pressure up the top, so I want to get the tails that sort of go thinner. And let's see what should I use? Square pastel. I'm going to start with that one. So using the paintbrush, I'm going to draw a shape over there, which is square pastel. Now, here's the trick. Don't go off to the other tool. Just leave it exactly as it is. Go to this brush, right click it, and duplicate that brush. So now you've got two of them. So we can now go to this copy. Double click the copy and make changes. I'm going to do a size variation on that and just pull it in, so we get the tail that comes off there, and I'll click on close. Now you can see I've got the square pastel. I've got the square pastel two of this. I've got two different brushes. This is my new brush in here. Let me go and do another shape. I will go along, get my paint brush, click on square tail, and do the brush like that. You can see that's the square tail brush. This one here is the square pastel over there, if I could Make sure it's selected, square pastel, and that one there is my square pastel too. So the trick is to make sure you stay in the brush. Don't go back to the selection tool to reselect it again. Stay in there and do all your changes, make your copies in there. By the way, at this stage, if you go to square or if you go to the copy that you've made, you can right click it and you can rename it. So I'll call this square pastel Tim. Over there. So I've now got a square pastel and I've got a square pastel Tim, which is a custom brush. Anyway, I do hope that clears up a lot of issues that you might be having with the brushes. They are really tricky. And especially if you just go back to this tool over here and then you make changes, it doesn't work. So make sure you stay on your path Brush tool. Try it out. If it doesn't work, go back over this video again and do it step by step with me until it works. 27. Make a Custom Solid Brush: A let's make our own custom brush now. What I'm going to do is in the path brushes, I'm going to go to the top right hand corner and click on the little V over there. And what we can do to start off with is to create a new category. Now, you'll see the categories that we've got here are sort of the oils, the acrylics, the dries, et cetera. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new category, and I'm going to call this category Tim's amazing brushes. And I'll click Okay. And let's have a look in there. Now, I can't see Tim's amazing brushes over there. For some reason, it doesn't automatically populate this area when you create it. So what I do is I go to sort B and change the sort by, which resorts the brushes in there. There it is over there, Tim's amazing brushes. So, this gives me a totally blank set of brushes, so I can put my own brushes in there or category, shall I say, I'm going to go in here and I'm going to go down to make a new brush. Now, although we're going to be looking at these three brushes in here, you can import brushes. So if you buy brushes or find free brushes on the web, you can import them in there. You can export your own brushes if you know you want to sell a set of brushes or give away brushes free. That's how you can do them in there. I'm going to go to New Solid brush, and I'm making a new brush. There it is. It's pretty boring, to be honest. But what I can now do is I'm just going to do my line over there. I can then double click the brush and I can adjust the size variance over there and the brush size manually to get the look that I'm after. I think I'm reasonably happy with the way that's looking. Opacity variance. Yeah, I think that works really well. And I'll just click on clothes. I've now got this as a new custom brush that I've created in my own brush set in there. Try it out. I 28. Make a Textured Intensity Brush: Let's make another brush in our new set. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to be using the new textured intensity brush. And for that, I actually need to make the brush shape first because it'll ask me for it. So I'm going to do a new file in affinity, and I'm going to make my brush in affinity and then save it out. So over here, I've just gone down to Video and web. I'm going to use this vertical video 1920 by 1080. You can try sizes. It's absolutely fine. And I'm going to go along. I'm going to just take off my transparent background for now. Click on Create Document. Now, let's have a look at what we can do with this. I'm going to use a shape, and I'm going to use the little arrows over here because this demonstrates this so well, but you can try with any shape you like. But I'm gonna be using this arrow over here, and I'm going to put the arrow in, and I'm just going to change the color of that arrow shape to black. So I just want my colors in here. And make sure I'm in vector mode. I'm going to go into my color and pop in black over there. And I'm going to export this now, so I'm going to go to File and Export over here. And I think I'll just export that as a PNG file at that size. Click on Export. And let's call this arrow. Not very creative. I'm putting it on the desktop. You can save it wherever you want to find it later. Now, I'm going to do a second variation of this, and this one's going to be the reverse. So I'm actually going to go to my shape. I'm going to put in a shape in there. I'm hoping that's covered the whole thing. Let's see. This, I've got a shape in there. I'm going to send that to the back. So rather than going to my layers, I'm going to go to the layer menu. Arrange, move, send it to the back. So the black object goes to the back, which means that the arrow is in front of it. And I'm going to make the arrow white. So I'm going to save that one, as well. So let's go to file, and by save, I mean export. Export has a PNG over here, and let's call this reversed arrow. Right. I'm done with that. I can actually close that down. I don't need it anymore, and I don't even need to save it. So let's have a look now at creating a new brush. Over here, I'm going to go to New textured intensity brush, and straightaway, it says, Okay, where's the graphic that you want to use for this? Well, let you use the arrow PNG. I will open it. And you can see, there is my brush straight away. So if I were to get a shape, like that, I can apply that brush. I'm going to double click it. I'm going to make it bigger so you can actually see it in there. Now, the arrow itself is being stretched out. So remember the little red line that we looked at earlier. If I pull that over just the other side of that, it'll mean that the arrow will remain normal shape. It won't be stretched, and I could do the same over here with that one. So it just stretches between those two points. That is the head offset and the tail offset in there. I'll click on clothes. Now, let's have a look at the other brush because we did a reverse of that. This one's not terribly exciting. Um, okay, I can change the color and maybe make it look different that way. But let's go up to the top. We'll go to new textured intensity brush. You can already guess what's going to happen with this one. This is reversed, so the brush will be reversed in there. I'll do another little shape here. Click on that, and I'm going to double click it, go in here, change the size, get this little line on that side, that little line on that side. So the idea is that anything black will be invisible. If I move this over there, you'll see Anything black is invisible, anything white will show up as the brush itself. Do have a bit of a go with that, then we'll look at some more options in here. 29. Use Repeat Shapes on Your Brush: I'm going to go back into this brush over here, so I'm going to double click it. And let's have a look at this option here. Remember, we've got stretch, which stretches between those two points. If you say repeat, then what it'll do is it'll just repeat the brush itself. Now, I'm going to pull that out and this one out. So these ones have to be at their maximum point. And you can then see it'll repeat those shapes that you've got. Once again, I'll just take that down a bit. Close that, and you get this really cool effect, so you can take any picture that you like or any graphic that you like, and just repeat it along a line like that. Quick and easy, this one, but try out. 30. Transparency in Brushes: Let's add some transparency into this. Once again, I'm going to create a new intensity brush. So I'm going to do a new document. I'll use the same size that I had before. And this time, I'm going to use shades of gray. So I'm going to start off. I think the background, I'm going to make that black. So let's have a little shape over here, and I will do that over my background. Whoops. Over there. And I'm going to fill that with black. Let's go back to vector over here and make that black. And then I think I want another shape in here as well. I'm going to go and get another shape over here. I'm going to draw in my new shape. So, and this one I'm going to make gray. So over here, let's fill that with gray. And let's do another one over here, and this one I'm going to make white. And to make it more interesting, let's put a shape in the middle of that, as well. So I'll just take a little diamond and do a diamond shape. Over there, we'll fill that one with black. And I'll just place that in the middle. Right. Let's save this one out so you can see what happens with the gray. In fact, if we do another one over here and maybe make that one a different gray and just copy it a few times, maybe copy it up to that point there, you'll get to see even more of how this is going to work. File, Export, and we're exporting this once again as a PNG file. And we'll just choose Export over there. And this will be our transparent lines shapes. Once again, call it anything you like as long as you remember what you've called. We'll close that down. So let's have a look at what's going to happen with this. Once again, I will just draw a little line like that. I'm going to go over here, do a new textured intensity brush. That's the one I'm going to be using. Click on Open. Here is my intensity brush. Now I'm going to double click it, and I'm going to change the breath the brush width in there so you can kind of see how it's working. Do we want to change the variance on size? Yeah. My as well. Let's click on clothes. Now, I'm going to change the color on this brush. I'm going to go to my stroke, and I'm just going to choose a different color because what I want you to do is to see when I put it over there, how this or the grays affect the transparency. So where it was black on the very edge, that's absolutely transparent, where we had the gray, it's semi transparent, where we had the white. It is solid color in there. So this diamond in the middle, which was white, is now totally transparent. And you can see we've got another sort of little semi transparent diamond in there, which was a light gray as well. So the idea is that you can create really cool stuff. Your brushes can have transparency on them like that. Try it out, and I will do one more brush for you and then show you how I've created it. 31. Gradient Brushes: Now, I've already done the start over here so you don't have to watch the whole thing. And what I'm going to do this time is I'm going to use a gradient. So I'm going to put a shape over the top. So once again, shape from one side to the other. Now, I've already done this gradient, so I didn't have to go through all the settings with you because we've done gradients already. You can see my gradient goes from white up the top there. I clicked to put another one in there, black one. You can put as many of these in as you like. So I could have maybe another one in there. A Black. I could have another white one in the middle. Over there or maybe even a sort of a gray color and white at the bottom. So I've got this gradient going on like that. I'm then going to go and export this and you can see what wild and wonderful brush we're going to get out of this. So we'll export that out. There. Let's go back over here. I'm leaving that one open because I want to make a change to it in a moment. You know how this works. New textured intensity brush, find my grad, bring it in, and I can then apply that you get this really interesting pipe looking effect with transparency inside. What about if we reversed it? Well, if I go back here and say, Okay, well, maybe this should be black, and that one there is going to be white. That one will be gray. This one will be white, and this one over here is going to be black. Once again, I will export that. I'm just going to call this one grad too. Let's have a look at that one. New textured brush, bring in grad too. And we'll just do a copy of that so you can see them both. We get that effect in there with sort of the soft brush looking edge. Anyway, try them out yourself, have loads of fun with them. There's so many interesting things you can do with that. And then we're going to start and we're going to have a look at the new textured image brush. But try that one out first. 32. Images in Brushes: Last brush, we're going to build a little graphic. Now, I'm actually going to go back in time to the first course. If you haven't done the first course, don't worry about it. We're just going to make a simple little animal graphic, the head won't take long at all. Obviously, for those of you who've done the other course, you'll know how to do this anyway. So I'm just going to take a little triangle over here and make a shape like that. I really want it to be the other way round. This is for the head or the face of the animal, whether it's a rat or a dog or whatever you want to do, I'm just going to do mine as a little mouse. Ready, ready, simple, we're keeping it as simple as possible. Let's give that a bit of color over there. And now, look at that. It's suddenly got rounded corners. Why has that happened? Well, if we go to the stroke over here, you can see there's a very big stroke on there, and the joins are rounded in there. Now, that'd be absolutely fine. If I wanted to, I could actually keep it like that, or I could just get rid of my stroke, go along to my fill. Over there, give it a fill, and then don't forget we can always use this rounded corner thing to round off the corners as we need to. So I'm just going to go back to this one here. Round off that corner a little bit like so. I'm just doing them manually. Over there, and we'll draw in a quick little nose, very, very fast. This is a mouse, so it's going to have a little round nose like that, which I'll make black in there. And then we need some ears. So once again, as fast as possible, quick let's use a diamond shape over there. I'm going to rotate it round to an angle, pop that on there. Now, I do need a second one over on that side there, so I'm just going to copy it with command or Control J and move that one across, and then I need to flip it over to the other side. I'll go up to the top here and we've got a flip option so I can flip horizontal so it's at the same angle. Down there. Now, of course, those two ears need to be behind the head, so we'll select both of them. And I'm going to use the eyedropper tool to just eye drop the brown over there and also go to layer, arrange, move, and send that to the back. Now, most of you, I'm sure, are quite happy with the way this is actually working. Once again, quick few details in here, maybe some eyes. So just a little I like that. We'll make that black. We don't want too many details. Remember, this example is not about how to create a mouse. It's about how to actually work with the brushes. And I will do the inner side of the ear as well just so that it looks a little bit more interesting. I'm going to use Command and J to copy that ear. I'm going to fill it with sort of a pink color. And there, let's go. It's I don't know, something pinky like that. And just scale it down a little bit, move it into the right position. And I'll do exactly the same with the other one, as well. So command J to copy it, scale it down. Find my pink. I'll just copy that pink over there, and let's move that into the right position. This does not have to be perfect at all. We just want something that we can actually use for this example. Right, I'm kind of happy with the way that that is looking. Now, if you remember from before, when we were creating these brushes, and we went up to the top over here. We went down to the textured brushes. What we had to do was to save out what we wanted from the brush in the first place. And I'm going to do that now, as well. So although I've created on this page, I'm actually going to do a new document in here, and I'm going to make mine square because the mouse's face is squarish. So I will just do 1,000 by 1,000. Doesn't have to be square. I'm going to say transparent background and click on Create. Now, let's copy that mouse in. So take this one, copy it. I'm using Command C or Control C to copy and Command V or Control V to paste it in over here. And we can just resize that to whatever size we want that to be. I'm going to make mine as large as possible. Over there. Right, that's brilliant. Okay, let's save that out or export that, shall I say? So I'm going to go to File, Export. And I'm exporting this as a PNG file. We do want a PNG because we've got a transparent background in there, and I will just export that. Give it a name. I'll call this mouse. Put that where I can find it again, and I'm done. Now, let's go back over here. I can get rid of this to the path. What I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new textured image brush over here. And I'm going to choose my mouse. Let's move that out the way over there. So one. There we go. Click on open, and you can see what it's done is it's actually put the mouse along the path. So if I had a path and I'll just use the path tool over there, what it's doing is it's pulling that mouse in color along the path. Now, this is quite important the whole thing in color because when you do yours, you might find it's not in color. You might find it's a completely different color. So for example, here, if I just go to my stroke, make it a bit thicker, you'll find that if you've actually got a stroke color on there, it's going to use those colors on your shape. So if you want to see the color of the original, you need to go to none for the stroke. Now, that's okay, but that's not really what we want. So I'm going to double click on the mouse here. And I bet you've guessed where we're going here. We're just going to say repeat. And that'll just repeat that little mouse all the way long. Let's change the width of that in there. Now, size variation, we could probably do that just a little bit, so the mice at the end are a little bit smaller. Let's click on close, and there we go. You can take any graphic that you like and put it along that path. 33. Image in Brush with Photo: Let's try this with a photograph. I've got a photograph here of some paint, and I'll just show it to you very quickly. It is this image over here. Now, I've taken this from the stock library. So let's just go back in here again. And you can see, I brought it in from the stock library and put it into a 1920 by 1080 size. Obviously, the size is not that important, as you know so far, but I want it to have a lot of quality in there. So that's what I've done. And then I've exported that out as a PNG file. So let's have a look at how that one works. So I'm going to go along as before to new textured image brush. I've called it paint, and I'm going to bring that in move that out the way. Click open, and bring that back again. There it is over there. So if I now get my brush and I'm going to be using the path tool, you can see how I can just pull it along. If I go in here, I can do the usual brush width, and then you can see how it's pulling it along the path. You can also do a size variant so you can get it to go from thick to thin or vice versa. Now, the great thing about this is that you don't actually see the detail in there, but it gives you this amazing color. You could also repeat it, as well, although, you know, that doesn't look quite so good with those little bits in there unless, of course, your original matched up on left and right sides. So I'm going to go with stretch in there, and we'll just close that down, and let's just have a look at this. Brush over there, and you can see how it goes from thick to thin, and it looks so cool. We'll get the stroke and increase the stroke a bit. It's a really interesting way to create really wild art looking brushes. Now, that's a hard edge brush. What about if we wanted to do it as a soft edge brush? Well, what we can do is we can take this, and I'm going to just actually copy this. So I'll use my Command C to copy that. I'm going to do a new document, same size, 1920 by 1080, as I said, whatever size you like. And I'm going to say I wanted to have a transparent background over there, so it's going to be transparent, and I'll just paste that straight in like so. To get the soft edges, I'm going to erase some of this out. So I'm in pixel mode at the moment. So I'm going to go along to the eraser, and I've got a nice big brush over there. By the way, to change your brush size, you can either do it here or you can use the left or right brackets. The square brackets on the keyboard, left will make the brush smaller, right will make it bigger. So I'm going to make that quite big, and let's try and see what happens now. So if I do that, that's probably a little bit too big. Let me undo that. I'll make it a little bit smaller. And I'm going to start on the top there and just erase out that section. So we get this sort of soft, nice blend, and I'll do the same at the bottom here. Over there. So our brush sort of blends out slowly. You can probably tell what's going to happen here. I'm going to export this once again as a PNG file for the transparency. Let's click Export, and I will call this paint Trans. And let's click on save in there. Go back over here again. We'll make just a copy of that one, to be honest to apply it too. And I'm going to make the new brush. So over here, new textured brush, bring in the transparent paint one. It always gets in the way. Let's open that up. There we go. And I'm going to just choose that. And you can see how we've now got this really nice soft edge. I'll double click that, do the same thing that I did before to make it softer, maybe make it a bit wider, as well. And look at that lovely brush that we've now got over here. So it's up to you what you want to do with these whether you want a soft edge or a hard edge like that. If I move this over, you can see how we've got that softness going on in there. Anyway, do have a bit of a play with those type of brushes, bring in photographs. Don't forget you've got the little vectors that you can bring in or you can bring in photographs. You could actually go to photograph and cut a person out, for example, bring it in like I did with a mouse and then have them along the path. So many options. Have a good play. 34. Bezier Curves & the Pen Tool - Intro: In order to get full control over the curves that you're drawing, you might want to consider using the pen tool. Now, the Pen tool is similar to the pencil, but it's got more control because as you work along, you'll be pulling out the handles. Now, if this has just gone whoosh and you say, What are you talking about? Well, I'm going to show you. I want to show you how to use the pen tool from the very start. From straight lines, integrating curves to manipulating the curves as you go. Let's get started. I 35. Bezier Curve Handles: Let's have a look at Bezier curves. Now, bezier curves are these little curves that you see when you select a point and you get some handles out. So why haven't they appeared on this circle? Well, that's because the circle itself is a shape and you can adjust the shapes. What you need to do in order to see the Bzier handles is to go along to the bar over here, click this button, which says Convert to curves. Now, when I use my node tool and I select that node, you can see the Bezier curves here, which you've got the handles on them. So why are they called bezier curves? Well, the bezier curve comes from a French engineer called Pierre Bezier. He worked for Renault, and during the 60s, he developed the maths behind this to help him create really smooth contours for the bodies of cars. So car design comes into affinity. Now, when you go to a Bezier curve, if you grab one of the handles and drag it around, what it's doing is it's trying to keep this as a smooth curve over there. So when I drag one handle, drag the other side over there. When I pull them out, if I pull this one out, what it's doing is it's pulling this curve out over here, and I'll try and do it without actually affecting the other one. So I pull this out over to there. And it's just pulling that little line over there, but once again, keeping this really nice and smooth. Let me go to the other side and just pull that one out over there. If I keep going, you can see how it'll keep pulling on that line, and eventually the line can't hold it anymore, and it goes round and back to this one. Once again, over here, I can pull this around, I can angle it around, or I can pull it out eventually because I've pulled that one out and that one out, we get more of a well, it's not a point, but it's a small curve in there. Now we have some options along the top here. And let me go to this point over here first of all. Firstly, we could make it into a corner point like that. Or we could go back and make it into a smooth point again. So let me go to this one over here. Now I want to make this one a smooth point. If I click that button, it doesn't actually do anything. But if you go to the next one, this is called a smart curve. Click on that, and once again, it'll make it into a curve, and it just gets your handles the same distance apart again. So before we go any further, what I'd like you to do is just have a bit of a play with that to get the feel for them. If they've ever been a bit mystifying, particularly when you're working with a pen tool, don't worry. I'm going to go through everything step by step. But for the moment, start off with a little ellipse. Over there. You will need to go up to this button and click that button to convert it to curves or this won't work. Use your node tool, select the individual points, and just very gently pull on them and see exactly what happens. Don't just go wild with them like that because you won't understand how it's working properly. Let's use the Command or Control Z to undo those two. So do it gently so that you can see what is happening with that curve and twist it around like that and see how that line interacts with the other point in there. You just click and drag to select a curve, and off you go. Try it out. 36. Breaking the Handles to Form a Cusp: I'm going to do another little curve over here and once again, click that button. Now, if I select this point, you can see there are two lines on either side. Let me do this one over here. There's a little line in there, and there's a little line in there. I'm not talking about the long line. I'm talking about the little one that crosses over. Those signify that these two handles are exactly the same length. Look what happens. If I pull this up a little bit like that, those two little lines disappear, so I now know that those are not the same length. Same over here, I can see them and I can see them in there. So do keep an eye on that. The moment that you start to move them backwards and forwards, those little lines will disappear. Now, what about if we want to adjust these handles independently of each other? So maybe I've done a curve like that, and I thought, That curve is absolutely perfect, but I want this one to now go at a completely different angle. Well, what you can do is you can go to this handle here and you hold down the Alt or the option key. And then when you click, it will break those two handles. This is known as a cusp. So to create a cusp, once it's a cusp, you can see I can move it around individually. Let me do that again on this side. So I'm going to go to this one here. I'm going to hold down the Alt or the option key and just break that one like that. Now, if I select this point, I can go back over here again. I can convert it to a sharp curve, or I can convert it to a smooth curve in there. Let me do that once more on this side, so I can go over there, make it into a smooth curve, which means these two are going to be linked together. So do try that out. Remember, you go to your one handle, hold down the t the option key, and you can click and drag to make a cusp. When you're doing this, by the way, do have a look along the bottom, because this actually tells you exactly what the shortcuts are. So if you can't remember and you think, Oh, my goodness, what on earth was that cusp thing? What if I select this over here, and then I can go and find I go to this one in there. I'm going down and find Now, the problem is, you can have to look for yourself because when I go over that point and I move the curse to show you, that changes. So if I go over that point, go to the bottom to about here and you'll see it shows drag the alter the option to create a cusp. So do check out what's happening down the bottom there. Try that one out and make some cusp points and play with them, but knowing that you can always get back with these little buttons up here. 37. Pen Tool Basics & Convert Nodes to Curves: Let's use the Pen tool now to create our own shapes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click with pen and you can just go point to point like this to create your shape in there. I'm going to undo those. So the idea is that you can actually put in the points where you want them. Let's say, for example, I'm creating a simple shape, and I'm going to use the shape of a fish. Now, I like fishes because, well, honestly, you can't go wrong with them. If your shape looks weird, you just say, Yeah, I'm sure there's a fish that shape. So I'm going to click over here at the point or the nose of the fish. And then I'm going to go up to the top of the head, and I'm going to click there and there over here, you'll see where I'm going with this. This is kind of the top fin of the fish. That's the head. And then down here, there's the body. I will do the tail out there. And I'm just going point to point. Over here. It's kind of like if you ever did those dot to dots when you were a child, at. They used to be quite popular when I was younger, but that was a while ago. Anyway, click point to points like that and once again back to the start. Now, because we've got that, we can go along, and we can use our node tool to say, Well, this one should be a curve, and I can then make it into a curve like that, and I can adjust the handles to get the fish shape. Once again, I'll do the same one here. And we're going to adjust those. I'm going to work my way all the way around the whole of this shape and putting those handles in over there until eventually we get something which looks vaguely like a fish. Now, if yours ends up looking different to mine, that's absolutely fine. You can always move these things around as you go. And remember, there's no such thing as a perfect fish shape all fish seem to be a different shape over here. Mine kind of has got this really big bump on the top over there, so honestly, to me, that looks like a goldfish, whereas yours might look more like, I don't know, a shark or anything else. Anyway, I'm going to select those two. I'm going to do two at a time here, so I'm going to select both of those and make them into curves, and I can then go back and just adjust the one. Oops. The one that I want. Like so. Last one over there, select that, make it into a curve. And, of course, these can be pulled in to any shape you like. So if I think the bump is a bit too big, I can just pull that in, adjust these. The body is a bit too large over there. And we can keep going until we get the final shape that we want all nice and smooth over there. So do try that out. Use the pen tool, make a simple robo fish out of straight shapes like that, but then use your node tool to select the individual ones and make them into curves that way. Try it out. 38. Draw with Curves: Now, you can make your own curves with the pen. So for example, here, if I were to click and now I'm going to move my pen over and then it's one movement, click down and drag. And you can see that we can do curves like that. Now, this second node over here has got two handles on it. There's this one that goes out there. That one controls that part of that line, so this part of the curve over there. This one here will control the next one that I do. If I go down here, it will try and make a curve that will follow me down to there. If I were to click up there, it'll make a curve that will follow me up to there. I'm going to go down here and just click once, and you can see, if I go back to my node tool that this handle is controlling this curve. If I just move it in and out like that, you can see it's controlling that one. This one is controlling that curve in there. But of course, they link together. So if you twist them, they will both move at the same time keeping that as a nice smooth curve. Let's get rid of that. So once again, back to my pen, I'm going to click once click drag and then decide where I'm going from there. So I'm going to go up to there. So if I click up there, it'll just follow me around. Now, because I clicked, I don't have any handles sticking out. So the next time I click, I will just get straight lines over there. But if I click and drag here, now, of course, we've got two handles, the next click I do will give me another curve in there. Once again, that one is just a straight normal point or normal node. So from that point on it's the straight lines. Once again, I can go back to the beginning in there. Try that out. Have a bit of a go with those clicking, dragging, and then clicking again just to get to understand where the curve is going to go for you. I will do it one last time to remind you very quickly click click drag. The next point that I put on, we'll try and follow that handle. So if I go down here, it'll follow down there. If I go up there, it'll follow up there. Click over there, and it follows it down. Then it straight lines from that point onwards. Try it out. 39. Redraw Fish with Curves: Remember when we created the fish, we did sort of there, there there, there there, there, there. I went do the whole thing. And then we went to those individual nodes, and we said, Okay, let's make that one into a curve, this one into a curve, et cetera. Well, we could do the same thing, but with a pen tool with curves. So if I clicked, I could click at the nose. I'm starting at the nose. Then instead of actually clicking with a point, I can then click and drag a little curve there, and then go to the base of the fin and click. Then I can go to the top or to the halfway up the fin, click and drag. And then click click and drag, and click. You can see we're cutting out quite a lot of the extra work doing it this way. Click and Drag, click. Still go in and adjust the shape later on. But I don't have to go in and put in all those little nodes or change those nodes, shall I say, into curves when I'm doing it this way. Click and Drag, click, click and drag, click. I can still go in and adjust them then, so we'll take that one. That looks all right. This one here, we can adjust it. Don't forget, you can change the handles individually if you wish. That needs to come in a bit. You can see how much faster it is doing things this way than actually doing them the long way around like that. Be careful. If you pull your hand out too much, you might get a sort of a weird curve like that. I'll just pull that in over to there. Try that out. D fish or anything you like ready. But just get into the habit of click click drag, click. 40. Draw with Cusps: Now, you'll find you can actually draw most things using the last technique that I showed you. But for those of you who want to speed it up or take it on to the next level, we can also with the pen tool, go in and actually break handles as we go. Let me show you what I mean. If I were to click here and then click and drag now, we've got the two handles out here. But what I can do is I can go back to this point here and I can hold down the lt or the option key, and I can actually drag that second handle out. These two are now broken. The second curve will actually now try and follow that line like that. So let me do that again. If I click and drag, but I want to break this handle, I'll just go back there, hold down the old key, and I can then drag that out. And now my next curve will follow that handle so it'll go like that. Let me do another shape with this. So I'm going to just start off with a click over here, click and drag. I'll go back to that little handle there. Hold down the old key, and click and drag again. And then I can click and drag, hold down the old key. Pick and drag again. Lick and drag, hold down the old key, click and drag again. You can get all these weird and wonderful shapes with just one line without having the node right in the middle. As I said, you can do almost all your drawing like that, but if you want to take it further, try this ittle technique out, remember, click and drag, go back to your last point, click and drag again. Now, if you don't hold down the old key like I didn't there, it just re drags out those two handles. So Alt or option, option if you're on a AMAC and drag it out, and then you've broken it. What you're actually creating there are cusp points, like we had to look at before with the option down here. Try it out and see how you get on. 41. Try Drawing Fish with Cusps: Now, for those of you who are brave enough to try the fish using that technique, what you can do is you can start to the nose. You can go to the base of the fin, and you can drag out that shape there. Then here, we can go along and we can hold down the old key, and we can actually just click. We can go over here. We can hold down the old key and we can click and drag to make another little handle. I can then click and drag over there. Once again over here, hold down the alter the option key, drag it out, click and drag over here. It actually comes with practice as to where you're going to put your point and where you're going to drag your handles out to. Once again, hold down the alter the option key, click and drag. I'm dragging up here because I want the curve to follow that around today. Over there, I will just do that as a double one. Same again back to there. Click and Drag, but hold down the alter the option key and drag that out. I won't finish it. You know how the process works. Try it out yourself and see if you can do the fish. If you find that really annoying or you don't like it, absolutely fine. You can still use the other method for well, almost all drawing. 42. Faster Cusp Drawing: Now, if you're getting on with using the pentil and the cusps, why not try this? If I were to click over there and then over here, click and drag, now, I want to actually break that point. So what you can do is you don't have to go back to the starting point, as long as you're still holding down the mouse button, hold down the altar, the option key, and you can then automatically just break that handle. Watch this. I'll do it again. Click, drag, hold down the alto option key, and break that handle. So it's click drag, hold down Option key, and break. I can then just keep going like that. Let me do another little shape here. Now this time, instead of just clicking and then clicking and dragging, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to click and drag first so that puts in my first handle. And then over here, I'm going to click and drag. I'm dragging the opposite direction, you'll notice to get that really nice, perfect curve with two handles. I'm still holding down the mouse button. If I then hold down the alter the option key, I can then drag out to here because I want my next curve to go around there. I'll go down to here, click and drag over there, once again, hold down alter the option key and break that handle. Let's go over to here, click and drag. Hold down the alter the option key and break the handle. Now I want one more that's going to go into there. So if I go to my starting point and click and drag, you'll see it just links those two together with a linked handle. So if I go over to there and hold down the alter or the option key first, now when I click and drag, it'll automatically make a curve with a broken handle. It does take a bit of getting used to, but once you're used to it, it's area fast way of working. Of course, you could do exactly the same thing by going click, click and drag, click, click and drag, click, et cetera, all the way around like that. But the other way means there's actually four less points than there are on this one. Try it out. If you've never done that before, it might take a little while to get used to, but once you're used to it, it's very, very fast. 43. Pencil Sculpt Mode: Et's have a look at some of the pencil tool options. So the pencil tool, when you draw with it like that, might or might not finish off that line. I'll come to that in a moment. But basically, it's just a free hand way of drawing. It's a lot easier, by the way, if you have something like a Wacham tablet or one of those tablets any brand will do. But let's have a look at some of the options. Now, first of all, over here, we have got the smoothing, so I can smooth it out quite a lot. And you can see, once I've created the shape, as it's selected, I can then go in and smooth it out like so. We've also got the stabilizer. Now, we've looked at the stabilizer already, and it's the same sort of thing, rope mode and window mode in there to follow the line as you're going. But there's a little button over here that I want to mention, and this is called Sculpt Mode. Now, when you try this out, over then you do that and you go, Okay, let's switch it on and see what happens. And once again, nothing happens or nothing appears to happen. So in order to use Sculpt mode, what we have to do is we have to go along to the settings. I'll just go back to my pencil over there to the little settings here, and we have to switch auto clothes off. So auto close is on at the moment. But now when I draw something like that, and I stop there, it will automatically not close that shape. So let's switch this off and have a look. I'll just zoom in a bit to make my screen a bit easier for you to see. I'm going to draw a shape, so this is switched off at the moment, and I'm going to draw a shape like that. I'm going to stop there. I've lifted up my mouse finger, and I'm going to then draw another shape over there and another one. Over there. So even though I'm starting on that point over there, these are all absolutely separate shapes. I can click on them separately like that. So that is with Sculpt mode switched off. Let's switch it on, and I'll do exactly the same thing. So I'll draw that bit there. I've let go of the mouse. I'm going to go back to that point, click and drag again. Let's go back to this point here. Click and Drag, or I think I missed that one. I didn't get it quite in the right place. Click and Drag over there. So the idea with Sculpt mode is as you're drawing, it keeps it has one shape, although you can see that I did miss that over there. So let me just do this again for you. So once again, sculpt mode on. I'll draw that one there. I'll draw that one there. I'll draw this one here. Okay, it's a bit wonky, I know. I want you to see that that is now all one shape over there. That's what Sculpt mode is. Have a bit of a go with it. The rest of the settings are pretty much the same as what you're used to. 44. Pencil vs Brush Tool: Okay what is the difference between the pencil tool and the path brush tool? Well, the pencil tool, when you look at the options here, is generally about creating clean strokes but doing them freehand. Whereas the brush tool or the vector brush tool is all about using the brushes that we looked at before once again with the settings along the top. So remember, if you are creating a brush, don't forget to go to your settings over here and change the controller from none to pressure so that you can actually change the width of the brush as you go along. Now, here's something interesting. I'm actually on a MacBook. I'm on one of the latest MacBooks. And if you are on the same and you don't have a tablet, you can actually use the track pad to change the pressure. So if I push down further on the track pad, I can adjust the width of that brush. Like so. It doesn't work on all machines. I'm not sure about PCs. You'd have to just experiment and try it out to change the width with pressure on the track pad, but give it a go. If it works great, if it doesn't haven't lost anything. 45. Knife Tool: Let's have a look at this little knife tool in here. I'm going to make a circle over there, and then I can use the knife to cut it up, and I can do it in a free hand way. So all you do is you click and drag a free hand line through your shape, and it will have cut it up into two parts. So we've got this part there and that part there. I'm going to undo this. Now, if you want to use the knife and you want a straight line, what you can do is you can hold down the control key while you're doing this, and that will give you a perfectly straight line to cut things up. So once again, if I hold down the control key, I just get a straight line over there. Now, if I click and drag over here and then hold down the control key, from that point on, it'll be a straight line. If I let go of the control key, I can do things like that. Lastly, and I'll just have a clean circle for this. Using the knife, if you hold down shift, you can cut things up, but it constrains your line to 45 degrees. So horizontal, vertical or 45 degrees like that. Try it out. It's really, really useful. 46. Stroke Width Tool: I now, I've made a little shape like this. I just use the pen tool to create it very, very simple curve. What I want to do is I want to affect the width of the line over here. Now, of course, if we go to the stroke, we've got the Stroke Options, we've got the brush options, as we've seen. But if I go along here, underneath the pencil tool, there is a Stroke Width Tool. Now, we've got some options for that. I'm just going to switch them all off for the moment, so nothing is on. And what I can do is I can go to the line and I can click and just drag out to adjust the width of my line. Let me do that again over here, click and drag out over there. Now, you'll see that we can actually go to these points that I've already put in over here for the width, and I can just drag them and I can move them along the curve if I wanted until I get the perfect curve for what I need. So what are these little options over here? Well, have a look at this. If I take this one and I'm going to drag it along over there, I can drag it over that one and continue on down that side, so I can just keep going like that. If I switch this one on, over here, it's got a padlock over there, and if you hover over it, it says Lock point ordering. It doesn't always make sense. Now when I drag this, I can only drag it to the next point. I can't go any further than that. So it just locks it to the position that it's in between the other ones you've created. Let's have a look at this one over here. Now, to do that, I'm actually going to undo everything that I've done here, so go back to my line. And you can see I've got a fairly thick line in there. I will just increase it a little bit. If I click on this one, what it does is it locks this tool down so it'll never be wider than the stroke. So it means that you can go in and you can adjust the width, but you can't adjust it more than the original stroke weight. We've got two more options up here, Snap to curve modes. Now, I'm going to pull this out. I've just switched that off so I can pull it right out like that. And if I switch this one on over here, Snap to curves, you can see, as I'm dragging this along, it'll just snap onto those points. I go over there and snap to get that to snap to those curves. It kind of does what it says, really. And this last one over here, and it says, snap to the width on the same curve. So when I'm going along here, if I'm dragging this in and out, you can see how it's sort of a snapping to the widths that I've got there already. If you don't have that switched on, when you drag it in and out, it'll be kind of smooth like that. So this one snaps to that width in there. I'll just keep going down. You can see I've snapped that, so it's now the same width as that one. Anyway, have a lot of fun with that. It really is useful. I know those little settings seem a bit strange, and honestly, I don't use them that often, but I do use the width quite a lot, just in its basic form. 47. Layers & Masking - Intro: Masks and clipping are so important in affinity, and I use them all the time in my own work, whether it's to take a texture and clip it to a shape or if I want to put one shape inside another shape or multiple shapes inside another shape, and they're so easy to do once you know how to use them. 48. Container Layers vs Groups: Et's go and find the layers panel. I'm going to go to Window down to General, and I'm going to find layers in there. For those of you who come from the Adobe world, you're going to find that layers are a little bit different in affinity. But let me show you how they work. You see, the layers go through vector, pixel, and layout. And if you create something in vector, it will be available in pixel and layout. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a little shape over here, draw my shape. Let's give it a slightly brighter color. Let's have another little shape here. I'm just using the shapes from down the bottom there, and let's have one more. I'll make that one Brown. And those have come in over here as objects or layers. Now, you can call them layers. You can call them objects. You can call them anything you like, really. They sit in the layers panel. But sometimes you might see the word layer in here. And if I go down to the bottom, there is an option here to make a container layer. I'll click on that. So now this says layer. This is where it can get a little bit confusing if you're not sure about these because this layer here, it's like a folder which contains our objects inside there. So I'm going to take the star and I'm going to drop it into that folder. I'll take that star and drop that one in. I'll take this star and drop that one in. So you can see if I click on that little arrow there that I've got those three stars. They're all contained inside my layer container. I like to name these, so I'm going to double click where it's layer one and call them stars. Now, that's absolutely fine. I can move them around. I can go in here. I click on them individually. You can see if I close those down, click off of it again. Once again, I can just choose them like so. Now, why am I making such a big thing about being able to choose these objects? Well, because it's different to a group, let me make a new document. I'll just get another one up. Doesn't matter about the size. And this time, I'm going to do different shapes. I'll do triangles this time. So we'll have a little triangle there, give that a color, another one here, give that a color, another one here, and give that a color. So one of the things that I can do is I can select those and I can group them together. Now, if I go down over here, you'll see this little button for grouping. And if I click on that, it does what looks like the same sort of thing. It makes a group. So let's go back to this one here. This is a layer container. And remember, I can just click on these items and choose them, do any editing that I want in there, I can close and open that container, and I can click on the objects within it as well. If I'm anywhere in here and I decide to make another shape, I'll just go over here and do an ellipse. You see it automatically puts it into that container. And whether I've got that selector or not, it will go into that container or that layer. A group, on the other hand, if I were to click on one of them, it selects all of them in that group. I can go into the group and I could choose them individually in there, but if I click on them, it selects them all. If I go to do another shape over here, let's get a different color for this one. Click and Drag in the group, it doesn't actually put it inside the group. The group is still separate from that new shape. Now, that is unless I've actually clicked in the group and then done my new shape there, in which case, it will come into the group over there, but by default, it doesn't you've clicked out of it, it will be separate from that group. So this is a little bit confusing, I know, but just think about it like the layers themselves. There's a container. It's like a folder that you can put your things into. Grouping groups things together so they behave as one shape to some degree. Have a little bit of look at that, and I'll take you through one of my own drawings and show you how I use groups and layers. 49. My Artwork in Layers & Groups: Let me show you how this works on one of my own pieces of artwork. So what happens is, I normally actually draw on an iPad or proper paper. Believe it or not, I love mechanical pencils and paper. But I'll start off, and I've put this onto my reference layer over here with a very rough drawing of what I want. So I was after a hair, a very fast hair or a dancing hair. So I tried those two sort of very rough designs. Once again, while I'm still in the paper or using Procreate on the iPad, I'll then go in and refine that until I get to something like that, and I tend to use layers in procreate and just refine and refine and refine. This is not a procreate course, so I'm not going to go down that route. But once I've got it to this sort of stage here, I then bring it into Affinity because I want to vectorize it. So what I've got is I've got a layer over here, a layer object. So it's this little one over here. Whoops. I think I've just closed it. No, there it is still, the container layer. And that's got my backgrounds and any reference that I want to work from in there as well. And the great thing about that is that even if I've got ten different bits of reference, because it's in a layer folder, I can just switch it on and switch it off at any time. And then let me go to the main piece of artwork over here. So I've got the hair, and there it is there. I'll just switch off the underneath artwork. And I want to take you into that particular layer object and show you what's in there. So if I go in here, you'll see, for example, the pores, these little or paw pads, the little pinky orange things on his feet. Those are inside a folder or a container layer, which is inside my main container layer, so you can put in a container layer into another container layer. Let's just go back to this one for a moment. So I've got a container layer with circles over there. I've got a container layer with stars over there. By the way, you can see, even though these are not groups, if I click on the container itself, I can almost treat them like a group and move them around. Groups and containers are so close, but I could take my circles, which is a container and drop it inside my stars. So now, I've got a container layer inside my stars layer, and you can just have one inside the other inside the other if it works for you. Let's look at a few more bits in here. As you can see, I've got quite a lot of groups going on in there. There's groups, groups, groups. Let's just open up one of them. So this is to do with the rear leg. And then you can see all the little pieces from that rear leg in there. And this just helps me to keep track of what's going on. So if I'm going to move something around and it's in a group like that, I can just move it about very quickly with all the components as well. Moving down, once again, all these are groups. I've got a bit of a mask going on there. I'll explain about those later. So I would have my main object in a container layer there. I would then also have my text as another container, and once again, you can see I've got the text groups in there. And finally, any other artwork in there would go into a separate layer as well. And that keeps it nice and easy and I can see straightaway when I need to change something, I can go in, jump into it very quickly and make any changes that I need. Anyway, do have a look at your own work, and as you're going along, try to put it into folders or container layers and just name them as you go. Honestly, I could have broken this one up further. I could have done ears, for example. So if I do go in there, you'll see I have got my ears somewhere there they are. They're as a group, but they could have been another container as well. Anyway, tried out. 50. Masks & Clipping: Now for the clips and masks, I'm going to start off with a little shape over here. I'm going to give my shape a color. In fact, I'm kind of tired of those colors, so I'm just going to change my swatches to maybe one of the system swatches or, I think I'll just go to this one colors over here. So there's plenty of colours for me to choose from. And let's go with something else like that. Now I'm going to take another shape and put this on top of that one. So let's have a shape like that, and we'll give it a completely different color, so it's really obvious what I'm doing. So with two shapes like that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the top one and start to drag it. Now, when I drag, you'll notice that things highlight. If I drag down a little bit, you have a little blue bar there. I could drag onto this one. I can drag to the left of that one, and finally I can drag underneath it. So we've got different areas that we can drag the layers or the objects onto. Now, let's start with the one at the top. If I drag onto there, well, nothing will happen if I let go, because it's already on top, so it's just tell me I can drop it on top of that green shape, but it's there, so it doesn't matter. If I drag underneath, then it will just change the stacking order. So I've got that one underneath, and I'll move that one underneath there. Now for the good bit, if I take this and drag it on this area here, you can see the whole of that object highlights in there and I let go. What I've done is I've clipped the top object to the bottom object. So it's looked at the bottom object and gone, Oh, you're a square or rectangle, and it's just clipped itself to that. So anything which is outside that rectangle isn't being shown up. This is so useful. I really love this technique. If I click in there, you'll see I've still got my shape inside let me pull that out over here. So to make a clipping mask, you just drag and drop it onto the main area over there. Now, if we drag it and we go over to the icon, you can see over there the little icon and drop it on there. Now what's happened is it's created a mask. So the green from the box is showing through, but it's looking at the circle and where it sort of overlaps on the green as well. So it does take a little while to get your head around this. So just remember, this one is a mask, and you can see there is my clipping mask over there, whereas doing it the other way, dragging on there and dropping it. I've done a clipping which has just clipped one to the other. I'm going to suggest that you actually, once I've finished this, try this out and just get used to that. Drag onto one. If it doesn't do what you want, drag it to the other area as well. 51. Multi Objects in a Clip: Now, let me show you this in relation to some of my artwork, and I'll go back to my hot foot design over here. So I've got a background in there, and the background, believe it or not, I'll just hide this over there for now. The background is actually white. It is filled with white. If I change the color you can see I can do something like that. Now, what about if I wanted to put some stripes on here, like some racing stripes because he's a hair and he's going fast? Well, I could take a little shape over here, and I'll give it a different color. I'll move that down, maybe angle it a little bit like that. And you see if I drag this now onto that shape, onto the curve, it will clip it to that shape in there to the circle. If I dragged it, just undo that again. If I dragged it onto this one, then we'd just be left with the overlap area over there. That's one more thing that I didn't mention when I was showing you this in the practical section. And that is, what about if I wanted to have a few shapes in here? So, kind of like multiple racing stripes, not just the one, whoops, over there. Well, I'm just going to ungroup these a little bit over here. I'm just going back to There we are. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a shape like that. I'm going to give it a color, and let's go and choose a different color from this set over here, and I will make that a red over there. And I think I want another one. So I want a few racing stripes here, so I'm going to take that one. Over there, so we get a sort of a second stripe going on in there and it's a third little stripe over there as well. So I've got those three. Now, if I were to take this one here and drop it onto there, you can see how I can cut that from that one. If I take this one and drop it onto the curve, I can get a second one in there, and I can even get the third one by dropping onto the same curve once again. I'm going to undo those, and I'll do it again. But this time, I'm going to take them, just move them across, maybe angle them around a little bit, like so. And I'm going to go back to this white background because I think it looks better with the white there? Right. So all I need to do now is to go in here, take the rectangle, drop it onto that circle, this rectangle, drop it onto the circle, that one there, drop it on there as well. And there I've got my three stripes going on through the circle. Do have a bit of a go with that, and I'm just going to suggest that you try it with some simple shapes like this. So dragon dropping them on to get the feel for how it all works before you try it on any of your own artwork. We'll be using this in projects as we go forward in the course. 52. Clip Multiple Shapes & Photos: Now, although I've used vectors in there, you can use photos as well. So I could go along, and I'm going to do this in pixel mode, go along to my stock, and I'm going to go and find something which would be appropriate for the background. I just typed in field in there. I'm looking for something interesting like that. I'll just drag this picture in over there, and I'm going to now go back to vector mode into my layers, and I'm going to scale this up a little bit like that. Now, all I've got to do is take that picture and drag and drop it into the curves to get it to clip to that shape. Now, of course, unfortunately, it means that my racing stripes are underneath it, but within that area, I can move them above the photo. Like so. And don't forget with vectors, you can go to your vectors. You can go to your styles. You could choose one of these existing styles that you've got. You can make up your own styles. I'm just going to undo those. Or you can change the colors. You can change the shapes and just adjust it as you need. There's so many things that you can do in there. I'm actually going to take those stripes and I'm going to make them a very light gray. Like that. Maybe I could change the opacity so we can see some of the grass coming through behind. I don't actually like the grass in there, so I'm going to hide it and leave my image like that. Anyway, do try that out and see how you get on just using one circle with a square, but then putting a picture inside it, as well. 53. Adjustment Layers in a Layer: Before I start with this adjustment layer, let me just explain what I've got. I've got two containers with my layers in them. So there's this one here called layer one, and it's got these objects or layers inside it. And I've got this one here called layer two, and it's got these little rectangles over here inside it. Now, what'll happen if I go and I add an adjustment layer in here? So I'm going to go down here. I'm just going to add a black and white adjustment layer because well, it makes more sense because it's easy to see, and I'm going to put it above this layer. So now what happens is that the black and white is affecting this layer container over here, container layer, and it's also affecting that one there. You can see it's all gone black and white. If I drag it below, so between these two over here, not onto it, but between them, now it's only going to affect the one underneath itself, which is this layer over here. Let me put that back again up to the top. If I want this black and white to just affect this layer, then I drag it on top of it, and you can see that it's put it inside in there. And once again, it's only affecting the things in this container. If I move this below that one, then it's only affecting those two only inside this container. Let's take that back to the top again. So. Now, if I only want to affect one shape, let's say, for example, I only want to affect this pink rounded rectangle with my black and white. Well, what I can do is I can drag it in there. Over there. And as you can see, it's affecting all of those. But if I drag it on above that one, then I'm only affecting that. That's fine. That's easy to do. But what about if I only wanted to affect the yellow one? Well, if I drag it onto that shape, now it's put it inside that shape there. So now it's only affecting the yellow one in the background over there. It does seem a little bit strange the way that it works, but once you've used a little while, you get used to it and it's like, actually, that makes sense, and it's quite cool. So with adjustment layers, either drag it onto the object that you want to affect or onto the container layer that you want to affect. Otherwise, it will affect everything that's underneath itself. Try that out. Just make some simple shapes over there and have a go. 54. Blends - Intro: In this little section, we're going to look at blends. Although blends are primarily for pixel based images, they do work very well for vectors as well, and it's lovely to be able to just mix one shape or one layer with the objects underneath and see really, really interesting results. 55. Look at the Blends: In order for me to show you the blend modes, I want to bring in an image, and I want to use a black and white image. Now, because I'm in the vector area, I can't actually see the stock pictures. So I'm just going to whip across very quickly to layout mode, find stock. And honestly, you could have done it by going to the window menu and opening the stock panel, but I find this much quicker, and I'm just going to go and put in black and white. So what I'm looking for is just any image which shows or which will be in black and white. Oh, there's absolutely tons of them. So that elephant one looks lovely. I'm going to just zoom out a bit and, um, bring it in. And let's go back to Vector mode over here. I want to change my page to match the format of the picture, so I'm going to go along to document. Document set up over here, and I can then change from landscape to portrait in here very quickly. You'll see it doesn't change the picture on there. It just changes the page. And what I want to do now is to put some colors over there. So I'm going to take a rectangle, and I'm just going to pop a quick color on top of this. Now, that doesn't look like color, does it, so let's find a color to go on there. Maybe something a little bit more safari like there we go. Let's go with that color. Now, I'm going to go along to my layers, which I can't see, so I'm going to go to general once again, find my layers. And let's have a little bit of a look at this. So the color is on the top, and I'm going to go from normal and have a look at some of these settings. Now, the first one that I want to do is to look at this section over here. Now, I'm not going to go through every single one of them, so don't worry. I just want to show you what I feel are the most important ones in each section. So over here, we've got two, we've got darken and we've got multiply. Now, what these ones do, in fact, what all of these ones do is they darken your picture down. And the top object, in this case, with multiply becomes the darkest part of the image. So you can see very quickly, I could go in here and maybe let's put that over the entire picture. You can see there is nothing which is lighter than the green of my overlapping shape. Now, of course, if I change that shape to a different color, once again, it shows it as being the darkest color. When you go to darken rather than multiply, it's very similar, but it works on a sort of a 50% basis. So up to 50% or lower than 50%, it will then change to darken down. I prefer multiply. I think you get a lot more detail out of that, but try it out on different images because different images give you different results. Now, these are all the darkening ones. The next one are all the lightning ones, and screen is the one that I really like because this does exactly the opposite. It says that the green or the layer on the top, in this case, my green color is going to be the darkest part of this picture and everything else from there goes through until we get to pure white. Once again, if I change the color to something else, it doesn't matter how light or dark I go. You can see this purple is the darkest color on the image. Now, of the settings in the blend modes, multiply and screen are probably the two that you're going to be using quite a lot of when you do use this. After that, we've got things like overlay, hard light, soft light. These are very much contrast based, and you can see how contrasty the image becomes when I put overlay on it. Soft light, much less contrast, hard light, or, that's a bit extreme. That kind of looks quite cool in some respects. You can imagine that as a background on a social post. Then we go down to something called difference. Now, when you first put in difference, you think, What on Earth is going on? Well, let me move this across so that you can see it. I'm just going to take it over to there. So difference looks at the colors underneath. And based on whether they are dark whoops, let's have difference on again. Based on whether they are dark or light, the overlapping layer, in my case, the purple one will either go positive or negative. The opposite of purple is green. So on the lighter areas, it's gone green, but on the darker areas, it stays purple. So you can get some really interesting looks like that. If I do this and just change the color and you can see we've got this really wild look going on. Moving down to the last ones that I really want to talk about because there's a lot of weird and wonderful ones down here, but I want to talk about color. Color is one I really like because it enables me to just colorize, if there's such a word, colorize up the document. If I put that on top, I could then go in here and say, Well, I'd like to colorize this sort of a subtle brown sepia tone color. So I've just chosen a little brown over there. You can see there's my brown. And I've got this lovely sepia from black and white through to sepia. Or I could go for something like a cyanotype, which is this blue color over there. And once again, I can either go really wild or I can get something a lot more subtle with just a touch of blue in it to cool down that black and white picture. But of course, any color that you like we do in here. There we go. We've got that orange, which really warms up that image really beautifully. So we can, of course, put in multiple shapes, and we can either use them with different colors or we can use them for other effects. So over here, I could take that shape there. Let's have another one and another one, and I'm going to move this one down a bit, that one down a bit over there. I'm just going to change the colors on here, to be honest. It doesn't matter which blend mode I use, it's entirely up to you as to what you want from it. So I'm going to go with maybe sort of more of an orange over there and this one. Let's do a bit of blue there. You can see when I use color in here, anything that's on white will be the main or that's not on the picture will be the main color in there. Do try it out. Have a little bit of a play with those and just experiment with the different blend modes. So just very quickly, before you go and try it out, these ones here are about darkening. These ones here are about lightning. This is contrast. These are weird. But you've get some opposites in there. You've then got this set here, which has to do with color. And you can see it says color so it's colorizing. There's hues, there's saturations that you can work from. And the last ones over here, you get almost sort of posterize type of effects. Let me just click on this one, and go down to the last set, and you can see how we've got that pure pure black and white or pure light and dark colors in those. Just worth trying them out and seeing what you get from those. I'm going to stop there so you can start playing. I'll stop talking. Have a go. 56. Gradient Blends: I've got a few pictures from Stock here, and I've got some lighter ones, some darker ones, and some contrasty ones. So this one that's at the top is quite a darkish picture. There's a lot of dark hair in here. You can see the skin tones over here tend to be a bit darker. I've also got one that's very light. And so there's a lot of light in here. Her hair is very, very pale. Her skin tone is very pale as well. And lastly, I've done one, which is very contrasty. So there's some really light areas here, but there's also really dark areas in the image. And let's have a look at how the overlays work with these. But we're not going to use a solid color. We're going to use a gradient. So let me switch these on over here. I'm going to go and get a shape and put the shape over the top. In there. And I'm going to go and fill that shape with using the fill tool here. So I'm going to click on the fill Tool, and with the fill, I'm going to use a linear gradient. Now, why can't I see it? Well, it's because it happens to be underneath that layer. Let me pull that above it over there. Now, I've got some really cool colors in here that I put in earlier. But remember, if you want to put in your own colors in here, by all means do so. Just click and drag with the gradient tool or the fill tool, shall I say? Choose which side you want to effect. Change the color in there. I'll go with a slightly darker color in there. I'm going to click on the yellow in the middle and we'll make it a little bit more orange and the purple pink on this side. Let's make it a little bit more purple like that. Don't forget if you want to put in more colors in there, just click on that line and you can then add another color if you wish. Well, I seem to be going down the rainbow route here, so let's add in another O I didn't like that. Control that, undo that. Right, I'm going to keep them like that. Now, I'm going to go from normal down. And you'll see when I'm putting these on color images, these multiplies and darkens don't work very well at all. It doesn't matter how dark or light the images. Unless the image was black and white, in which case, it shows up really well, these ones don't work too well. The lightened ones are not too bad. You can see how it's actually lighting it up into the colors of my rainbow over here. But what do work really well are these ones, the overlays, the soft light, and the hard light. They just give some really interesting effects. Now remember, I'm not showing you how exactly to do this. I'm just saying, here are some techniques, try them out and make your own really wild looking images. Moving down to the color mode, it looks okay, Ish, but I really like the effects that we're getting from here. It almost looks like light is streaming down through that image. I'm going to go with overlay and have those really bright colors in there. And have a look at this one here, which is very light in there. So if I go back again, over here, the soft light works. Hard light looks quite interesting on that image. Try it out, see what you can get. And let's have a look at a contrasty one now. Once again, this is very contrasty. The vivid light makes it even harsher. Hard light. Okay. Soft light's okay. You might find that you prefer one or the other. Just play around and experiment until you get what you want in there. Now, there is one more thing that I want to mention before you try this out, and I'm going to get rid of that over there. Don't forget to put a shape over the top, like so. If you don't you forget to do that, and you just go in here and you click on your layer and you then go and use the fill tool and just say, fill, and I'm going to fill that with an ellipse. Okay, so first of all, nothing appears to have happened because I'm hiding that layer. But if I show that layer, you can't see the solid color that we've got, and that says normal in there. So this is actually just filling the layer. It's not actually doing what we've done, which is filling a layer on top of the existing photo and then changing the blend on there. So just be careful with that. When you do this, I'm going to just suggest that you actually make a shape, first of all, fill that with your gradient, and then you can try it out with the different blends. There's no right or wrong here. Just have loads of fun with it. 57. Options on Blends: Et's look at other ways that we can blend layers together. I'm going to go to this rectangle that I've made over here, and I put a gradient on there, so I just filled it with black through to white so that you can see what happens. Now, if I go up here, instead of using these blends, I'm going to click on the little blend option CG over there. Now, this opens up quite what initially looks like a scary window, but bear with me because it's not as bad as it seems. We're just going to use this side over here to do these blends, and it says source layer ranges. Now, I'm going to take this white little dot over there and pull that down. And you can see what happens is that it kind of shows through or hides on that layer, anything which was black. If I do the other side, it hides anything that was white or lighter, so it just leaves the black in there. If I did the middle, it will hide the grays, so it will leave white on one side and black on the other and try and get rid of the grays. You can, by the way, just click on that and say, switch off linear, you get a more sort of rounded, smoother fall off of the light through to dark. Honestly, just play with this. Try some weird and wonderful things, and you'll see how you can actually mix those two together and you get some color one color coming through. And you can use that in conjunction with some of those color gradients as well. But as always, there's no right or wrong, you just play with them and see what you get. But let me show you how you can actually use this in a document. I'm going to go over to Layout over here, and I've done some searches for fireworks. And I'm just going to bring across a firework into this image over there, and I think let's make that a little bit larger. Over here. And in fact, I'm going to spin it around because I want it to be over that side over there. Now, let's go back again. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up to the top here, and using these two, I can hide the light or the dark areas. So this one, if I pull this down, see, absolutely nothing happens at all. So let me make sure I'm actually on the correct layer. I'm on the underneath layer. I'll make sure I'm on that layer first. Then I'm going to go in here and I'm going to pull down this. And what that does is it's hiding those darker areas and just leaving the lighter ones around. We get this sort of lovely fireworky type look. If you find that it's not getting you enough, you can just pull this along over to here, and you can see how I can remove some of those middle tones from the image as well. Of course, if I did it the other way, let's just reset that again. I could get rid of the darker areas. And make the lighter areas sort of semi transparent. You'll see if I move that across there. She's showing through on the lighter areas on that side. So it's quite fun, actually, if you've got an object like this that you just want to blend through. And you can use a combination of them, so I could go to this one here, and then once I was happy with that, I can then combine that with some of these options as well. Until I get what I want, there we go look at that screen. Now, that looks so much nicer with the firework in front of her face. Lastly, experiment, experiment experiment. Try out with just regular pictures. If I just brought in another portrait, you can use any images that you like in here. I'll just put another one on top of that. There. This is going to look really weird. Like, so, go back in there and go to this top one and see what happens when you get rid of the darker areas to mix the two of them together, or the lighter areas. That didn't mix quite so well, but certainly taking this one down has mixed in a really interesting way. Try it out. 58. Project: Project: Redraw a Sports Shoe - Intro: Okay. And it's project time. We're going to create this advert. It's going to be a flat art version of this shoe, as you can see on the side. And I want to show you how to do it. Everything step by step. But we're also going to be adding some texture to it, as well, and we're going to use some techniques for that. Let's get started. 59. Place the Image to be Used: Et's get started by making a new document. Now, you can decide whatever size you want for your document, but I'm going to go for a four because this is going to be something that could be used maybe in a poster or an advert. And I'm going to go with a portrait size over there. Now, as long as we can make sure that this is in RGB, that's all that we really want. We can change it to CMYK later if we need. And if you're not sure, just change the color format over there. The color profile over here, we're going to change, and we're going to keep on SRGB. If you haven't got it to SRGB, just make sure it's on SRGB in there. There are some color profiles which work in RGB, but are very, very bright. And so if you show the image on a browser, for example, that doesn't support that profile, you'll find that the colors look different. But SRGB should work on most browsers. So make sure that you stay on SRGB in there. Let's click on Create Document. And the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to File, and I'm going to place the picture in that I want to use. So file, place, and we're going to find this picture of a trainer over here. Now, if you don't like these particular ones that I'm using, feel free to find your own. Just maybe something from a side profile like this to make your life a bit easier. Now, I'm going to click on Open over there, and Click and Drag to bring that in. Now, honestly, the size doesn't matter because remember, we can always scale this up later on. But I'm going to place it over there somewhere. I'm going to go across to my layers. If you can't see your layers, find it in the window menu, as you know already. And what I'm going to do is to change the opacity of it slightly. So just make it a bit lighter so that we can actually see what we're doing on top of that, and I'm going to lock it, as well. You can either click on little padlock over there or you can click next to the eye to just lock it down. Now that's locked. You can't do anything to it by mistake. It doesn't matter if it's not in the right place. We can move our artwork around later on. Have a go, get up to that stage ready easy to start off with, and then we'll start drawing in the various parts of the shoe. 60. Draw in the Back Insole & Fabric Areas: Et's start drawing this, and we're going to draw from the back forward. So we're going to look at what the backmost object or part of this particular shoe is. And I think it's this bit, the inner bit of the um I don't know where your foot goes. I'm sure there's a proper proper name for it. So we're going to draw that bit in first. Now, you can use your pencil if you want. And actually just go round there. If you've got a drawing tablet, this would be a lot easier, and then you could use your node tool over there to just move those into the right position like that. You can see it takes a bit of work over there, but you can do it. So if you don't like the Pentl, feel free to use this method. Now you'll notice when I did that, and I'm going to just give it some color so you can see, what it is, it doesn't matter about the color at all. I went along this line here, and then I didn't bother. Let's hide that again about this section here. I just went all the way down because this section is going to be covered by another part of the shoe. So if you want to do it with a pencil, that's absolutely fine. But I'm going to be using the pen. So I'm going to go to the pen, and I'm going to start over here. Once again, I'm starting over here because this bits going to be covered. And I'm going to click. And then I'm just going to go here and I'm going to click and drag a little bit, click and drag a little bit over there, click little bit of drag around there. And then, as I said, this bit doesn't matter, so we can just go click, click, click click over there. If everything's not correct, use your No tool, click on the point and move it around. Remember, this is a stylized representation of this particular sports shoe, so you don't have to get it absolutely perfect. I will try and get it perfect for this particular example over here, but you don't need to get yours absolutely absolutely right. If you need to zoom in, I'm using my Command plus or my Control plus to zoom in, and it's sometimes easier to make things absolutely spot on if you are that kind of perfectionist, or you just want to get it accurate. So, there's my first shape over there. Now, I'm going to actually leave these shapes without a fill on them so that I can see really what it is that I'm actually doing when I'm drawing them in my next shape over there. So what would my next shape over here be? Well, I'm thinking it's the whole shape of the shoe. So from here all the way around going up there down round to there. So let me do that one now. Once again, I'm going to use the pen, and I'm going to click over here and drag just a little bit, and I am going to stylize this up a little bit so it's not quite so exact over there. And I'm just clicking and dragging a little bit around there. Once again, I can tweak that if I don't like it. Let's go round here over there, up and around that bit at the top. It's not quite in the right place, but I'll fix that later on down to here with a click and drag. Now, do I need to go back along there? No, I don't, because it's going to be covered up with this, so I'm just going to click very quickly through here for speed. And then click and drag at the end to round that off a little bit. Then use your node tool. If you want to go and tweak it, I will just zoom into this back bit here because I think it actually needs to come in a little bit like that. That bit needs to come in there and that bit comes in over there. You can grab the handles, you can move the handles hoops. You can move the handles around, you can move the points around whatever works for you. So try that out and do those two sections over there with either the pencil or the pentil. Make sure that you've got no fill on those, so you've only got a stroke, and you start from the back object and work to the front, and then we'll do some more in a moment. 61. Draw the Heel & Base: O now we need to draw in two more bits. I'm going to use my pen tool and do this little section over here. So once again, I'll just click click and drag. I'm not being that accurate. I'm just hoping for the best over here because this bit honesty, you won't see that well, and we just want something like this. So clicking and dragging all the way around until I get back to there and click and drag. I can still tweak it using the node tool you can get so fed up with me saying that very, very shortly, I promise. Okay, so I think I'm happy ish with that. Let's go and do another section. This heel area over here, it's going to be on top of the fabric, but it's actually going to be underneath the rubber base or silicon base, whatever it's made of. So I'm going to go back to my pentle. I'm going to draw that in. I'm going to start over here, click click and drag, click and drag, click and drag up to there. Now I have gone further out to be a bit more obvious about this. I'm going to go to last point over there, and I'm going to just click that gets rid of the second handle. So when I go down here and click and drag, I'll get a nice cusp point in there. Let's go all the way around over there. And I'm going to go back to these now and just move them into the right position over there, and that'll go into the right position over there. Now, if you find that you're having problems moving things and I'm doing this and you can see the little green flash lines are popping up. What you can do is you can go up to your snapping options, and you can just switch off snapping over here. So if I just switch that off, now I move that around, you'll see that all my snapping is now switched off. You don't have to go in and decide which ones you want to switch off. Switch them all off for the moment. And I'm going to keep that just to the right of the underneath one. I think we'll just move that across a little bit like that. Those handles are a bit big, so we'll tweak them around maybe pull that over a little bit like that. Right, let's do one more while we're here. So the next big thing that we've got is the base of the shoe, the white or off white area over here. So I'm going to use the Pen tool. Same again. Click and Drag, and I'm going to do this as fast as I can because you've seen this all before. The orange bit. Well, that's going to be on top of that, so I'm not bothering about that. I'll just go down here a little bit of a click in there. And once again, there's going to be a purple bit over there. I don't have to be too accurate about the bottom. And we're going to have this a nice sort of flat base because it is stylized. And then once again, don't have to worry too much about where the purple goes. I'll just go all the way around, click up to there, and back to my start. And I'll have to move that once again into the right position down there and change the handles until I'm happy with that. Right, have a go with that, get that far, and then we'll do the orange bits, the purple bits, and some laces. And well, it's pretty much the whole drawing done after that. 62. Add in the Plastic Details: I hope yours is going well, and don't worry if it's never perfect. This is a very stylized shoe, so nobody's going to notice any small mistakes. What I'm going to do is do the orange bit over here. Now, when I move over the orange bit, you can see it thinks that I want to actually go onto that line. So I'm actually going to start my first point out there. You don't have to start exactly where you want things. And I'm going to just keep going around here. Drawing in this ittle shape, you can, of course, lock your other points if you feel that they are being a problem. And once again, I'll just pull that in. I'm going to move this around when I'm good and ready. Ah, now, look at that. I've got that weird little I wouldn't say corner, that weird shape. So I'm going to just undo that over there, go back to my last point, click my last point, to get rid of that and make it into a cusp. I'm going to click and drag now to get a curve, and we'll just follow this along up to there. Now, it's not in the right place, so I'm going to use my node tool and just move this into the correct place over there. Let's zoom right into this bit over there, and that's looking okay. That's looking okay. This one maybe the handle needs to kind of come out a little bit. And this one here, oh, no, is that the right one? Yes, it is. That just needs to be pulled in a little bit like that. If you want to go into your line, you can just click on your line to add more points in. If you need more control over the line. So don't forget like here, I want more control there. So using the node tool, I just click on the line. That puts in a point with two handles, and I can pull that out a little bit like so. I just moved that point along a little bit in there. Let's have a look at the purple ones. Once again, zoom right in for this, and we'll use the pentil once again. So I'm going to kind of start just over there, do a bit of a click and drag. Y'all want a nice long smooth curve going there, so I'm going to click and drag out like so. And this is going to come all the way down to here, so I'm going to click and drag over there. Click on that point in there and then go back on myself. If they remember that point gets rid of the second handle, so I can then click and drag over here, and then back to my start, click and drag up there. Then clean it all up using your node to grab those handles and just pull it around until you get the shape that you're after. So I'm going to move that one kind of onto there. So, if you're not sure about these shapes, as soon as you start to put some color in them, you're going to find that you'll see them a lot clearer, and then you can understand exactly what they are doing. And I'll show you that when I put the color in, which is going to be next. Oh, that one's missed a bit, hasn't it? Let's click over there. I might move that down just a little bit, and I'll even click on there. Pull that down. Now, onto this shape here, this goes all the way up right to the toe. So let's start up on the toe. And I'm going to just start right up here. I think I'll start there. Click click and drag with just a little curve because there's a bit of a curve there. Down to here, I have to move that one because it's a bit far over at the moment. Let's keep going along here. Oh, that kind of goes up a little bit. Like that. When you're doing this, you see so many more details of a shoe that you really never knew existed. I did a lot of training for Clarks, the shoe people, which if you're in the UK, you'll know Clarks, although they do have a branch in the states as well in Boston. And I was amazed to see how many details went into to making the shoe there. Anyway, let's move that across a little bit like so, and I think that's just about it. I think I've, I've got this okay. I might have to move that in a little bit over to there. Right. Anyway, get those last two in. We'll get all the color in before we start to do the laces, they'll be quick and stylized, as well. Try that out. 63. Make a Swatch Palette: Et's go and get some colors. But what we're gonna do is we're going to make up a swatch. So I've gone over to my swatches. Once again, if you can't find it in the window, go to General and your swatches at the bottom. I'm sure you know that by now. I'm going to pull this out to make it easier for you to see. And I'm going to go to the top right hand corner and click, and I'm going to add a palette. Now, we've got the application palette, which is for all documents, or we've got the document palette which is specifically for this document. And that's really what I want. I want a document palette. You can see over there, I've got an application palette so that cello comes up all the time. Let's add a document palette to here. And I'm going to call it, um Show. I'll click Okay. And now what I want to do is to get some colors for it. So I'm going to go and choose some colors in here. Now, I want something which is sort of purple, so I'm going to move over to the purples in there. I kind of quite like that purple. I might need a lighter version of that, but let's go with that for the moment, and then I can go and click to add that color in. You just about see it's very dark it is over there. And let's have a lighter version, so I'll pull this over like that, as well. Add that in and maybe an even lighter version still. You know, you can just choose any colors that you think would look interesting. I'm also going to go with an almost white, so very, very light gray. That'll be for the base over here. Add that bit in. Now, what about some oranges for the laces and this back bit? Well, once again, we'll just move that around till we get to the oranges. I kind of quite like that orange there. Sort of almost a pinky orange. Mm. Let's go with that one. So I'll start with a light one in there. Once again, add that in, and let's have slightly lighter orange over there. We're going to use two shades of orange for our laces over there, but we'll do a third one just in case. Like so. And I think that's it. Oh, we need something dark for the background. I'm going to go back to purples over there and I'm going to do a very, very dark purple, almost black for that background. Once again, we'll add that in. So we've now got our swatches in there. If you click over here, you'll see that you've now got a shoes swatch in there. So if I chose, I don't know, colors, for example, go back in there again. I will have my shoes panel, sorry, my shoes palette right up the top there. Have a bit of a go and get that f. 64. Fill with Color: Now for the fun part, this is the bit that I always enjoy. Let's just start, and I'll just use my black hair to start coloring these up over here. So I'm going to go with that very dark purple and make sure that you're on your fill over there, not on your stroke. Right. So we've got that bit there. We've got this bit here. I always start from the back and work forwards. Again, mm. That's interesting. Let's go with maybe a lighter color over there. This bit here, this is going to be a slightly darker purple. Although the original showed that as a very light purple, I might try it as a darker purple, I think, and see how that works. Right, so onto the base, let's get the base over there, and that was sort of an off white color. We've got this bit here, which is orange. And we've got the two bits at the bottom, that bit there, which is a purple. It's quite a deep purple and this one over here, which is also a deepish purple over there. I'm going to select all of those, and I'm going to go to my stroke, and I'm going to choose none for the stroke. So that just leaves us with that shape in there. It's looking pretty good, isn't it? When you're actually doing it with lines, you look and you think, Oh, I don't know about this, but when you start to fill it with colour, it looks fantastic. Right, so get your color in and then we're going to put in some laces on this. 65. Clean Up & Group: Et's find any little bits that don't look right. So for me, you can see the orange bit is over the purple there. So I'm going to zoom in in there, and I'm going to get my node tool. Just click on that little point over there and just move that one across a little bit into the right position over there. And I also thought this had a funny angle on it, so I'm going to click over there and maybe move that down a little bit. Like so. You can tweak for hours, to be honest, and it just yeah, can just keep going and going and going. So when you feel happy with it, there, what we're going to do is we're going to go along and we're going to select all of these shapes. And I'm going to go all the way to the top, hold down the Shift key, so I've selected the bottom one, and then all the way up to the top, so they're all selected. So I'm going to go over to my layers down over here and I'm going to make a group. So there's two little folders over here. I want the one on the right hand side, and that makes everything into a group. So now, it's easy for me to just switch it on and switch it off. And we're going to switch it off. So very, very simple. Not much to do there, clean up your lines and then make those into a group, switch them off, and then we're going to do some laces. 66. Draw Some Laces: Now, as we've hidden that group, I'm going to zoom in so I can see the laces. We're going to do this in a very simplified way. I'm just going to be using rectangles for this. So I want one, two, three, and four, the underneath ones. And then I'm going to do one, two, three, and four for the top ones. You'll be pleased to know that we're not actually going to do the lace in here, these shapes and keep them nice and simple. So I'm going to go and get my rectangle tool, and I'm just going to draw in a little rectangle. Let's go and make this orange, and I'm going to make this a darker orange. Now, I always do this. I get this the wrong way around and I do the stroke instead of the fill. So the shortcut here is to use X on the keyboard to just flick between those two. So either go to stroke or fill to get to the right one. But you can also use shift and X. Shift and X, we'll flick those around. It's kind of like clicking on that little button there. Then the shortcut to get rid of the stroke over here rather than going to that little button there is just forward slash on the keyboard. If you're an Adobe user, these will come naturally to you because they're the same as Adobe, as well. So I've got that shape. I'm going to just move it around, sort of put it in the right position over there, maybe shortened a bit. So we just want something really simple like this. Remember, it's all stylized. I'm going to hold down the old key to make a copy. Once again, I will just pop this into the right place. Actually, it should be a little bit thicker, maybe up to there. Hold down the old key, do another one. This is a bit more of an angle. Like that. Pull that up to there. And one last one over here, which is gonna go from there, sort of angle a little bit like that, and up to there. Now, so that I can speed this up in a little while, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to make a copy of this and move that down. So I'm holding down the Alt, the option key every time I'm copying. I'm going to go and I'm going to get my node tool. And on this one here, I'm going to click on that little point there and move it out. Now, I can't do that at the moment because this is a pre made shape. So what we have to do is we have to click the little button. Remember this button up here, this will convert it to curves. So now I can use my node tool to click on a point and pull that down to get that little shape over there. Let's do the same with this one over here. I'm going to go up, make sure I select it first. Let's just make sure it's in the right angle as well. Something like that over there. Now, this one, the top doesn't matter, by the way, because there's something else that kind of covers it, but this one is going over the top. So I will go along, click on that button there, which is the convert to curves button. I'm going to go along, use my node tool, click on this point and move that point up a bit. I think that one can come down a little bit over here. You just tweak them as you need, and this one can kind of come in to that sort of angle over there. And one last one over here, let's just have a look. This one actually doesn't matter because it's going to be covered by some of the other bits of whatever you call them, laces. I knew there was a word there somewhere. So once you've done that, and I've done that in a darker color, you can come back and do the same thing for the next one up. Now, this one here, I'm going to angle to the right angle. I'm going to make it the lighter orange. Now, look at that. I've done that again. So once again, X to flick them around or shift X, like so. And I want to get rid of that stroke. So now, this one's going to go there. It's going to go up to the top. But look at that. It's underneath that one there. So just move it above the others in your layers panel until it's at the top and do the same technique over here. Use the node tool, but make sure that you convert it to curves first, and over here, we can just get a little shape like that. The shape can come down. That one can go if you want to go further, you could actually go in there and put in some more points in there and you could maybe pull that out a little bit and pull that up a bit and round them off. If you wanted something a little bit more, I'm exciting like that. I'm going to keep mine really simple though without those extra points in there. Moving on, same thing again, up to here, angle it around. You see it's a really nice angle already. I can pull that up. And I'm going to give it something like that. If this is not right, later on, we can come and we can tweak those around. Let's make another copy. Et's do that. Pull that along, and we'll do the same thing just making sure that we tweak that into the right position. I think I need one more over here, one of the lighter ones. So I'm going to use one of them here, make a copy of that, and I think I will angle this around Over there, let's make that a bit longer and use the same node trick over there. Pull that down. That'll go. To there. Let's turn everything else on and have a look. And there we are. We've got our stylized laces coming through. We'll just hide the picture at the back over there. Now at this stage, you could still go in the think, Well, those don't look quite so good. So feel free to go in and click on them and just maybe pull them up. Round off the corners. If you want to round that off, just go to this little button at the top you and choose rounded to round that off like so. I'll do the same over here, so I'll click to put a point in and then I'll round it off like that. This one's already got a point on on mine for some reason, so I'm going to round that off over there, maybe make that a little bit thicker. And last one over here. That's got a point, so we'll pull that up. Remember, if it doesn't have a point, you just click on the line somewhere, round that one off like that. I will do this one as well because I think it finally needs to be something done with that. Right.'s pull it up a little bit. So. I think that kind of works. Right, let's zoom out a bit and have a look at that. You can spend hours just tweaking those settings, but do have a bit of a try with that. If you want to take it further. I'm not saying you have to cause I'm not going to do this, but if you want to, you could then start to put a little dark area under here. So we could have a little rounded rectangle like that, for example, and I could make that Uh, darker purple than that. I could rotate that into the right position over there. I'd have to make sure that it was underneath all the lasers. I'll just keep going down. It's under all the laceers like that. And then you could just hold down the old key and you could make a copy of that, once again, rotate the angle of that one, maybe do another one over here, rotate the angle of that. You'd see how we could get some quite nice detail going on in there. In fact, why not? I'll do this, but I won't ask you to watch me doing it. While you're trying that out, I will add a few more of these in as well. 67. Group, Twist & Add Shadow: Let's group these together. I'm going to take all of the lace bits and group them into one group. So I'll click on that little folder down there. And then I'm going to take the laces and I'm going to shift, click the shoe, and I'm going to group those together. So we've now got a group within a group. If I click on this group here, you can see the laces are one group, the shoe is another group. If I click on there, I've got all my individual parts inside there. Now, what I'd like to do is I'd like to angle this shoe around a bit to give it a little bit more action. So I'm going to select it in there, make sure I'm on my move tool and I'm going to rotate this around to sort of an interesting angle like that. Now, the next thing I want, and I'm going to just hide the trainer for the trainer's photo for the moment is a bit of a shadow underneath there. And we can do this really easily. We're just going to take a little ellipse, drawing the little elliptical shape under there. And let's move that over there a little bit like that. You can kind of squish it down a bit as much as you need. And then for the fill, I'm just going to choose a medium gray, and I'm going to move that underneath the group, not into the group, but underneath the group like that. I'm going to get rid of the stroke from that, as well. And that kind of gives me a little stylized shadow underneath it to show that, you know, the person's stepping down. Anyway, as always, tried out. 68. Add Texture: Now, one of the things I like to do on flat vector art like this is to give it a bit of texture. It just lifts things up a little bit. And I'm going to do that to the fabric itself over here. Now, we're actually going to do this in pixel mode. So I'm going to go across to pixel mode over here, and I'm going to paint a little bit using a texture. Now, I've gone over to my paint brush. That's just the standard paint brush. And in the brushes, now, you generally start on the basic brushes over there. If you can't find the brushes, once again, go to window, general, and brushes. We're going to look for some textures that we can use, and I'm going to go down and I'm going to find some spray and splatter. And you get all these different sort of brushes in there. You can try anything you like, really. I'm going to try this one here, the ink splatter. Now, I need to make this brush a whole lot bigger. So I'm going to just increase the size of the brush. So as you can see, I'm painting with a splatter. Let's make that bigger still. There we go. That's possibly what I wanted. But I would suggest you just go in here and experiment with the different types of brushes that you have. Mm. I don't like that one terribly much. What else have we got? This drop No, I think something like one of those splatters was probably one of the best ones. If you don't like these ones, try some of the other ones as well. The technique is going to be exactly the same. And we can go to textures over here, and we could find a texture, like, for example, this half tone. I'm going to increase the brush for this, as well, so you can sort of see, Whoa. That's a bit big, but I can pop a half tone over the top. Now, I'm going to do two of these so you can see both of them. Let me start off with the sprays and splatter, first of all. And I'm going to use this dropper. I'm going to make my brush a whole lot bigger. Something like that, and just click on some splatters like that. Now, if I want to put this into the shoe itself, what you do is you go in to your layers, and we need to move this. There it is the pixel layer inside it, and I'm just going to keep going until I get to the shoe itself. That is that part of the shoe in there. And then you drag it on top of that object, and it will just clip it to that shape like that. Let me undo this over there, and I'm actually going to delete that pixel layer and do it again. So we can go in here. We can choose the brush that we want, and we can start to paint. This time, I'm going to do it, and I'm going to use the textures. And I'm going down to the half tones over here and I'm going to use a really big brush. Over there. Let's test that out. I think something like that maybe even go a little bit bigger so I don't have to go backwards and forwards too much. I'll double that size and go to say 1,200 in there. Now, as far as the color goes over here, I'm going to just pick a color for the brush. I'll go with a dark purple, I think. And then I can paint that in onto the shoe. Now we're going to take this just get back to that tool there. We're going to take this layer, move it down inside my group right the way down. Watch where you drop it and drop it on top of the shoe where it says curve and that will then lock it inside that object. It clips it to that object. I'm going to keep this really nice and simple and just have that one inside there. Let's go back to vector. It will still be there in vector mode. If I click on that curve, you can see it, so I can select it, maybe even change the opacity so it's a bit more subtle. In there. We just got that sort of interesting texture on the shoe. I will do this one last time, and I'm going to do it with the orange over there and put a bit of texture onto the orange. So go over to pixel. I'm just going to click on that, so I'm right there. I'm going to go along and find a color. I'll use a slightly darker orange over there. Go over to my brushes. There they are in there, and I will use one of these other textures, this half tone brush, choose a brush size. And just experiment and see what you get. Okay, that's good. And I just want to do it from this side, maybe. Like that. And then there it is. So I drag it and I drop it on top of the curve so it locks it in, and I can then always go into that and change the opacity just on the texture like so. Anyway, do try that out. It's in pixel mode and you're using brushes, and these are pixel brushes. Remember, that's quite important because when you zoom right into them, you will see the individual pixels on those brushes in there. Try it out. 69. Color Variations: Let's add a few more of these shoes in here in different colors. But I'm going to keep this one exactly as it is. I'm going to select it. I'm going to hold down the option key, and I'm going to size this one down over here. So we're going to have three different color variations at the bottom. So you've got this one over here. Now, you'll notice I didn't bother about the shadow. I just want to keep the shoe exactly as it is like that. So let's go and change the color on this now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and add right at the bottom, let me move that layers panel up down to there. And I'm going to go and add an adjustment layer, which is going to be the HSL, hue saturation and lightness or luminance in there. And I'm just going to change the color in here. Now, you'll see it's actually changing both shoes. So let's take that saturation and just desaturate it a little bit like that. Now, I want the HSL to only affect this group here, so I'm going to drag it and I'm going to drop it inside that group, so it's only affecting the group that I put it into, which is this one over there. Now it becomes really easy to make variations because I can go to my move tool, hold on my ultima option key, make a copy of that one. Go inside that copy to the HSL, click on HSL in there and do another variation of the color for that one. Let's do that again. So hold down the alter the option key, drag a third one out over there. Go in. Oops. No, not that one. This is where you start to lose it a bit. Which one is the third one? Ah, now look at that. This is a genuine mistake. I put both of them into the same group. Let me undo that. So I've just got the one. What I should have done was instead of being on HSL there, I should have come out of HSL. So when I dragged the copy, it made a new group. Do be careful with that when you're doing that. Then I can click inside there. Go to HSL. I've just clicked on the little icon over there and do another color variation on those. Once again, try that out, do some color variations. If you want shadows underneath, by all means, put the shadows underneath. If you want the shoe to sit flat on the floor, do that. Just really know that within these groups you can put your HSL or any adjustment layer, so it'll only affect that group. 70. Create a Background: Now, we always associate racing stripes with these type of shoes. So let's put in some stripes. I'm going to make sure that I am where I want to be as in where I want the new shapes to come in. So I'll just go down to the bottom over there. So when I draw in my lines, over there. They come in just above the picture if you draw them in elsewhere, absolutely fine. You just going to have to move them around yourself. So I'm just rotating one of these little stripes like that, and let's hold down the old key and make three more of those like that. Now, of course, I can always select all three of those. And move them around into the right position. I can change the color. I can change the width if I want. I think I'll start with this one over here being sort of an orange. Maybe oh, that's a bit difficult to actually see the shoe properly. So let's go with a darker orange in there. Maybe do the same with this one with a darker orange, and I'll just experiment with a lighter orange in the middle. Think it actually works best with that purple, to be honest. If you want a color behind it, once again, just go back to where you want the color to come up above, and I will zoom out a bit. I'm going to go and get my shape, put in a shape over there, and it's right at the back, and I'll just change the color to maybe a lighter orange. Over there. Lastly, we need a bit of text in here. I think those colors those background colors are a little bit too dark, so I might have to lighten them up a little bit. But I'm going to put in my text now anyway. So I'm going to go over here to my type tool, put click and drag over there. These are going to be called these shoes are going to be called Xtreme, so I'm going to have X. Extreme like so, and we will just change that a little bit over there. I'm thinking that this X might look quite good if it was a lot bigger. So once again, I've just selected it, and I'm going to go and change the size up the top here to something like that. I might even make that bold. There. Now, the problem is that the X goes through that way, but the stripes are not at the right angle. Watch details like that where you've got one thing going one way, one thing going the other way. So I'm actually going to adjust this until the stripes match the X, like so. Let's just take those and try different color with them and see how that works with the white. Move that around because it's in the right at the right angle, you can place it wherever you want in here and you can then just resize if you need. Do have a bit of a go with that and then come back and I'll have sort out a few different colors in here as well. 71. Add Text: I found that the orange was really overpowering. So what I've done is toned it right down. I've also taken my shadow and just reduced the opacity of that, so it's a little bit less. Now, with my word extreme, I've got the X being really big and the trim, if there's such a word, comes in underneath. So what I'd like to do is I'd like to move trem up a bit. Now, there is a way to do this with text. We can use something called the baseline shift, but we're going to be getting into text in a much bigger way when we look at the layout mode. So for the moment, I'm going to use a cheat method. What I'm going to do is click on the extreme, hold down the alter the option key, make a copy of that. This one here, I'm going to remove the X, so I'm just separating them into two separate words. This one here, I'm going to remove the trem so they become two words. It's a bit of a sneaky way of doing it, but it works and I can now control them independently. Like that. Anyway, once again, as always, try it out, experiment with some different colors, and most importantly, have lots of fun with this. Now that you've finished it, go to file, make sure you do a save as, or a save if you haven't been saving it already. But most importantly, go to export and choose JPG. Export your work out and then share it with us. I love seeing what everybody's done with these projects, and I promise I will only ever say nice things about your 72. History, Symbols, Artboard & Effects - Intro: Affinity saves your history as you go along, so you can always undo to something that you've done before. But what's interesting is if you go back to something you've done before and then go forward in a different way, well, you can actually go back to a different piece of history. Now, this really mess with your head, and you kind of can go back in time and forward in time and then onto a different timeline in time. Honestly, my head just goes when I first started with this. But I'm going to take you through it nice easy steps to show you how it works because it is very, very useful. 73. Use & Save the History Panel: I'm going to go along to file and make a new document. Now, any size, it doesn't matter. I'm using landscape because it fits in the screen nicely. And I found my history panel. Now, mine was down here, and I pulled it out, but you can go to the window menu if you can't see it, go to general, and the history is in there. What I want to do is I want to start off on this little document by bringing a picture. So I'm going to go over to layout mode. I'm going to find the picture that I want. I really like archery, so I'm going to bring in a picture of something archery like in here. I'll actually just use these arrows at the top. So I'm going to drag them in There they are. Now, I'm not going to do anything else yet. I'm going to go back to Vector, so you can see the first thing is, it's recorded the fact that I've pasted a picture in. So I'm going to zoom out and resize my picture, so I'm going to grab the side, size it down, Transform it, so it's recognized I've transformed it, and I'm going to move it across. Let's have it in the middle over there. So once again, it's recognized that I've transformed it a second time in there. Now I want to do some other things over here as well. I'm going to click off of the picture, so I'm going to click to deselect it and you can see it says clear selection. I'm going to go and find a rectangle, and I'm going to put a little rectangle shape. Over here. And then I changed my mind and go, You know what? This is archery. I should be using circles as in targets. So I'm going to undo that. I'm going to use Command and Z or Control and Z on the keyboard to undo it. You see what it's done is it jumped back over here to clear selection. So let me go and do something else, so I'll use a circle. I'm going to pop in my circle over there. Let go. And it's now said add circle. I'm going to go and change the color of this. Over here. I won't put in all the target colors, but let's go over and go into my swatches. I'm going to choose myself standard colors in there, and let's have that as a blue you can see it says set fill in there. I'm going to make another copy of that. So I'm going to take this one, hold down the lt or the option key, make a copy, resize the copy. You can see all of these things are being recorded. Drop that in there, and let's make that one red. And I'm going to do this one more time. So hold down the old key. Make the smaller, drag that in to the middle, and then we've got the gold. In there. Now, I chose orange first instead of yellow, and you can see it set the fill and then it set the fill a second time. So everything that I do, absolutely everything that I do is being recorded. Now, over here, where I made a mistake and I went back and I undid, you can see what it's done, is it's created this little branch over here. So it's created what is called an alternative history, and this is where it starts to mess with your head, to be perfectly honest. It's kind of like time travel. But all of this history is recorded, and the fact that I've actually changed history in there is recorded as well. Now, what can we do with this? Well, obviously, I can see what I've done and I can go back along there. But I can also go up here and I can save the history with my document. You see, where's this file? And I go down to save history with document, I can just make sure that I'm saving that. And what it says is that means that anybody you send this document to can see everything you've done to create it, which for transparency is absolutely perfect. You can say, Yes, I created this. I'm not an AI. You can see my history in there. And I'll click on save in there. Obviously, if there's something that you've put in, maybe you worked with a picture that you don't want the client to see because it could be their competition, something like that, you might not want to save the history if you are going to give them the editable file. Now, let's just stop at that point there. Have a bit of a go. Get your history up first of all, be very deliberate and mindful about what you're doing. And every time you do something, have a look and see how it actually puts that in there. Do an undo and see how you get a change in history. I'll stop there so you can try that out. 74. Cycle Your History: Let's take this history to a whole new level. What I'm going to do is I'm going to change some of these things in here. So I'm going to go along and I'm going to click on this blue. I'm going to use my eyedropper tool and I'm going to sample a color from the picture itself. So I'm just going to sample this sort of gray over there. And then let me take the red. Once again, I'm going to sample the darker red from there. And instead of the gold, we're going to sample a very light bright red in there. So I've done a few little bits and pieces over here, but then I'm thinking, You know what? It'd be really interesting if I could have a look at how it was before. So if I go up here, I can just go up to where that was, Oh, I'll have to keep going a bit more. Right, where that was yellow, like that. So I can always go back up my history in there. But then when I'm here, maybe I want to try something different. Maybe when those colors were there, I wanted to select them and move them to this side instead. And when I'm here, I could do a few things as well. Let's click on that and we'll make that black. And this one over here is nice pink, and that I'm going to make more of an orange color, like so. So what I've done is I've gone back in time and I've then done something else. But at any point, I can click back on here. To go back in time to when that was over there, and we can just work between these two different futures. It really messes with your head when you're thinking, is this the future? Is this the past? What's happening in here? Now, while I'm here, I could even go and add some more shapes. So I could go in there and let's add a little diamond shape over there and pick a different color for that. I'll use the eyedropper tool and choose gray for that shape there. Now, I'm going to go back to this little future history and just click on that. And you can see how it just jumps back to that last version. And I can click it again and say, Oh, what about that version or this version here? So by keeping on clicking on that, I can just cycle through the various timelines or various futures or pasts, for that matter, however you want to look at it, that you can have. Honestly, it's red useful. It does mess with your head, though. So just try it out, do a few bits, undo, click on that and cycle through those to see the other options that you could have done. I can go back to this one here and see when I added the rectangle. 75. Project: Social Media Post with Artboards - Intro: This little section is going to be project based, but we're going to be looking at a lot of new stuff. But most importantly, we're going to be looking at artboards and how you can take your artwork and then make variations of it in different artwork in different artboards and save them out separately. 76. Create a Background & Lock Via Layers: Let's do a new document, and you can do any size you like. I'm doing my landscape. Click on Create. What I want to do here is I want to bring in a background picture. So I'm going to go across to Layout because I've still got my stock open in there. And I found some pictures here. You can choose anything you like. It really doesn't matter. I'm going to pull in this picture of this woman hooting a bow and go back to vector mode. Let's zoom that out a bit. Actually, the placement is pretty perfect. Now, one of the things I want to do is I want to bring in some shapes down the bottom here. You can do any colors that you like, and I'm going to use my rectangle to do that, so I'm just kind of a little shape like that. I'm going to hold down the alter the option key, make a copy of that over there. Another copy. If you can remember, it's been a little while, but from earlier in the course, what we could do with this is we could actually do power copying, where you can just get it to keep copying thing over and over. If you want to use that, absolutely fine, go for it. I think that's all them. I'm gonna pop them over there, and I'm just going to give them some color. So I'm going to start off over here with my colors. This is all about archery, so I'm going to use the colors of the target over here, which starts at black, and then we have some red here some a nice, darkish, red, blue. Actually, you know, it's the other way around. So that should be red. This one here should be blue. Um, and this one is going to be yellow or gold, as it's called. Right. Okay, so I've got those in there. I'm going to lock my picture in the background. Now, to lock things, you've got a little lock symbol in there, and it appears down here. So you don't actually have to go to click on something and then go up to the padlock. You can just move over to the right and click to lock an item in there. Even though there's no sort of padlock as such, it will just lock it quickly for you. And I want to put these into a different shape. Now, this, of course, is just going through something that we've done earlier. I'm going to go over here and I'm going to use a rounded rectangle. Going to draw in my rectangle like so. And remember the little dot over there. I'm going to go to that dot and just pull that.in a little bit to round off those corners, and I'm going to make this whole thing a bit bigger. So what I'm looking to do here really is to have something like that because I want to round off those shapes in there. Now, all we have to do is to take those shapes and drop them into that shape there. And you can see by doing so, it will just clip them into the bottom shapes. I've now got this as a shape by itself sitting down over there. And I'll just move that into the right position. Anyway, I'll stop there so you can get to that point over there. We haven't actually got what we're going to be doing. We haven't got to where we're going to be doing this yet, and that's symbols. But let's pop that in over there. So make any shape you like, put some shapes inside it, get any picture you want in the background. We're going to make a very simple little logo, so any words you want for that, but get to the stage. I 77. Add Logo Text: What I'm going to do is I'm going to start off by taking a little shape over here, and I think I'm just going to use a rectangle, drawing my rectangular shape, and I want to put some text in there, which just says feathers. Maybe that's the name of the club that she's shooting in. And I can give that any color that I like, really. For the moment, I will change this later on, but for the moment, I'm just going to make it a blue. I'll put in my text. So using the text tool, I'm going to click and drag to get the right shape or right size, shall I say, and put in the word feathers in there. I'm going to select it. And I'm going up to the top. You can choose a different typeface in here, over there. Have a look, see what it's like. I think that one might work. Let me pull that in. Like so. Right, I will put that up against that side over there, and I'm going to change this and move that in a little bit like that. Now, what I want to do is I want the word feathers that I've got here to be cut through or punched through that blue thing so we can actually see the background through the blue. And to do that, I'm going to select both of them, so I'm going to select the blue background, hold down the Shift key, and then select the text, as well. You can see they're both selected in my layers. And I'm going to go up to the top here and use the second button along. This is subtract to subtract one from the other. Now you can see it straight through the text in there. I'm going to place this, I think, down here. Like that. And I might move it over a little bit up to there. I think I'm going to change that to white. I think it'll look better, white, and I don't want any stroke, so I'll get rid of the stroke on that. I think I'll live with that. Once again, have a go get up to that stage, and the next stage will be putting this into a symbol and then what you can do with it. 78. Make a Copy & Create a Symbol: Now, what I want to do is I want to have a few versions of this around. I'd like to have sort of the logo at the top there, maybe another one down over here, and of course, one at the bottom in there. And this is a great technique if you've got a logo that you're constantly using in a document. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go along to the Window menu and I'm going to find the symbols. If I go to the Window menu, I can go down to vector and over to symbols, and this is the symbols panel. Now, before I actually start to make a symbol, I'm just going to make a copy of this. You don't always have to, but you'll see why I'm doing this in a little while. So I'm going to hold down the l to the option key, make a copy of that, and let's just move that a little bit out the way like so. Now, going back to this one in here, I've selected my logo, go into the symbols, and I'm going to click on the Create button. And there it is. I've now got my little symbol in there. So what does this mean? Well, it means that I can actually drag this one out again. And I think this one, let's move that one out the way. Remember, this is the original one that never went into the symbols. Move this one here, and I think I'm going to rotate it. So I'm just holding down my shift key to rotate it perfectly. I'm going to move it across to that side there. And maybe I want another one. So let's bring another one over here. I'm going to make this one a lot smaller, so I'm going to just size it down by grabbing the corner and putting that down and placing it up there. Now, you can see the problem that I've got here is that well, the problem is that you can't see it because it's white. So, what can we do about that? Well, because this is a symbol, all these ones that are in the symbol are linked. So if I click on this one or that one, it really doesn't matter, and I change the color and let's do that on fill Not on Stroke. So change the color, and you can see they've all updated. If I want to black, once again, they've all updated in there, except the one that I've got at the top. This one hasn't because I made a copy of it before I put that one in the symbols. So maybe I don't want this one, and I want to take this one rotated round, and this is a kind of on the edge here. It's going to be a little bit of almost like a watermark type of effect. So I can go into my layers and just take down the opacity on that a little bit to get this sort of simple watermark in there. And I've got that logo there, and I've got this one over here. Let's just move that up like that, and I'll move it across. But then if I'm looking at this, and I'm thinking, you know what? That's really boring with that edge, let's make another change. I'll zoom right in. And I'm going to click on this. And I think what I'd like to do is to maybe round off some of these corners so that it looks similar to the other colors that I've got. So I'm going to use my node tool, select this point here, and then get this little tool here. Remember, it's the corner tool, and I can just click and drag to round that corner off. So it sort of mirrors almost this shape that we've got down here. I could do the bottom one as well. My as well do the bottom, so it looks looks symmetrical in there. Here we go. Let's do that. That looks good, and of course, it will have done the same thing to this one here, but it won't be affecting that one over there. What about if I go to this one and think, Well, you know what? I would be great if I could change the opacity on that one in there? Well, I'm going to go to it. I'm going to change the opacity. And they both change. So if you change a symbol, whatever you do to one, it'll happen to all of them. Lastly, in the symbols here, you can see that there are little orange colors in there. By the way, this is not a symbol. This is the one that's on the very left hand side there. So these ones here, which are symbols, and these ones you can actually see very quickly because they've got those orange lines on them, so I know that those are a symbol. Try that out. Have fun with it. It's really, really useful. 79. Artboards: New & Insert Artboard: Let's have a look at artboards now. So we've got our document here, and whatever document you've made, that's absolutely fine. If you haven't done anything, just do a very simple document. We want to make some variations on this. So this could be for a social post, and, you know, you want one version for the first week and a slightly different version. For the second week, et cetera. This is not an artboard. We need to actually make artboards ourselves. Now, if you're creating a new document, you could go to File and New. And over here, there's actually a little button down here which says, Do you want to make this new document into an artboard and you can switch it on over there to create an artboard. But if you've already got a document and you haven't made it into an artboard, well, you can actually go along to the Artboard tool, and when you click on that tool, it now gives you the option to make an artboard. So over here, if I click on the little plus on the right hand side, it will make another artboard for me. You can see this one's artboard one, that one's artboard two. If you look at the layers, you'll see that we've now got an artboard one and artboard two. Artboard one has got all the items inside it. So it's kind of like another one of these folders or container layers over there. But it's a different type. It's called an artboard. Let me undo that. The other thing, which is different in artboards as it is in normal documents is in the view menu, we've got something called clip to Canvas. Now, if I switch that off, you can see the whole of, well, everything that I've put in there, but I just want to see it in the canvas view, so I'll say clip to Canvas. If you make an artboard and it's make an artboard there, that actually gets grayed out, so you can't switch off clip to Canvas in the right, let's undo that over there. Let me stop at this point, so you can have a look at those and try it out. 80. Creating Variations with Artboards: I've undone all of my settings. If you want to go to your history to undo it, that's fine. But I've just used Command or Control Z, undo it until I got back to before I started making things into artboards. So how do you make this into an artboard without making a new blank one? Well, if you go to your artboard tool, you'll see in this little contextual task bar, there's an option there that says insert artboard. Now, watch my layers. When I click on this, it automatically makes an artboard for me with all of my items inside. Once again, it's kind of like when we go in here, we make groups, or we make folders, same sort of thing. Now I want to make a copy of this. So I'm going to go back to my move tool, make sure that I've clicked on my artboard, not on these items. And I'm going to hold down the alter the option key and just drag a copy out of that artboard. So I've now got two of those, and you can see they're both exactly the same. So I can go to this one and say, well, actually, why don't we move Oops. Now, make sure that I'm selecting the right things. Let's move this over here to that side there, and we'll select that and move back to there. And then let's have another version. So I'll just close that down. I'm going to go back to my move tool. Make sure I'm on the artboard, hold down the lt or the option key, and make a copy of that one. I think in this one, I'm actually going to put an adjustment layer above these to make it black and white. So I'm going to go in there, add an adjustment layer. It's going to be the black and white adjustment layer, and you can see how it's affecting everything inside this artboard. In fact, it's affecting my colors as well. So if I drag it below all of those and below the color object, now it'll only affect my picture in there. Let's have one more. So once again, back to my move to make sure I'm on the artboard, hold down the old key, make another copy. And I think in this one, let's close that one down. We'll open up that one. I'm going to put a color over the top. Oops. Now, look at that. I went to go and put in a shape and I managed to change my artboard size. I will use Command Z to undo that straightaway. And what I want to do is to actually just draw in a shape. So you've just got to be very careful you don't hit the wrong thing. I'm going to make that a deep red, I think. And this is in that artboard. I'm going to move it below everything except the photo. Over there. And then I'm going to change it from normal into multiply looks quite interesting. Overlays a bit too bright. I'm going to go with multiply over there, and I can always go in there and try different colors in here and create something which looks interesting. Anyway, do try that out. So remember, when you initially go into this little icon over here, which is the Artboard tool icon, you just click Insert artboard that makes the artboard for you, and then you can use your move tool as long as you're actually on the artboard, not on an object inside it. Hold down the alter the option key to make a copy, and then you can go and change them like so. Try that out, and then we'll look at what happens when you want to save these. 81. Exporting Variations of JPG for Social Media: I'm going to save these out. So if I get a file and save as over here, if I'm saving it as an Affinity document, it will contain all of those artboards. Let's call this feathers. And I'm just putting mine onto my desktop or wherever I can find it again. We'll click on Save. So that is now all contained in the one file. But let's say that we've done this as images or different images for social media. I'm going to go to file down to Export, and I'm going to choose JPG. And then I need to find out what I'm actually going to be exporting. So the area here shows me artboard one. I can choose to export any of those artboards in there. You can see as I'm flicking through them. Each of the different artboards is coming up, or I could say the whole document. And what that will do is it'll export all of them in one great big document over there. You can see if I scroll across like that. It's showing all of those. If I go to one of them, it's just showing me that one. I can't move left and right. Anyway, I'm going to export. Oh, let's have a look and see which one I'd like. I think the last one was quite fond of, and I'm just going to click on Export in there. Let's say this one's for Monday. And once again, click on Save. Do have a little bit of a go at exporting it out. And remember, when you save, it saves all of them, but when you export, you export one of those artboards at a time using this file and export method. 82. Quick Effects: Et's apply some quick effects to this. Now, quick effects, and if I click on here, you'll see things like shadows and bevels and embosses, those type of things are in here. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to start off by clicking on this shape here. So I'm going to go along to that shape. Over there, let's zoom in a bit so you can see it a bit clearer. And I'm going to apply a shadow to that. So I'm applying it to the whole of that shape in there, not to the individual parts that make it up with a color. So it's the whole shape in there. I'm going to go down and find a outer shadow. It's kind of like a drop shadow, really. I will click on that to switch on the tick and pull this up a bit. Now, you can't see anything yet, but let me change this offset. So we can pull that offset right out there, and you can just see a bit of shadow coming in. We'll angle it around there sort of a full 360 degree angle. I'll pull it out. And then over here, we've got a radius, so I can actually change the radius, which is the softness of that shadow. So I'm going to go fairly soft. Obviously, it's too far away, so I'll pull the offset in. So you can just about see it and then change the opacity so it's not too obvious. You can see if I go to that where it's a bit too much. So just a soft ever so slight shadow in there to lead the viewer's eye to these shapes. Let's have a look at another one. By the way, that was only on that one there. So these are independent at the moment, these artboards. However, if I go to feathers, now, remember this logo was a symbol. So I'm going to go and I'm going to do something in the feathers and I'm going to go in here into three D. I'm going to switch on three D and put a little bevel in there. Now, you can just about see that bevel coming through there, but have you noticed it's also affecting this one. Go over there. So you can see some changing the bevel. It's affecting all of the instances of that. So if you've got a symbol and you put a quick effect on, even if you've got individual artboards like this, it will affect all of them because they all come from that same symbol. So I will affect that, and I'm just going to put a little bit of an effect on there. Now I want to show you really, really cool technique. I'm going to go to the top to the fill opacity, and I'm going to remove the black fill. And what that's going to do is it's just going to leave the effect in there. I can do that, and you get these lovely sort of embossed effects in there. And you can see now if I change that effect you can get a sort of a different subtle effect on there. Once again, change the opacity in there. So the opacity is different from this fill opacity up here. If I do that, it's the fill opacity. If I do this, it's the opacity of the effect. So this is the fill, that's the effect in there. Let's take that right down to there. And you'll see it'll affect every single one of those. There's all sorts of quick effects that you can do in here from bevel embosses to just purely outlines. Let me go over to this one now and just do an outline on that and change the radius a bit. Alright, so you can change the color if you wish in there as well. I will make that red. And once again, I can then go to my fill, and I can remove the fill. So I'm just left with that as an outline. It'll only affect that one because this one here is a separate object. It's not something that we did in the symbols. Do have a bit of a go with that, try that out and just experiment with some of these quick effects. And also don't forget fill opacity or the opacity in the effect itself. They do different things. Try it out, have loads of fun with that. 83. Well Done & Thank You!: Congratulations. You've reached the end of this course. I'm sure you're creating amazing work. Now, don't forget to leave us a review. It really helps us to help to build more courses for you. I also do courses in Adobe, as well as Canva and Procreate. Don't forget to follow me and have a look at my profile. I'll see you in the next one. A