Affinity Designer Basics: Vector Assets for Surface Pattern Design | Weronika Salach | Skillshare
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Noções básicas do Affinity Designer: conjuntos de vetores para o design de padrões de superfície

teacher avatar Weronika Salach, Art with MAGIC

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Apresentação

      2:44

    • 2.

      Seu projeto e inspiração

      2:39

    • 3.

      Sobre o Affinity Designer

      4:08

    • 4.

      O que são assets

      3:04

    • 5.

      Download GRATUITO do Assets

      1:43

    • 6.

      A interface: V1 e V2

      7:32

    • 7.

      Projetos e documentos

      7:00

    • 8.

      Suas pranchetas

      6:42

    • 9.

      Referências e painel de estoque

      8:19

    • 10.

      Como planejar as ações (demonstração do Procreate)

      6:02

    • 11.

      Esboço do Pixel Persona

      6:57

    • 12.

      Como organizar os conjuntos em camadas

      5:37

    • 13.

      Bônus: traço e preenchimento

      6:34

    • 14.

      Cores da base da ferramenta Lápis

      11:03

    • 15.

      Estabilização do pincel

      8:26

    • 16.

      Modo de modelagem

      6:16

    • 17.

      Painel de traço

      12:01

    • 18.

      Reagrupando o reúso part1

      11:53

    • 19.

      Reagrupando o Assets Part2

      6:52

    • 20.

      Máscaras de recorte

      12:41

    • 21.

      Linhas de recorte e traço

      10:33

    • 22.

      Modos de mescla

      11:54

    • 23.

      Ferramenta de faca

      6:02

    • 24.

      Escala com objeto

      5:51

    • 25.

      Painel Assets

      11:18

    • 26.

      Como importar e exportar assets

      3:09

    • 27.

      Próximos passos

      1:54

    • 28.

      Sorteio (03/2023)

      2:03

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About This Class

Interessado no Affinity Designer como uma alternativa ao Adobe Illustrator? Você quer levar suas habilidades em design de superfícies para o próximo nível?  Inscreva-se agora e comece a criar belos ativos de vetores, que ajudarão você a criar padrões de repetição com o Affinity Designer. Este curso foi criado em 2023 e está muito atualizado.

Neste curso, você vai aprender tudo o que precisa saber para criar ativos de vetores lindos e de aparência profissional para seus designs de padrões de superfície. Este curso é para artistas iniciantes e intermediários que gostariam de aprender a desenhar lindos vetores com um “sentimento desenhado à mão” para eles. Sem mais vetores chatos!

Juntos, vamos desenhar elementos botânicos mágicos (flores, pequenas flores, folhas e frutas) em massa. O processo que vou mostrar para você vai economizar muito tempo e vai ajudar você a se manter muito organizado na interface do Affinity Designer.

___________________________

Meus recursos de bônus GRATUITOS

Os assets são essencialmente os blocos de construção de qualquer design vetorial, como ilustrações de pontos de vetor e padrões sem emenda de vetores.  Pessoalmente, construo todos os meus padrões com os ativos do projeto.  Você cria ativos uma vez, salva em sua biblioteca e pode reutilizá-los em todos os seus documentos. Eles realmente valem o seu tempo!

O Affinity Designer é uma alternativa fantástica ao Adobe Illustrator ou ao Adobe Fresco em seu iPad. Com relação aos vetores, também é superior ao Procreate (onde você só pode criar ilustrações rasterizadas).

Neste masterclasses de ativos, vamos abordar:

  • tudo sobre a Ferramenta Lápis (traço, preenchimento, estabilização, etc.)
  • tudo sobre o Assets Studio no Affinity Designer
  • as principais diferenças entre Affinity Versão 1 e Versão 2
  • trabalhando em várias pranchetas
  • Como esboçar na persona do Pixel
  • Como organizar ativos em grupos & camadas de forma eficiente
  • Como usar máscaras de recorte
  • Como aplicar modos de mistura a vetores
  • a Ferramenta faca!  (novo no V2)
  • Gestos de atalho úteis para a versão do iPad

Para quem é esse curso:

  • Artistas
  • Designers de superfície
  • Repetir os criadores de padrões
  • Entusiastas do design gráfico
  • Ilustradores
  • Qualquer pessoa criativa que queira desenhar lindos vetores!

___________________________

Junte-se ao meu grupo FB do Affinity Designer para obter ainda mais suporte

Encontre-me no Instagram para desafios de arte incríveis!

Confira meu canal no YouTube

Leia mais em meu site — postagens no blog e tutoriais em vídeo

___________________________

Você gostaria de atualizar seus fundamentos do Affinity Designer? Comece com meu curso de introdução (aplicável para V1 e V2):

___________________________

Data do curso: janeiro de 2023

Versão do Affinity Designer: 2.0.3

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Weronika Salach

Art with MAGIC

Top Teacher

Hello! My name is Weronika (or Wera, pronounced with a "V"), I'm a Polish children's book illustrator, surface pattern designer, and online educator based in Germany. Internationally I'm represented by Advocate Art illustration agency.

LET'S STAY CONNECTED:

See you on Instagram Extra Procreate and Affinity tutorials on YouTube Affinity Designer Facebook Group for pattern designers Affinity Fresco Facebook Group for illustrators Read my BLOG Substack blog-letter, behind the scenes, resources, advice

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi, my name is Weronika Salach. I'm an Illustrator and Surface Pattern Designer based in Berlin, Germany. I've been using Affinity Designer for iPad mainly to create seamless repeat patterns. I use those patterns to print them out on fabrics, on stationary, and on home goods. All of my patterns are built out of vector assets. Assets are design elements that you can create onetime, save them to your library and keep reusing them across all of your projects. They save you a lot of time and they can really help you create vector designs full of details. Together, me and you are going to go through this course and create beautiful hand-drawn vector assets in Affinity Designer on the iPad. During this course, I'm going to show you how to use the most important vector tools in Designer and how to create multi-layer defector assets in bulk. You will need your iPad and any versions of Affinity Designer. We will start with getting to know Affinity Designer interface Version 1 and Version 2, setting up our project and our document, as well as creating presets, and working on multiple art boards. We will get very familiar with the pencil tool, which will allow us to create beautiful vector assets that have this hand-drawn feeling. We will explore stroke and fill, brush stabilization, the sculpt mode, clipping masks, and blend modes. I will also show you the knife tool, which is only available in Affinity Version 2. Most importantly, I will teach you everything I know about the Assets Studio, how to layer and group here vector assets, and how to organize them in your Assets Library in an efficient way. Ready to take your vector skills to the next level? Let's get started. 2. Your Project & Inspiration: Welcome everybody. Let's briefly discuss the project for this course. Your project is to create at least five vector assets, between five and 10 would be a good number, but of course, you are very welcome to create more. Vector assets that will be saved in your assets library, organized in at least two different subcategories. For example, I choose to create botanical elements that I will most probably organize in three subcategories such as flowers, maybe small blooms, leaves, and berries. Of course, you can choose any other theme for your assets. You can follow along with me and you can create some botanical assets for your library. Here, really the sky is the limit, you can create flowers, berries, twigs, leaves. You can go even deeper and create some exotic plants, or plants that are typical for your area. Another cool project is to create a little stars, especially if you like to sprinkle your illustration with those of magic. I do for example, have a whole category of stars that I saved into my assets library that proved to be very helpful over and over again. For this category, pretty much any other celestial elements, like some planets, maybe the moon will be a great idea to include in this category. If you're a little bit more ambitious, you can also create a library with some animal objects, maybe doggies or cats, some pets or some birds. Those are very popular motives that you can then reuse to create, for example, patterns. Another fun category is food or cooking or baking, or you can consider to create some fruit and veggies. For this project, you can upload, for example, a screenshot from your Asset Studio showing your new group of vector assets. You can also put them on a dedicated Artboard and showcase them in this way. Then you can also take a screenshot or save this Artboard as JPEG and then upload it as your project. For those of you who are a little bit more advanced, [LAUGHTER] and feel more comfortable using Affinity Designer, perhaps you can take those new assets and you can create a pattern or just a spot illustration which uses those assets that you created after taking this course. If you're sharing the work that you created in this course on Instagram, I would love to see it as usual and feature it. For that purpose you can use the #magicalvectors [LAUGHTER], so that I can see your beautiful creations. Happy creating. 3. About Affinity Designer: In this lesson, I wanted to tell you what you can expect to learn and to see in this course. I will be showing you my process mainly in Affinity Designer Version 2 but I'll be also making comparisons to Version 1. Why is that? Some users are used to Version 1 of Affinity Designer for the iPad. There was an upgrade to the entire Serif suite with Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher. It was, I think November 9, 2022. But here's the thing, you don't have to update to Version 2 if you're comfortable using Version 1, you bought it some months or years ago, you can stick with Version 1 and you don't have to delete it, you don't have to upgrade. It is totally fine. If you're watching this course and you've never had Affinity installed on your iPad then moving forward, you will be offered only Version 2 from November 2022 on. You can buy the app in the App Store for a one-time payment. I cannot really tell you how much it costs right now. I think for me when I bought Version 1, it cost 24.99 and then it was reduced to 19.99. The price can change over the years. But I can tell you only that for me personally, it was totally worth it. I think it's a very powerful tool. You pay only one time and you have any future updates included in the price tag. In this class, I will be showing you how to create assets directly in Affinity Version 1 and Version 2. But I wanted to let you know that there are many other ways to create your vector assets and you don't have to stick to Affinity Designer, for example, I like also creating my assets using Adobe Fresco and Procreate. But in this course, we will be only covering creating assets directly in the program, in Affinity Designer and then creating assets in Fresco or Procreate, those will be covered in separate classes so that the content is more digestible for you. I also get many requests to create a dedicated class on surface pattern design using Affinity. This will also be covered in a separate course. However, in the meantime, the more assets you create for your Affinity library, the easier it will be to create a beautiful pattern using Affinity Designer later on. I wanted to ask you to stay tuned. In the meanwhile, create as many assets as you can because it will certainly pay off in the future. I would also like to briefly mention why people choose Affinity over Adobe in the first place. For starters, it's a great option because some people just don't like the subscription model. You pay a one-time fee and you have the program pretty much forever. Another advantage of using Affinity Designer over Adobe is that it's essentially two programs in one because Affinity supports in one same program vector work with pixel work whereas, when you're using Adobe, you have usually two programs. You do your vector art in Adobe Illustrator and then if you want to add some extra raster or pixel texture, you move to Photoshop. This is solved in Affinity suite by introducing the so-called personas, in Version 2, you see the personas, for example, here, there are two main personas. We will also discuss it in further lessons. Along in this course, there's a designer persona for vectors and there's a pixel persona for raster or pixel art. You could for example draw all your shapes for starters, as vectors and then you can switch to the pixel persona, where you will get a different menu. You will get here pixel brushes, paint brushes. Both of those modalities, vector and pixel, are combined in only one program. Now, in the next lesson, we are ready to talk a little bit more about what are assets. 4. What Are Assets: Welcome back. This is where the fun starts. Let's first address the question booth, or assets, because many of you have not heard about assets before. Assets are pre-made design elements that you can store it in your library on your device. Then you can access or create any new document and they will be accessible across the entire device, so you create them once, you save them in your library and you can re-use them as many times as you want. This in turn can save you a lot of time. I re-use my assets a lot, in particular, smaller elements which are not hero elements such as, smaller blooms or twigs, but also other decorative elements such as, little stars or dots, or any other abstract shapes. I wanted to show you one example, this is one of my most favorite food patterns. I have here, some pies, some apple pie, some pears. You will see that I have re-used those apples and those pears in a few other designs. It was super easy because they were available in my assets library. So there is one pattern here that has those apples and pears. Here is another one, see, the same apples, the same pears, just a different pattern. Here the same pears, the same apples. [LAUGHTER] Those are three different patterns, but I was able to re-use some elements and save time. Since those are not licensed to any client, it's quite safe. But if you are choosing or if you're drawing something more specific, for example, I have here a pattern with Christmas jackalopes, this might be a little bit too unique and if I took, for example, this jackalope and re-used it and then licensed that pattern to one client, then I would probably block this asset so I wouldn't be able to re-use it in another one till the license, for example, expires. I would say so in order to avoid any copyright issues. But all the other smaller items, for example, this little sun or stars, I have another pattern here that I got printed out on a fabric. As you can see, for example here, I re-used the same stellar elements. I tend to reuse them over and over again, they're the same assets that I have saved up in my assets library. If you would like to see my assets [LAUGHTER] more in action, you can also check out my videos on my YouTube channel where I'm showing a very quick demo in one of the videos on how I create a botanical pattern in pretty much only a few minutes using exclusively the pre-made assets from my affinity library. It looks pretty cool. [LAUGHTER] Let's get started then and join me in the next lesson. 5. FREE Assets Download: Now that you know what assets are, I wanted to help you build your assets library. I prepared for you one asset category that you can download in this course. In this way, in case your assets library is a little bit empty, you won't feel intimidated by its emptiness, and you will have something to start with. I prepared for you a folder with some basic filler assets, a few botanical elements, such as small blooms, twigs and leaves, and also some abstract shapes. You are free to use those assets in your projects. You just can't sell them or present them as your own creation. For the sake of this demonstration, I will remove this category, Hamburger menu. I'm going to delete it so that I can iporate it again, delete from this app. Now it's gone. I hit the Hamburger menu again, and I select the option Import category, and you can choose an asset name that starts with fillers. We click on it. And now our import is complete. Yeah, all done. Congratulations. We imported our first assets category into our library. I hope that you enjoy them. I will tell you more about the assets studio in one of the last lessons titled Assets panel. We will learn there about the anatomy of the assets studio, how to save our assets, and how to export them. But for now, let's continue learning about the basics. 6. The Interface: V1 & V2: In this lesson, we will have a quick look at the interface in Affinity Designer. Let's briefly outline the differences between Affinity Designer Version 1 and Version 2. I have a whole class on how to find yourself in affinity interface Version 1, and it includes some bonus material covering Version 2. Maybe you'd like to start your learning with this introduction course. The first difference is that the main page, the homepage, looks different because, this Version 2, in Affinity Version 2, the main menu is here on the left side. In Version 1, the menu on the homepage is here above, and it looks a little bit more limited. In Version 1, we have the hamburger menu here, the three vertical lines, and they help you to access some additional features. When you click on it in Version 2, you can, for example, rename the project. Let's go maybe inside. If you click on the hamburger menu directly from a given document, you have the option to close it, which means to completely remove it, delete it, then you have the option to rename it. Then you can make a copy of duplicate. You can save it into your storage, and you can also move it out of the project. Also, through the plus symbol here, you can create a new project, a new folder, or a new document, or import any other documents that you created in the past from the Cloud or from your photos, for instance. Also, the size of the thumbnails is a little bit different. How many can we fit here? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. To be perfectly honest, I think I prefer the Version 1 view, but yeah, I guess you can get used to that. [LAUGHTER] We had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and you can already see in Designer Version 2, the thumbnails are a little bit bigger. This is Version 2, the thumbnails are a little bit bigger. You also have the hamburger menu here, but this only gives you the option to save and to save as where you can save it into your external storage, and one important thing that I need to underline here is right now as of December 2022, the only way to rename your file is to, when you're creating it to already name it properly, and to save it into your storage. For example, I save everything to my iPad directly. I have a lot of storage on my device. You click on ''Save As'', and this is where you can change your file name. Then every time you want to rename that file, you have to go through the Save As option, and then you have to save it as, you have to choose your new name. Then probably you have to go to your file directory and you have to delete the other file that has this old name. It helps you to save your data because it's saved in some storage bead on your iPad directly, or maybe in a Cloud services such as Dropbox. Whereas over here, let's open again this project. You can rename the file very easily here, but it doesn't mean that it's backed up or it doesn't mean that it's saved. Well, I like the renaming function in Version 1, but to be fair, I never had any issues in losing any data. This can happen when you get your device lost, maybe it crashes, you have some accident with your device. Maybe you uninstall affinity for some reason and you want to re-install it, bring it back, then if you do not use the save option, all your files will not be backed up. They will not be stored anywhere. Affinity developers, we talked about it quite extensively in the affinity form. They wanted to prevent complaints from the users, so they forced this save and save as usage so that you get into the habit of saving your documents. This is something that you have to bear in mind. Let's see what's also difference in the document view. Let's open this document in Version 1 and let's do the same in Version 2. By the way, I forgot to say in Version 2, there's also an option to swipe to the left and then you can save it, and it will get saved to your storage or you can make a copy here. Copying. Now we can open it. If you want to find your way around the interface, you can always use the question mark. This is the same in both versions, you can just press and it will give you some a cheat sheet. The same in Version 1, the question mark is in the very same spot in the lower right corner. Each of those options that you have here on the left side gives you some extra actions that you can perform, and they are placed in the so-called contextual menu. In Version 1 this menu will be below here, whereas in Version 2 everything was taken out of the art board, the developers wanted to create more clarity and declutter this creative area here [LAUGHTER] in the middle, and they move this contextual menu that we used to be here below, up here. Apart from that, Version 2 has a few new features. That's why it's Version 2, it should have some extras. If you're still on Version 1, you can keep using it, but you can consider upgrading. Some of the new things that were introduced that I quite like, are the knife tool where you can cut your vectors and. [NOISE] This is pretty called the shape builder where you can merge and subtract some elements from your shapes to build completely unique shapes. I think this is particularly handy when you're doing a logo design. Both versions combine both tools for vector work and for a pixel or raster work. Those personas, they're called personas, they're always available in the same upper-left corner. In Version 2, you have it here, you can switch between designer and pixel and in Version 1, it's also in the upper left corner, but it's not nested in one menu. It's next to each other. Here is the designer persona for vectors, and here's the pixel persona for your raster work. In this course we will be creating new assets using the pencil tool, and there's also a tiny difference regarding where the pencil tool is located. [LAUGHTER] In Version 2, let's go back to our question mark to find it. You can find the pencil tool here more or less in the middle of the menu on the left side, pencil, right underneath the pen tool. But one difference is that when you click on it, you will see also that the vector brush has been nested together with the pencil tool. In Affinity Designer Version 1, let's click again on the question mark, the pencil tool and the vector brush tool have been separated. Cool. We discussed the interface, the differences between Version 1 and Version 2, and now we're ready to create our first document. 7. Projects & Documents: Welcome back. Let's start our project with creating a new document. I will show you how I proceed in Version 2, and then I will very quickly show you how to do it in Version 1. Whenever I'm working on my assets, let's have a look at this project here, I usually have a dedicated document just for creating those assets. The dimensions of my canvas, I usually work in the square format, they don't really matter in the end because those are vectors. Later on, you can scale them up and down without any quality loss. Now, a word about creating projects, it was a little bit different than Version 2. If you want to create a project which is essentially a folder under which you can nest multiple projects, for example, here I have a folder for all my autumn designs. In Version 1, you create such a new folder by hitting the plus symbol and then choosing new project, and then you can create it and rename it. But let's cancel. This option is a little bit hidden in Version 2. You can either create a folder by holding on the screen all the documents that are already created and dragging it and dropping it onto another document that you want to join in one folder. This will help you to stack them and therefore to create a new project. This new project you can also rename by swiping to the left then this icon will show up. You can click on it and you can rename it. Another way to create such a folder is a little bit hidden. Over here, you have the option to create documents under new and plus, but if you just tap on it and long press it, it will open you a new menu, and this is where you can create a new project, and then you just rename it and you'll have a new folder. We will not do that because we already have a new folder here. Moving forward, if you create any other documents that should belong to this project, you can just press drag, it will start moving a little bit just like Apple products, and then you can just drop it into that folder and now everything is in one folder. This mechanism works in the same way this dragging and dropping. It works in the same way in affinity Version 1. To create a new document in Version 2, we click on "New", and this is where you can create your canvas from scratch or you can say the preset. If you want to create a new preset, you click on the first symbol with the plus, and then you can rename your preset here. The next symbol allows you to create a new category. Let's do a quick exercise on how to save your presets. I have 2,000 pixels here and 4,000 pixels, but maybe I would like to save 3,000 pixels. In order to do that, you have to go to the existing preset and then you have to modify it, so I'm changing the 2,000s to 3,000s. I keep the 300 DPI document unit stay as pixels. This is something you can untick but I always have it ticked. If I create this document, it will automatically create an artboard, and I love working with artboards, so I keep it on. Color format is RGB. Here too also have an option to create a transparent background, and that's pretty much all that I pay my attention to. [LAUGHTER] There are some extra options here, for example, here you can set up some margins and bleed values depending on your project. Now we changed the 2,000s. They are the original preset of 2,000 pixels into 3,000. Once you do any modifications on presets that already existed, it will get this little star symbol at the end of the name. It will mean that it has been modified. Now, in order to save this new preset, I go to this first icon with the plus symbol. I keep it in the pixels category that was previously created in advance, I changed the name to 3,000 pixels, then I hit "Okay", and now it's created. If you change your mind, if there's some format that you're not using anymore, you can hit this last icon here with multiple, I think, artboards. [LAUGHTER] You can use this hamburger vertical lines menu to move your presets. For example, I would like to have 4,000, 3,000, and then 2,000. By hitting this minus symbol, you are able to delete it. Cool, let's have a little look. Now we have our presets here. Let's select 2,000 pixels and hit "Okay". This is Version 2. Let's see how to do that in Version 1 very quickly. In Version 1, you hit the plus symbol here, new document. Here you can change your units, for example, pixels. You adjust this to 2,000 by default you get 144 DPI, you change it to 300. You make sure that you create an artboard. The orientation doesn't matter because it's a square document, and then you hit "Okay", and you create your new document. If you want to save this document, let me just repeat. You have to hit the back arrow and go back to your homepage. The same with Version 2. This one, we don't need anymore. It's a copy. If you want to remove a document that you don't need anymore, you hit the X symbol in Version 2. It will ask you whether you really want to close the document because it's a little bit misleading to close the document and affinity means to really delete it. [LAUGHTER] So you choose close without saving. Again, a reminder in order to rename it, you have to save it as, let's name it as floral assets, save, and it will ask you where you want to save. Like I said, I actually save mine on my iPad in this folder, so I just hit "Save" and it's been renamed. Now we're ready to draw. 8. Your Artboards: One of the useful things that you can find in Affinity Designer is that you can work on multiple artboards. I've been using for years Procreate, and this is something that I've been really missing in Procreate as a program. It's really cool thing and very useful thing in Affinity Designer, and I wanted to show you how to utilize those artboards. Let's have a look at a few examples. Let's take, for example, this pattern file. You will see that I'm working here on three artboards. The first artboard is with my pattern, the main pattern tile. This is the preview that I created for this pattern, artboards number 2. This is a smaller artboard where I'm keeping my color palette. Those color palettes, by the way, are available on my Pinterest page. You can also pin them for future reference and you're very welcome to use them. Here on the right side, you have your layers symbol. You will be using it all the time. Let's have a look at the layers. The very first view that you will see are your artboards. Let's zoom out. You can make your layer invisible by toggling on and off this little circle on the right side. This is our pattern tile, this is our preview, and this is our color inspiration. If say you wanted to export it, we can hit this vertical lines menu here, choose Export. As you're exporting, you are able to either export the whole document or you can choose which of the artboards you would like to export. I usually export mainly, not the preview because they can have some mistakes. I usually tend to export only the pattern tile. I think in general, working with artboards makes your life easier. Here's another example. There was a time when I uploaded a lot of my patterns into my print-on-demand shops. In order to make my work easier, I worked with three artboards. The first one was the pattern that was 4,000 by 4,000 pixels. The second artboard was the preview of my pattern to see if it is a good repeat design. The third artboard was my POD tile. If you want to check the dimensions of this artboard, let's actually go to Layers. Let's have just the POD artboard selected. Over here you have the transform studio. If you click on it, you get some additional information about your artboard. We see that the whole selection here in blue encompasses exactly this POD artboard. Through this transform studio, you can see right away the dimensions of this artboard which is, for my POD shop, 11,000 pixels square. Let's do the same with the preview. The preview has 8,000 pixels square, and my pattern has 4,000 pixels square. When we created our document, we created our first artboard. You also have the option to rename it. In Affinity Version 2, you have to go to the three dots. Then you see the name Artboard 1. You can click on it, select it, and just rename it may be assets. You can rename it to anything you want. Then when you go back to the layers panel, you see that this artboard has been renamed and it's empty. Let's also create an artboard for our inspiration and reference photos. In order to create a new artboard in Version 2, you go to the three vertical lines, so the hamburger menu. Somewhere in the middle, you have the option to select Artboards. Then you start drawing your artboard and it's done. If you would like to change the dimensions, you can either just drag it by selecting one of the corners with a little circle symbol, or having it selected, you can go to the transform studio here and you can change your dimensions here. For example, let's say, I want the width to be 1,500 and the height to be exactly 2,000. If you would like to move it, just make sure to go back to the move tool, which is here in the upper-left corner because otherwise if you're still in the mode for creating artboards, when you start drawing or touching your screen, you might accidentally create another artboard. Now we can move it. You can move it up or down and remember you can still resize it. But I'll go back. You go back by tapping on your screen with two fingers. Let's say I actually wanted here and I want to drag this artboard below and I want to rename it, so again, three dots to reference. Let's do the same in Affinity Version 1. Let's first rename it, hamburger menu, rename, floral assets, click on it. The first artboard is there, we can rename it. We go to the layers panel. We make sure that our artboard is selected and we choose the three dots which are here on the left. Then we also click on the name and we rename it, for example, to assets. To create another artboard, we go to the menu in the upper-left corner, this little sheet of paper. Then again in the middle, we go to the artboards option. Then we just drag and we create our artboard, and in the same way, we can go here to the transform studio. We can make sure that our dimensions are exactly what we want it to be. For example, 1,500 for the width and exactly 2,000 pixels for the height. In the next lesson, we will populate this reference artboard with our reference photos and some sketches. 9. References & Stock Panel: In this lesson, we will talk about using reference images to create a mood board, and preparing your sketch. For your project, you will need a few sketches for your assets. In my case, it will be sketches of flowers, leaves, and berries because I decided to create more botanical assets. But there are many ways you can go about it. For example, you can do it in a traditional way. Namely, you can sketch the elements that you would like to vectorize later on in your physical sketchbook, such as this one. [NOISE] If you're more of a sketchbook person who likes to draw while watching TV or just sitting on your sofa, then feel free to prepare your sketch of the elements that you would like to turn into vectors in your physical sketchbook. Once you're done, you can just snap a picture from your sketchbook, save it to your camera roll, and then import it directly into Affinity. Then, as always, another great source of inspiration is always Pinterest. I've put one inspiration board for you. You're more than welcome to check it out and pin over some botanical pictures that inspire you. Let me show you this board. Let's go to Pinterest. I will also link this board in the description of this class on Skillshare website. Here a word of advice. I recommend that you focus on shapes and forms. In this class, we will not be tracing any photos. I really encourage you to draw from your imagination [LAUGHTER] rather than try to copy a shape perfectly. As you're working on your sketch, you simply let your pencil flow. Please also make sure that you're not copying anything one-to-one, as you might infringe someone's copyright. If you like a photo from Pinterest and you would like to use it on your mood board in Affinity Designer, you can take a screenshot of it. For instance, I felt really inspired by the shape of this ginkgo leaf. I will open this one and I will take a screenshot of this one leaf, and I will use it later on my mood board. A fantastic way to get reference photos is actually just to simply snap a few pictures on your phone as you maybe take your daily walk. [LAUGHTER] You can also go to a flower store and ask for permission if you could take a few photos. Now, there's also a really fantastic feature directly in Affinity Designer because Affinity has the so-called stock panel and it's available both in Version 2 and in Version 1. I will show you that in a second. Currently, they have a connection to Pixabay. You can again choose the question mark, and here you will see there's a stock panel over here. When you click on it, you see Pixabay. They say that they have over one million high-quality stock images. Serif don't own the rights to those images and videos. It's actually owned by Pixabay. So if you'd like to use them in your design work, you have to agree to their terms and conditions. You can do that by selecting the "I understand" option, and then you have access to the images. Remember from the previous lesson, we have the board where we will be designing and drawing our assets. This is our reference pictures board or our mood board. Let me for example, here you can type something into the search bar and it will give you all the images that you might want to use in your mood board. For instance, I want to type in flowers, berries, and let's see what they have. There's a whole bunch of pictures really. I think the variety is quite great. You will definitely find something that you can use in your mood board. The one may be small disadvantage is that those images are pretty tiny, especially on the iPad. You can test out those images and you can drag them on top of your reference artboard. You just long press, and you drag it onto your artboard. It's usually a little bit bigger. [LAUGHTER] You have to resize it. Then you can put it onto your mood board. Let's actually see if they have ginkgo leaf. They do. [LAUGHTER] I have snapping on this symbol here in the upper right corner. Thanks to the snapping tool, it will help me to snap those images into the edges of this artboard. If you want to deselect it, you either tap outside of the artboard like so, or you use the de-select button X here. Now, this works in exactly the same way in Affinity Designer Version 1. [LAUGHTER] Over here, the stock studio. It's the same process. I would also like to put it into my mood board, those screenshots that I've taken directly from Pinterest. In order to place any image from your camera roll or from your storage on the device, you have to go to the upper left corner hamburger menu. Then you have to select "Place". The tiny difference between Version 1 and Version 2 is that it's the same position pretty much. It just says Place Image. Then you can input your image from photos. It works exactly in the same way. Place from photos. Now I can place the ginkgo. I actually did crop that image, but it's not cropped in here. You can still crop it. I know it's an extra step, but you can still crop it with the vector crop tool, which you can find here. It's exactly the same in Affinity Designer Version 1. You can select the crop tool and you can crop it [LAUGHTER] again. Then you have to remember to go back to the move tool and you can scale it up and down and position it onto your mood board. Let's place a few more images. If it's a screenshot and unfortunately I have to crop it again. [LAUGHTER] Now we will see that my reference artboard includes all the reference photos that I would like to always have at hand to see if I want to add anything into my sketches. Meanwhile, I still love sketching in my Procreate app. I created this sketch sheet along with my color palette inspiration. I also have a tiny mood board here. Let me show you. You're more than welcome to sketch digitally in any program of your choice. Your sketch can also include any color samples from your starting color palette. In the next video, I would like to briefly explain how I prepared my Procreate sketch. If you're a Procreate user, you can follow along, but if not, feel free to skip this lesson. You can skip it to the lesson that follows right after because it's about sketching directly in Affinity Designer using the pixel persona. But as I explain how I went about this sketching in Procreate, I will also be giving tips and tricks on what types of shapes and forms is good to include in your sketch so that you have a good variety and more balanced in your composition later on. I'll see you there. 10. Planning Assets (Procreate Demo): In this lesson, I would like to show you my time-lapse video from Procreate, and briefly explain how I prepared my sketch and my color samples. Let's have a look together. I recommend sketching in Procreate or any other digital drawing tool with a form of a soft pencil. I drew mainly from my imagination and my goal was to get very flowy botanical shapes. You will see for example here that I tried to include the shapes that I liked so much about this gingko leaf from my mood board. Another advice that I could give you here is to include a variety of forms and shapes. I have a few shapes that are more round, a few shapes that are more edgy and a little bit longer. I have bigger blooms, smaller blooms, really tiny berries, super small flowers that will be good as fillers, some shapes that are a little bit more pointy and edgy. I try to spread everything evenly on my canvas so that it will be easier later on to vectorize it in affinity. Here I marked with color the different categories of flowers that I created. The yellow color are the main blooms, they're little bit bigger, they're a little bit more around. The burnt orange color are the secondary flowers that are a little bit more edgy and a little bit longer in their form. Next, I have the really flowy, round as if soft, Ginko inspired leaf shapes that will be pretty good as fillers. On that purple background, you see the more spiky and edgy filler flowers. We also have a few berries, and a few more tiny berries on this soft pink color. The reason why I marked everything in color is that I wanted to show you that there is no color in isolation. What it means is that for every category of those blooms or leaves, I have at least two elements [LAUGHTER]. You will see here that out of this sketch sheet, we will have 28 assets, for example from the category of those main or hero flowers, we will have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, the ginkgo leaves. We have 1, 2, 3, 4 assets. From those berries, we have 1, 2, 3, they have slightly different shape. I recommend that you play around with the angle. One leaf can tip to the left, one can be more straight, and one can tip to the left. Those main flowers, they seem to be very similar, but they still have different shapes. Apart from the hero blooms and secondary blooms and some extra leaves and berries, I also recommend that you include some tiny blooms which you will be able to use as handy fillers, I have one example here for you. I think I reuse those tiny blooms everywhere [LAUGHTER] in my patterns, so I really like them. Let me check if you can see that clearly. Yeah, those are two different patterns, that I was able to reuse those fuller blooms in both of them. Next, directly in Procreate, I played around with a potential color palette. You will also see that I always start with the background, I have also later on reduced the opacity of the sketch, and then I continued laying down the colors on separate layers in Procreate, modifying them up and down, making them brighter and making them darker, until I was happy with how they worked. Every time I work on the color palette, I try out two different color variations, so here comes the second one. For the color palette number two, I just knew I wanted this really intense electric blue, and then I knew that it will be standing in fantastic contrast with this cadmium orange. Finally, when my sketch was done, I kept the domain sketch and I got rid of the background layer so that the background is transparent. I exported this sketch through share as a PNG with a transparent background. Then this is what you saw previously, I have made some copies, I put the two color thumbnails next to each other, I put my sketch in the middle, and then I took a very thick brush, I think, yeah, this one, the heart airbrush, some big chunky brush. With the eyedropper tool, I selected the main colors. I painted the background here first because I always like to see how the colors interact on a given background, not just on white. Then I put some blobs of paints [LAUGHTER]. In this way also in Affinity Designer later on, it will be easier for me to select my colors and to pick them because I think affinity is still quite limited with the management of the color palettes. Procreate is much better with that regard. Now I can go back to designer and I can paste them in here into my mood board. This is my ready-made mood board, you can repeat this process in exactly the same way in version one. Did you know that you can also sketch directly in Affinity Designer. We can do that by using the Pixel persona, and in the next lesson, I would like to show you exactly that. 11. Pixel Persona Sketching: As I've mentioned in the previous lesson, you can also sketch directly in Affinity Designer. The advantage of sketching directly in here is that you have everything in one place. You don't need any physical sketchbook or you don't need to go to any other digital drawing software and then export it and then import it. The reason why I use Procreate and showed it in the previous lesson was that I really loved the brushes there and I've been drawing in Procreate for years and it's hard for me to let go. [LAUGHTER] In order to sketch directly, we have to switch between the Designer persona and the Pixel persona. You can do that in version 2 by clicking here in the upper left corner and switching to Pixel. Then you will see on the left side we have the Paint Brush and this is what we will be using. It's exactly the same in Affinity version 1, the Pixel persona you will find it here and by default, the cursor is usually already on the Paint Brush Tool. The process that I will be showing in Affinity version 2 can be replicated exactly in the same way in version 1. For now, I will stick to my demonstration in Affinity version 2. The first thing that we got to do in the Pixel persona is to hit this plus symbol and to create a Pixel Layer. Version 1, you go to the Layers panel, you make sure that you're on the right artboard, you click here plus and then "Pixel Layer". Next, you can go here on the right side to the Brushes studio to choose your brush. We click on it. If you click right in the middle of it, you also get a scroll-up and down menu where you can see all the brushes that you have. I have to admit I'm not a big fan of their pencils. This is one reason why I actually stick to Procreate. But I would really recommend the Acrylics category. I think it doesn't matter which one. You can choose the very first Matte Acrylic 01 brush. This is where you change the size of your brush. It's the same in version 1. You just scroll here up and down and you manipulate the size of your brush. Let's test it out. Make it maybe a little bit smaller. If you were to create such a sketch directly in Affinity, that's basically how you would do it. Let's try out some other brushes too. This one is pretty. This will be just a sketch and later on, we will lower the opacity of this layer and we will vectorize those shapes. If you want to change the scale, you have to switch to the Move tool and scale it down. You can work on the same layer or for the next shape, you can hit the plus again and create a new pixel layer. In this way, you can move your elements easily because they stay on separate layers. The same process, very flowy lines. It's actually all down to your personal style. Now to the Move tool and we can scale it down. A new Pixel Layer and some filler blooms. Let's try out a new brush. Now I like this one more. This is a Matte Acrylic 02. I like it a lot, maybe I will ditch Procreate, who knows? [LAUGHTER]. It's very flowy and very fluid. I like it a lot. Like I said, in case you want to do everything in one program, you can just stay here. Moving forward, you are free to choose which option is best for you. You can use a photo of the sketch from your physical sketchbook, you can use a sketch from another digital drawing program such as Procreate or you can sketch directly in Affinity. For me personally, I will hit the delete button here. I will remove this sketch. I will go back to the Designer persona and then making sure that I'm on this asset's artboard, I will place an image of the sketch that I created in Procreate, which I exported as a transparent PNG file. Then before I start painting, I will reduce the opacity of this sketch layer. In the Layers panel, I'm on the photo PNG file, three dots menu, and here we have the opacity slider. I will reduce the opacity. One tiny thing that I think would improve my whole process is to have an extra small artboard just with my color palette. Let's create a new artboard. Artboards. I'm going to rename it color palette or just colors. Then I will place again my mood board from Procreate and make sure that I showcase mainly the color palette. I can also vector-crop it. Back to the Move tool and now I can move it again, stretch it out a little bit. Now we're really ready to vectorize. We have our references for inspiration. I also included some past personal work of mine. We have the sketch ready that we're going to vectorize. We lowered the opacity of the sketch and we have the color palette so that picking the colors is much easier. Let's start vectorizing. 12. Organizing Assets in Layers: A few important words about planning. The way we will draw and lay our colors will have a big impact on the usability and efficiency of our assets. In order to understand that, I wanted to show you a few assets that I created in the past, and I would like to show you them in the layers panel so that you see how I organize my layers. The asset studio is right here in between appearance and stock. Here are a few assets that I created in the past, some winter assets, assets for my wonder collection. Actually you can not see that but [LAUGHTER] I'm wearing a t-shirt that was created with those assets. [LAUGHTER] My Autumn Harvest collection, a few birds, some branding assets. I started cooking category, I have some exotic animals and exotic plants and some ******. The sky is the limit. This will be my yoga collection, a whole bunch of florals. Let's take this asset here. When I click on it, I have the option to either delete it or to insert it. Let's insert it. Switching to the move tool to the layers panel, let's find it. I had to go to paste it into my references. Let's bring it to our assets art board. You will see here that I separated not only the colors on different layers, but also the elements. At minimum, I recommend that you separate the blooms from the stems and the leaves. This is still a pretty, let's say, soft separation into layers, because I could have gone even further. For instance, I could have separated all the stems, that would be Number one. I could have separate all the leaves in case I wanted to move them around, that would be layer Number 2. I could have separated those bells, Number 3. Maybe I could have also separated those tiny details on the bells in case I wanted to change their color separately. Separating asset elements onto layers has a huge advantage of being more flexible. You can get rid of some elements in an easier and faster way. You can manipulate the color in a more efficient way. For example if those leaves were on the separate layer, it would have been even easier to maybe remove or to add or to make a copy and add a few extra leaves, it gives you a huge flexibility. It's always better that an asset has more layers. Later on when you're working on a design or on the pattern, you can merge things together, but it's easier to merge rather than doing it the other way round is to separate it. Let's have a look at this friendly tiger. This is a category that I created for kids illustrations, so insert. [LAUGHTER] That's a friendly tiger. What do we have here? Let's have a look into the layers panel. Here, I think, yes, I was really tidy. See we have the whole tiger, which is called tiger. If you want to rename this group, you always go to the three dots, and then you just click on the name here and you can rename it and that goes for all the other layers. We have cheek separately and not only one cheek, but every cheek is separate. Maybe I want different colors, maybe I want to change the size. Here I can change it, I can merge it, but my original asset will stay in the same way I saved it. Here is the color panel maybe I want the cheeks to be red. Dark features like all the line work is darker. All the stripes are separate. Of course you can merge them, but you can get rid of some of them. You can change with the move tool. The location, maybe you want to spread them around a little bit more. Separating those elements into layers gives you much more flexibility. Here's another group for all the white elements. Also those are all separate, do you see that? Maybe I want to remove them, maybe I just want to keep a few. Maybe I want to make a copy. If you want to make a quick copy, by the way, you just hold two fingers on the screen and then you drag the element that you want to copy, and then you can move it, you can go here to this transform studio, flip it horizontally, change the direction. It's just an example. You stay very flexible when you keep your elements unmerged and on multiple layers, and the whole face is one shape. Let's actually put that tiger here so that we remember this lesson about organizing our layers. Now it's in our reference art board. Let's remove this asset and bring back our sketch. Great. In the next lesson, we will start laying our flat colors using the pencil tool. 13. BONUS: Stroke & Fill: [MUSIC] In this lesson, I wanted to give you a very brief introduction to what a stroke and fill is. Because if you're doing graphic design and if you're working with vectors, you will certainly come across those two terms. If we take here our vector flower, you will see that it can be composed of two elements. The first element is the outline of this vector flower and this is called stroke, and the second element is the inside filling of that flower, which is called fill, very logically. Essentially, when you're working with vectors, when you're creating patterns for example or illustrations, you can choose to create only with the strokes. Only with the line work. Or you can choose to work only with the fill without bothering yourself about the stroke. Then there are also some illustrators or designers who prefer to work with both. You can find all the options to change your stroke or your fill in the color studio, which is here, just click on it. The first leftmost full circle is your fill, and the empty inside outline circle which you see to the right is your stroke. Let's have a look at this flower which consists only of the stroke. In this example, this is only stroke, fill is completely empty. You will see it by identifying this icon, which is an empty white circle crossed with a blue line. This means there is no fill, but we do have a stroke. We can also change the color of the stroke. There's also an option to use the so-called stroke studio, which is directly below the color studio here. Namely, and this is also very useful, I use it a lot of times. You can change the width of your stroke, so you can make your lines bigger or smaller. Essentially, you are working on the outline of your object. For example, we can make it super delicate and dainty. Now, let's see the flower with just the fill. In this case, our stroke is off. It's the same symbol, there's a white circle with a blue line going across it. It means there is no stroke. Of course, I can switch it on. Then you will see we have a red stroke here. If you want to switch it off fast, and this is also a very handy gesture, you just tap on the stroke and you make it to move up, so you touch it and you flip it up. Again, let's activate the stroke. If you want to deactivate it fast, you can, of course, choose the symbol here to deactivate it. But it's a super handy gesture, just to flip it up and it's off. Now our last example is when we have both the fill and the stroke. This flower has a blue fill and it has a red stroke. I can also change the stroke for example, or I can make it the same. Let me show you one example when it is very handy to have both the stroke and the fill. We're on the move tool here. You know very well that you can resize your flower by just dragging on the nodes. But, what if I wanted to change just the stalks of those flowers? For example, I wanted to make them a little bit thicker or a little bit thinner. If I go to my layers, you will see that I have my leaves and the stalks of those flowers separately. So I have my leaf selected, I go to the color studio, I make sure that both the fill and the stroke are on, and then I go to the stroke studio and I make it here bigger or smaller. Say, I wanted to make it a little bit thicker. The same with the petals. I can go directly to the petals, then to the stroke studio, making sure that the stroke is also on. Back to the stroke studio. If I wanted it to be a little bit bigger, then I can just expand the stroke. Or maybe I wanted to keep the leaves in the same color, but then the petals, stylistically, maybe I want the fill to be blue, but the stroke to be red. Maybe. [LAUGHTER] I just wanted to show you that those are the options that you have here. You can play both with just using the outlines, which is the stroke. Just using the fill without being bothered about the stroke and without making any small mistakes that there's maybe a stroke somewhere here that you haven't noticed had a different color and then you send this work to a client and they're like, what is this? This is not entirely green or blue. So you just have to make sure that the stroke is off in this case. Or maybe you want to play around with some different color combinations, maybe you want the outlines to be a different color, maybe it's just your style of working, then you have the option to change the stroke over here. Remember about the quick gestures. If you wanted, in this flower, to get rid of the stroke very fast, you just make sure that you have it selected. Sometimes you have to change from the full circle to the stroke symbol. Then you flip it up and it's gone. You can do the same with the fill of course. You can either bring it back and now we have a color. Or you can remove it by flipping up, or directly choosing the icon here that will mean that the field is empty. Those are the essentials that you got to know about stroke and fill. 14. Pencil Tool Base Colors: Let us start by discussing the basics of the pencil tool and the main differences between Version 1 and Version 2 of Affinity Designer. In Version 2, we have it here. The pencil tool, when we click on it, it also lists the vector brush tool. Whereas in Version 1, the pencil tool and the vector brush tool are separated. Thanks to the pencil tool, we can draw vectors and the nature of them will be as if they were hand-drawn. So I personally, I love using this tool because I don't like shapes that are too smooth and too perfect. I like lines that are a little bit more wobbly and imperfect and you can imitate that or you can replicate that very easily using the pencil tool and the shape will still be vector. Once you access this tool, in Version 2, you will get the contextual menu, which gives you some extra options here above. This little icon here is the sculpt mode, which we will discuss in the next lessons. This is where you can set the color of the stroke. The little bucket with the paint gives you the option to switch on the fill and we will be using it a lot [LAUGHTER]. The little icon with the arrow and some small nodes is the auto-close function. I personally don't use the controller mode, but I use sometimes the stabilizer. There will be a separate lesson covering that. In Version 1, we have this menu over here at the bottom. That's the main difference. We also have sculpt. We can change the width of the stroke. We can change the color of the stroke, choose the controller, choose the fill. When we click on the arrow, that leads us to the right. We can choose the stabilizer and the length of the stabilizer. The stabilizer and stabilization, in general, will be discussed in the next lessons. Over here we have the stroke color option. It's the circle with this line that goes across. If we wanted to select the color of the stroke, we could use this eyedropper tool and select the color. If you want to get rid of your stroke, you can de-select it with this icon here. Now there is no stroke. For those bigger flowers, I would like to draw without any stroke and using some fill. So I will activate the fill. Here, I can choose the color of the fill. So I want this color here for my main flowers. I can just use the eyedropper here and now this color is selected. Another way to select your color is once you have de-selected either by clicking outside of the canvas or using the de-select icon, the cross. We can go to the color picker, picker tool over here. So you just click on the Color Picker, you make sure that you don't have anything else selected. Now you can observe here in the color studio, every time I touch, I select this color. But you have to be very careful with that. Let's go back to the move tool. Say I had the tiger selected and then I wouldn't de-select it, I would go to the color picker tool. If I selected some color, it would affect the previously selected element. So let's go back. You have to de-select first color picker. See? Now it changes. Now you can pick colors. You can also pick different colors from your images, from your photos, or your previous work. So I wanted this color here for my blooms. The fill is selected, there is no stroke. Now we go to the layers panel. We close the friendly tiger. We make sure we're on the right art board. We hit the plus symbol and we create a vector layer. I wanted to quickly show you the auto-close difference between version one and version two. So let's select our pencil tool. See? Now I see the fill as I draw. Let's go to the Node Tool. I didn't use the auto close selection here or the auto close options, so this is not closed. Now I would have to take those nodes and connect them so that my vector shape is really closed. Let's go back. Let's remove that. Back to the pencil tool. Now we will make sure that the auto close function is on, making sure you're on the pencil tool. Now the shape is closed automatically, which is fantastic. Unfortunately, you don't have that in Affinity Designer one. Plus, create a new vector layer. Go to the pencil tool. No stroke, switch on the fill. We can either choose the color here or through the color studio. I will just choose some random color, or we could have picked it up from this photo, doesn't have to be the same. Now we can draw using the pencil tool. You will see, unfortunately, there is no auto-close options, so then you have to go to the Node Tool and you have to close this shape manually. That's one pretty big disadvantage when you compare Version 1 to Version 2. I would like to have my sketch photo above, so I will drag it on top of everything else. Creating this vector layer will nest all those elements in one group. So as you create a vector layer, you create a group automatically. Let's continue drawing our flowers. I like lines that are a little bit more wobbly. It closed, it's working [LAUGHTER]. Let's take this one. This one. The sketch is only a rough reference. Of course, I can change my mind and create slightly different shapes. You don't have to stay perfectly in the line. For example, I'm making my line a little bit more wobbly because that's just part of my personal style. Now we have all the main flowers flat colored in purple. What I want to do now is I still want to double-check that my nodes are okay. So this is the thing with the assets. They take some time to create. You need to do some quality checkup. It's a little bit of work, but once everything is done and checked and perfect and perfectly organized, you have those assets forever, and you know they are clean. I would like to select all those flower shapes using two fingers, starting from the first layer, tapping the last. Now you will see that everything is selected. Making sure I'm on the Node tool, I would like to just quickly zoom in and zoom out, see and check if everything is okay. If I want to remove this node here, I can click on the little circle and then select "Delete." I can also change my shapes, play around with the handles. So this is the time for some fine tuning. If you feel you have too many nodes, for example, maybe I don't want this one., you can just drag and select and then it will turn into darker blue. This one is still white. It means it's not selected. Then delete or go back. So I will take a little bit of time to make sure that everything is okay and everything is tidy and I'm happy with my shapes. This one, for example, got a little bit twisted. So I will untwist it and remove of this extra node. Or maybe not. That was actually good [LAUGHTER]. Great. So now I think everything is okay. I can continue drawing different colors. Before I organize those shapes into separate assets, I like to draw all the colors in separate groups. You always create a group when you create a new vector layer. So again, plus, vector layer. I will drag it below. I will go to the color picker. I will pick this color here. Now the color has changed, back to the pencil tool. I'm keeping the same settings, no stroke and a fill. In case there are some imperfections when the nodes close, I like to start in an area that is invisible because it will be underneath another shape that will be on top of it. So I'm going to start here and then draw. It should close itself automatically. In case you create a shape by accident, you can always do the double-tap and remove the previous version. Selecting everything together. I think that I would also like to change the color. In order to do that, you go to the color studio. I like to stick to HSL slider. What I'm going to do is make it a little bit darker, this color, and a little bit more saturated so that the contrast is better. Then I will go to the Node tool and again, double-check if everything is okay. So in this lesson, we covered the basics of the pencil tool. The main differences between Version 1 and 2 about closing the path. We refreshed our knowledge about stroke and fill. We got again more familiar with the node tool. We laid a few flat colors and organized them into layers. In the next lesson, we continue drawing our assets using stabilization options. 15. Brush Stabilization: In this lesson, we continue laying down our flat colors. But this time, we aid ourselves by using the stabilization tool. To demonstrate how this tool works, I will color-in those ginkgo-like leaves. In the meantime, I have laid also flat colors to those light orange, peachy leaves of our main flowers. Before we continue, I wanted to give you a quick look at our layers. On top we have our sketch. Next, I also painted in the middle of the flowers, the first layer of the main flowers, the layer underneath, and the leaves. Now, I would like to group all those four elements. You can also select it by swiping to the right. To keep everything more tidy and transparent, I will group it. I'll go to the three dots menu, and I will rename this group, main flowers. Now I'm going to create a new vector layer and drag it underneath. Making sure that everything is de-selected, I go to the color picker, and I pick the color for those leaves from here. Back to the pencil tool. I just want to make sure that the stroke is off. Now, a small reminder of all the options that we have here. Apart from the auto close, which we can again turn on, here we have the controller settings, for now its set to none. The controller allows us to set the pressure sensitivity of the tool. You have two options with the stabilizer, you can either choose the rope stabilizer or the Window stabilizer. Both of them allow you to smooth the curves of the stroke. Let's check out first the rope stabilizer. You will see a rope or a line that will be dragging behind your Apple pencil. Right now it's very small because I set it up at small, it gives me more flexibility. But if I make it, on purpose, a little bit stronger, then you will see that as if the tail of this rope also get stronger and it enables me less flexibility because the shape is getting smooth out to an extreme. Then a Window stabilizer, it will smooth the stroke by averaging sampled input positions within a Window. You can set up the size of this Window here. Just like with the rope stabilizer, the more you go up, you see that those values are getting higher and higher, the more smooth your shape is going to be. The more you go down, you reduce the Window, you will enable or allow more flexibility to your shape. If I had it, again, all the way up, it would be a little bit difficult to get those fine edges because it really creates a lot of effort to smooth everything out. What I would recommend is to set it up at a lower value. You will see, it's much more flowy, but it still makes everything smoother and really nice and flowy. It's just an example. If you're using a Window stabilizer, if you're making a turn like here and making a turn, I went down, now I'm going up and now I'm closing, this turn will rather be more rounded. Whereas if we use the rope stabilizer, let's check the value here, the Window stabilizer was set at 16. Let's do the same comparison, set it up also more or less to 16 or 17. Let's try to create a similar shape. With the rope stabilizer, I can make much more dramatic turns, therefore, the rope stabilizer will allow you to create sharper corners. If you wanted more round and flowy, I would opt in for the Window stabilizer but not set too high. If you wanted a little bit more edgy, a little bit sharper corners, then I would go with the rope stabilizer and also not set too high. Those leaves, I want them to be rounded and flowy, but I still want to retain some sharp edges, especially when I'm drawing the stock, this lower part of the leaf. That's why I will go with the rope stabilizer set up exactly to what I had, about 17 pixels, 20 pixels, a rather low value. Just like in the previous lessons you will see here the stroke, so the outline is off and we only have to fill. Now, let's draw those leaves. Let's make sure that we have a new vector layer and we're drawing on the correct layer. Let's start drawing. Auto close is activated. When we're done with our shape, it will close itself automatically. Nice. Leaf Number 1. Now starting somewhere below here, leaf Number 2. It closed itself automatically, but maybe I will adjust it. I will go back to the node tool and move this little node here. Select the under one. Where is it? Here, the node tool and fix this node a little bit. Now I will select those two leaves and I will group them because they will be one asset with two elements inside of the group. Now let's draw the rest of the leaves using the rope stabilizer. After you're done drawing, it's good to switch back to the node tool and fix some small mistakes. If necessary, you can again click somewhere on the path and you will add a new node. I'm happy with those leaves. I will rename them to ginkgo leaves. I also wanted to briefly mention where you can find this stabilization option in Affinity Designer, Version 1. Let's head to Version 1. We click on our pencil tool and as opposed to Version 2, we have our menu at the bottom of the screen. We have to click this arrow in the right corner. This is where we can choose our stabilization option. We can either choose no stabilizer. Here is the rope stabilizer and this is where by dragging and lifting it up and down, we can change the value of this stabilizer. Next is the Window stabilizer, the same. You just drag and drop your Apple pencil or your finger on the screen and you move up and down and the value of the Window will change. You can also input it manually by just tapping on that numerical value and then you can adjust it through the menu. It's also very easy. In the next lesson, we will draw our secondary flowers, and this time we will aid our work using the sculpt option. 16. Sculpt Mode: In Designer Version 2, let's start by activating the Sculpt option. The icon for the Sculpt Mode is just an icon of a pencil. Right now it's deactivated, it's on a gray background, and when you click on it, the background turns into black, and now Sculpt Mode is on. Let's create a new vector layer for our secondary flowers. Making sure that everything is deselected, we go to the Color Picker, and we pick the color for our petals. Back to the Pencil Tool. The Sculpt is on, Stroke is off. Fill is on, we have this bright orange color and Auto-close is on. We don't have any controller on and this time we will deactivate stabilization. When the Sculpt Mode is enabled, any selected pencil stroke can be reshaped or continued. Let's see the sculpt option in action, making sure that I'm on the right layer, Pencil Tool is selected, I start from the bottom of this flower, and I draw it in a very rough way, following roughly my sketch layer. This has to be fixed, so I'm switching to the Node Tool. I would like to delete those and maybe this one too, drag it a little bit down and back to the Pencil Tool and now I would like to show you what the Sculpt Mode can do. You can build on that shape. You can start with this preexisting node, create something outside of this shape, and now we don't have any extra shape. It's still the same petal shape. We can close this gap here, for example. It takes a little bit of getting used to but it can be a pretty powerful tool. Cool. We have only one shape that we sculpted together, so to say. Now, let's draw this one. Can start with this one and even though I'm lifting my Apple Pencil off, when I continue, it will still be counted as the same shape. Lifting my pencil off, see it joins automatically the rest of the shape. Now I'm switching back to the Node Tool and I'm removing some nodes, just a few cosmetic adjustments, dragging it a little bit down. This one looks good. Again, selecting everything, going to the Node Tool, and checking if everything is okay. Sometimes it's also useful to switch off the sketch layer, deselect, and have a rough look if the shapes are okay. I like those wobbly lines that's why I did it on purpose that I didn't use any stabilization because I like this wobbly, messy, organic look to the outlines. I'm going to create a new vector layer. Actually it will stay on top, and I'm going to disable Sculpt and color those leaves separately. I wanted to show you here the difference between the Sculpt Mode on and off. Before that, the Sculpt Mode was on all the time so as we were adding new elements, every time we lifted our Apple Pencil off the screen it didn't matter because it still joined together the original shape, and it didn't put those extra strokes into separate layers whereas when we're using the Pencil Tool without the Sculpt Mode on, every time we lift off our Apple Pencil off the screen, it's going to create a new layer for us and each of those shapes will get a dedicated layer. Now we have a lot of different shapes of the same color that actually belong to a particular flower and there are so many layers that I'm starting to lose the visibility here. I would like to find, locate the leaves, and the elements that belong to this one particular flower and to group them. Beforehand, I make my photo layer with the sketch invisible because it can a little bit mess up with my selection. I start with having one element selected, then I press one finger onto the screen, and I continue selecting the elements that belong to this one flower. Then I hit the "Group" icon and select the Group option. Let's group this one. One finger, press, and hold on the screen, tap, tap, tap, and "Group". In the next lesson, we will get more familiar with the stroke panel. See you there. 17. Stroke Panel: Now we have to draw all the lines of our stems, for example here, the stems of this flower, here, here, and here. There are two ways to go about it, for example here we continued drawing the stems of those leaves by using only the fill and not using the stroke. Another option is to use the stroke and to deactivate the fill. Let's deselect everything. Let's create a new vector layer. Here is good. Let's go to the pencil tool. Now, we deactivate the fill. We're not using the fill anymore, and instead we will be using stroke. We can also pick the color by using the color picker. Then we can swipe up to deactivate the fill, and we can select a new color for the stroke. The important thing is to switch off auto close because there will be very strange shapes happening. Auto close is off, and my fill is off. On the pencil tool, let's draw a line. Again, this is only stroke. Let's go to the color studio to make sure fill is off. There's a cross, the empty circle, and stroke is set to a color. There are more options to edit this line. In order to do that, we have to go to the stroke studio, which is right underneath the color studio here. As it happens, I used to draw when I was designing another pattern with this type of stroke. This is the width of the stroke and this is the pressure sensitivity of this stroke. The program simply remembered my previous settings. In order to reset it, you can tap with your finger on any of the nodes on this pressure sensitivity panel. Once you tap on a node, it will get selected, and it will give you two options. You can either delete just this one node or you can reset the entire pressure. That's what we're going to do. As you reset it, this should be the starting position for most of you, especially if you haven't been using the program before. This is the default pressure sensitivity of this line. There are two points. There's a starting point and there's the ending point, and they're on the same level. You will see that this line has exactly the same thickness along its way from the beginning, all the way till the end. The width of this line right now happens to be 4.9 points. You can adjust the width of the line, and you will see it in real time as it changes. If you have any particular width in mind, you can tap on this numerical value here. It will open the menu, you can erase the previous value and you can input your new value. Over here, you can also change the way this line ends. Right now we have the cap selected on the default rounded cap. You also have this cut option and this more square like option with more of edges at the ends. You can also set up the width of your line from the menu. Even if the stroke studio or the stroke panel is closed, you will see here your line, it has 14.2 points. You can use your finger to bring it up or down. You just have to tap and long press, and then you can bring it down or up. Let's leave it a little bit thicker because I wanted to show you how you can get really interesting results playing around with the pressure sensitivity panel. You can for example create a taper. By bringing this line down, I will be editing the starting point. Now you will see that the starting point has become more pointy. It has got a taper. We can also create any extra nodes along this line, for example I will tap on the middle of the line here, this created a new node, and I will set it all the way up. I will bring this end points down to create a taper on the other side of the line. Now those settings will be remembered by the program. Let's deselect, zoom out a little bit, see, and now the settings remembered our previous settings. If we go back to the stroke panel again, it has exactly the same width and the same pressure sensitivity. The way you draw your strokes will heavily depend on your personal style. My style is more jittery or wobbly. I like movement and more dynamic lines. That's why here I wanted to show you a little trick on how to create a more jittery line. In order to do that, we keep our taper at the beginning and at the end and on each sides of the middle line, we will create two extra points. 1, 2 and 1, 2. Now this point will go a bit down and this point will go up. You can see in real time how this will affect your line. The same here. This point will go down, and the other point will go up. In essence, we are creating a shape here on our pressure sensitivity panel that looks a bit like a crown. Let's make it a little bit thinner. Now we have created the jittery line. I'm going to keep those settings so that I can draw the stems for my flowers because I like my lines to be a bit more uneven. Making sure that I'm on the right layer. I will bring back my sketch and I will draw those stems here. Let's have a quick look at Affinity Designer, Version 1, the stroke studios in the same place. Here you can adjust the width. Here you can also modify the pressure sensitivity. Let's draw the rest of those stems. I'm starting here because my starting point is a little bit thicker. I love it [LAUGHTER] The last one is here. Beautiful. Now here we have both the leaves of the secondary flowers. Here we have their petals, here we have their stems. Again, for more clarity, I will swipe to the right to select those three groups. I will group it. Click on the three dots menu and rename it secondary flowers. Now, I would like to draw those berries. I switched to this electric blue. I will create a new vector layer. Go to my pencil, maybe reduce the width a little bit and I will draw those berries here. It's a little bit too thin, so we will pump it up. I think I'll go to the stroke panel again and I will make some adjustments. That looks good. I will keep drawing the stems. Now we have many separate layers. We will keep this one in one group and create a new vector layer to deal with the rest of the berries. I'm playing around with the width of my line, making it a little bit smaller for the smaller berries. This one we will also keep in one group. The advantage of gripping it like that. We have all those shapes separately, so we can modify it separately. We can even recover it separately, or we can delete it altogether. That's why I'm going to keep it like that. But in case I wanted to recolor it, then I can do it from the entire group level. Then I go to the color studio and I select a different color in the entire group is affected. But let's go back to our original blue. Let's speed up this video and finish the rest of the berries. I've noticed that the lines of this asset are a little bit too thin. We can find it here in the layers panel, and then we can go to the stroke studio, and we can adjust the width of the stroke for all those twigs and branches. But what is also cool about having everything on a separate layer is that we can select, let's go to the Move tool to do that, we can select just one line, and then we can change the settings just for this one element and go to the stroke panel and adjust the width. We can also change this one here. Let's see which one is it. This one and we can make only this one a little bit thinner. Let's summarize what we learned so far. We started with purely laying flat color, no stabilization whatsoever. We were using the fill and not using the stroke, no stabilizer. Next, we learned how to use the stabilizer. We learned about two stabilization types, the Rope stabilizer and Window stabilizer. Finally, we took advantage of the sculpt option that we were sculpting the petals of those secondary flowers. All this time throughout those lessons, we were only using the fill am not using the stroke. In this last lesson about laying flat color, we took advantage of the stroke. We created the stems of the flowers and the stems of the berries. In the meantime, behind the scenes, behind the camera, I will lay down the remaining flat colors for the berries and those smaller filler blooms. I will see you in the next lesson where we will be adding some extra details and dimension to those vector assets by using clipping masks. 18. Re-grouping Assets Part1: We're halfway through our work. I wanted to take this opportunity and show you one more time how I organize my layers, and how we need to regroup them so that we have one complete group per asset. Let's go to the layers panel and let's see what we have here. We have three art boards for the assets, for our color palette and for our references. Let's open our assets art boards. On the very top we have our sketch, but for now we can also make it invisible, switch it off. I have also renamed it to sketch. Then we have our main flowers. When we opened this group, we will see that right now we have everything sorted out by color. In the meantime, I have also added those line details. I only use the stroke for those lines as shown in the previous lesson. I made sure that this line has a more of a tapered a pointy edge to it. Then we have the blooms and the leaves separately, as you will see for each of those groups, the elements are sorted by color, but we will change that. Then we have our secondary flowers separately. Our ginkgo leaves, big berries are here. I also added some details onto those berries with strokes. Small berries are over here, spiky filler flowers, those two and round filler flowers. I'm happy with my colors, so I will proceed to reorganizing my groups. You will have to do the same. it's a little bit of work, but it pays off in the end because you will have a very tidy assets ready to be saved with just a few clicks. Let's start with the main flowers. Because it's already divided into groups, I am able to switch off the visibility of the other assets so that I can see better the power of grouping. It's just so much more neat when you're using groups. Now I'm going to leave only the main flowers, open them and I will group them. What we want right now, all the main flowers are in one folder. Everything is divided by color. What I want is I want this flower completely separately with all the elements, the middle elements, Number 1, this other middle part, Number 2, the lines will be Number 3. Then the body of the flower four and five. Right now, they're spread across those color groups. We will have to put them into one folder so that this one flower is in one group. Then we have group Number 2. For this flower with all the five elements. Then this will be our third one. Our first one with those leaves here, and our fifth one. Out of all this group, we will have five unique assets, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. To do that, we have to select the elements that are right now stored in those color groups, and we have to take them out of the groups. You can either select them by swiping to the right. But sometimes there's so many elements you'll see like 50, 100 elements. It's easier to start by selecting the first one and then tapping with two fingers on the last one. That we selected everything, we long press, and we drag it out of this group. It becomes empty. I'm hitting this delete icon to remove it. Next, this purple middle. I take it out of the group and I remove this group this can stay. This is just one element. It's grouped because we have all those lines separately, but it has to stay grouped. The body of the flowers, let's take them out too, and delete the empty group. By the way, about the visibility. Again, it's a matter of personal preference. Right now, all my elements are on this checkered background. Some people like it, some people prefer other settings and you can change the settings in the layers panel. You go to the hamburger menu here. You can check the checkerboard background or you can check it off. Then you will have this. We can keep this for a moment so that you can see maybe you prefer this one because what I want to show you is when we take off those curves out of this group, then you will see that this is empty and sometimes if you have the checkered background, you cannot see it very well. Now I see this is empty. I have to take out all the leaves and remove this group. We will also have to group those leaves later on. Now we have all those elements that belong to those main flowers out of their groups. We click on any layer in that group. We make sure that we are on the move tool. Now we can start by selecting those flowers that are somewhere on the outside. Then press halt, drag across. It should select the elements of just this flower. Let's zoom out. The selection only includes this little flower. With one exception, we also have a group of those lines in here. We have to find this manually. Then we have to select it, include it into our selection by swiping to the right. We can also double-check by switching off the visibility. When all those layers are selected, it's enough to switch off the visibility of just one. If everything disappears, then you will know, this is the one. [LAUGHTER] Now the single flower is selected and which is the middle icon to group it. We select "Group" and now we have our first flower grouped. In order not to include it by accident somewhere else, I can switch it off. Hit on another layer somewhere within that group. Click outside of the selection, selected with the move tool. Also makes sure to find those lines. I think those are the ones we can turn off the visibility. Included the lines, making sure that everything belongs to this one flower. The selection indeed includes only this one flower. Hit "Group" group it, turn it off, hits another random layer within the group. Now we have three more flowers which we need to group into their dedicated layers. I wanted to show you one piece of information about the move tool. We can deselect by hitting outside of those elements. Now we can drag our selection over this main flower here. The trick is, in order to include all those elements in one selection, they really have to be included with this selection. Let's get that random layer again. If I hit it like this, I included most of the flower, but I didn't include the entirety of this lower part. It didn't get selected. I really have to make sure that everything is within this blue line. Even though I'm touching with my selection, a bit of this other flower and the other flower here at the bottom, they will not be included in the selection because they would be if the selection really included everything. If something is a little bit out of the selection, you see this leaf was not included because part of it sticks outside of the selection. We don't want to include this flower here. We have everything selected, making sure that also those grouped lines belong together. Turn off the visibility everything okay. Hit "Group". When you switch off the visibility, it will be easier to select the remaining flowers. Hit some other random layer in that group. Let's maybe do this one. Make sure you're also selecting the strokes. This one is good. Group, switch off the visibility, and now we have this one left. It will be super easy. Let's bring them back. Now we have one group with the main flowers, but each of them has a dedicated group. This is already a setup that will be very useful for saving them as assets. Let's also rename them because even though you don't have to rename all the tiny bits that are inside of this group, I would still recommend that you at least rename the top-level three dots group. What shall we name it? Let's name it big flower. Copy it and I will rename all those flowers in the same way. Unfortunately, you have to go one by one to rename them even though they have the same name. I will add here plus leaves to make this name more unique. Now my recommendation to see things better, you can move them around on the canvas. Right now, I have snapping switched on. Let's switch it off. You can move them, you can scale them up and down. You can select any of those flowers by simply tapping on it. It's very easy, and then you can scale it up and down. You don't have to be afraid about losing any quality because everything is a vector. You're not really losing any quality in here. That's the beautiful thing about vectors. Right now we have five assets, divided into their dedicated groups. We will keep on adding details to them in the following lessons, but you could theoretically already save them as assets. I make them bigger so that any future editions are easier because I can see better. Now I'm done with this group. I will turn it off, and I will deal with my secondary flowers. 19. Re-grouping Assets Part2: Before I speed this video up, let's do this one more group together. Selecting all the leaves, taking them out of the group, and removing the empty group. Selecting all the petals, dragging them out of the group, and deleting the empty group. Now our three stems, you see those, taking them out of the group. Removing the group. Now we can continue selecting this flower here. Everything has been selected. The leaves, the petals, and the stem group. Then we can group this one. Again, making sure that everything is included in the selection. Everything correct. Let's group it. Our last flower group. Now we can rename it. You can rename it as you like. I will rename it a meadow flower because it looks like a meadow flower for me. I will copy the name and I will basically give the same name to all the three flowers, because moving forward when I create a design for a t-shirt or maybe a repeat pattern, it doesn't really matter that they have a unique name, each of them. Let's rotate it. Now they will have their dedicated space. On the move tool, I can reposition them and make them a little bit bigger because I will be adding some extra details in the next lessons to the petals and to the leaves, and I want to see better. One asset, another asset, and another asset. We have to repeat the steps for the remaining groups. Once you're done with one group, you make it invisible. Then you open the other one. You take out the elements from groups. You group them together. You position them as you like on the art-board, and then you make them invisible and you move forward till you have everything regrouped. I'm going to regroup now the remaining assets and I will meet you in a minute. [MUSIC] We're done, in Affinity Version 2. Here are our main flowers, five assets. Our secondary flowers, three assets. Our ginkgo leaves, four assets. Big berries, another round of three assets. Smaller berries, another round of four assets. Spiky filler flowers, two assets. Round filler flowers. How many do we have here? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Seven assets. This entire process that I have just shown to you in Version 2 also applies to Affinity Designer Version 1. I can show you quickly the icons here, the same gesture supplies. For example on that big flower, if I wanted to group the petals in accordance with the color, I tap with two fingers starting from the first layer, tapping the last layer, and it will select everything together. The grouping icon is also here in the middle. But this time you don't have any extra menu. You just click one time and it's already creates a group for you. Let's also group this color. You can also swipe to right to select them. Group. The three dots menu is here. By clicking on the group name, you can rename it. If you also want to drag something, it works in exactly the same way as in Version 2. Now we have all our vector assets grouped into their dedicated folders, and in the next lesson, we can keep on adding some cool details by using clipping masks. 20. Clipping Masks: After reorganizing our groups, things will get a bit easier now. Before that, once we start to do our sketch, we focused on our assets as part of a consistent portfolio. We made sure that they match each other. We made sure that they have a variety of shapes and scale for a good balance. That's why we were doing everything on a single sheet, each flower next to each other. At first, we have everything grouped by color, and now we will be focusing on adding the details per asset or per asset category. This is why I switched off the visibility of all the other assets. We will start by focusing on adding some extra details onto our main flowers. Those are our hero flowers and they need to look a little bit better than that, for example we are missing some details on the leaves and I thought it will be a perfect opportunity to introduce to you clipping masks. Layer clipping is a process where you place one object inside of one another and you create a parent-child relationship between them. Then scaling or recoloring the child layer, the layer that is underneath, will have no influence on the parent's layer and vice versa. You will see that clipped objects can be edited independently. By the way, this process that I will be showing to you now works in exactly the same way in Affinity Designer version 1. We will be adding some extra details onto our leaves, so maybe we will switch off the other flowers. We will open the two groups with those two assets that have the leaves. We will also group the main bloom into a dedicated group. Switch off the visibility the same for this flower here. We can have groups in groups, in groups and it's all actually depending on how we'd like to work. If you like a lot of layers in one list, then of course you don't have to get involved in grouping. But personally, I like putting some layers that belong together into a group because they make everything look more transparent and I can for example switch them off faster to gain a better view of what I wanted to add that next. Okay, we will be using again the pencil tool. We will be adding some extra layers of color onto those leaves using only fill and no stroke. We are switching on the fill and we make sure that the auto close is on. We can make one, test the blob, and sometimes it doesn't quite click. For example, here I have to switch off again the stroke. Next we can change the color. I would like to have a darker hue of this peachy tone. I can deselect what I have. Go to the color picker and pick this other tone and you will see the change in the color over here. We have only fill and the auto close is on. For this, I'm not using any stabilizer. Now I will start drawing my first shape and then I will go to the Layers panel. I will check which leaves needs to be clipped. It's this one here. Then I will place this layer on top of the leaf. Now we have created the parents and child relationships. This is a clipping mask, it works in a similar way in programs such as Procreate. There's an arrow, you can open, it's as if we created a group essentially because there's an arrow here, you can open it and see what's inside and inside of this Parent's shape. We have a child shape which is this clipped color object. Let's tackle this leaf now. Let's clip this color to this leaf and then this one is left. I'm selecting it. Still, on the pencil tool, I start to draw my shape and I clip it. We can also select those clipping masks, go to the node tool and we can make sure that we're happy with our nodes. If the visibility is somehow not good, you can just start with one. As usual, you can tidy it up. You can remove some nodes. Some of them will be redundant. Now, we can also switch on the other flower and go through the same process. The alternative would be to create a new vector layer and then drag it into that leaf. Now the clipping mask, it's already clipped, so the drawing experience is different. Because maybe it will help you to see better. Perhaps the one disadvantage is that every time you create a new vector layer and you start drawing shapes, it will create a group that will list all the objects that we will be drawing on it. I don't like too many unnecessary groups. I prefer to first locate the object, having it selected, making sure I'm on the pencil tool. Then I start to draw. Then I like to clip it and maybe then, I like to go to the Node Tool and make any adjustments. You can also go to the Move tool and move it around. Just to repeat, I find the object I want to clip. I keep this selection. I go to the pencil tool and then I start drawing, but this is again my personal preference. Then I clip it. Remember also that when you clean your asset, it will be cleaned forever. It is a little bit of work, but you do it only one time and then you save it to your Assets Library and they're ready to use and they're super clean, beautifully labeled. Everything is neat and tidy. Okay, I'm happy with how it looks, but I have one extra color which is a little bit darker. I would like to keep on adding additional layers, making sure that I deselected everything. I go to the color picker, and I pick this darker shade of orange. Back to the pencil tool. I select the leaf that I want, and I see the selection. We already have a group, so I go inside of it. If you already have one clipping mask, you click on it and you start drawing something new that will get a dedicated layer. It will already be clipped into a clipping mask. Let me show you. Pencil tool is on, I start drawing. You see it's already a clipping mask and now I go one leaf after another. I open the group. I select the other clipping mask that is already in, and then I start drawing. Again, bring back our flowers, de-select everything, and now we see the difference. I'm going to group those leaves together now. We have to leave separately and the flower separately. I think I'm pretty much done with this assets category. Now, I will go through the same process, stylizing those secondary flowers here. I will speed up this video and I will see you in a few minutes. [MUSIC] Okay, our secondary flowers are done. The last thing I would like to do is to sort those layers of clipping masks. Because on the petals I decided to use not only one extra color but two colors. I would like to also group the clipping masks within my parent's layer. I will group those colors. The advantage of having them grouped is now grouped by group. I can make any color adjustments. For example, if I want this one to be a little bit brighter, I can go to the sliders. I can change the color, I can adjust the brightness. It's much easier to do it on the group layer. This flower is done. This is the entire group. We have to leave separately, the stem separately and the petals separately. I can close this group. Let's group those clipping masks together and those, organizing them by color. Now I can say that we're done. In the next lesson, we will tackle those ginkgo leaves and I will be showing you how to apply not only fill but also stroke as a clipping mask. 21. Clipping Lines & Stroke: I would like to show you here how to apply and stroke lines as a clipping mask onto shapes. Let's deal with those ginkgo leaves. Let's open this group. Start with the big leaf here, we will go to our Pencil tool and we will change slightly our adjustments. As a reminder, in order to draw only with the stroke rep, right now we have to fill and the stroke is empty. We deselect. We remove the fill by swiping up and we adjust the stroke to some color. We have to switch off the fill here. We have to switch off the auto-close because it will do some strange shapes. Let me show you what I mean. If you have the auto-close on when you're drawing only with the stroke, it will try to auto-close. It will try again to join the first node with the last node. If you switch it off, then it's all fixed. [LAUGHTER] Remember in the lesson about the stroke panel, I told you that if you're playing around with your stroke settings, it will remember your last settings. I would like to add some extra lines onto those ginkgo leaves just like in my sketch over here. I will start at the bottom, so at the stem of the leaf and I will be moving up. I would like to design my stroke first. Knowing the direction in which I'm going to move, I will go to the Stroke panel and I will make a few adjustments. This will be my starting node and this will be my ending node. You can see a square button, the red. This is the beginning and this is the end. Also on the Pressure panel here, this is the beginning and this is the end. I would like my beginning to be a little bit wider so I'm going to grab this node over here and drag it a little bit so that it gets thicker. Then I will keep the rest of the settings as they are because again, very typical for my style, I would like to achieve a line that is not perfectly smooth and it's a little bit more jittery. Next, I will change the color of my stroke. I can also do it on that test line. Where was that? I can either grab it from here or from my color palette here. I would like to have this darker, navy blue. You can either do it from the color picker. Again, as a refresher, you see the color changes here, whatever you pick. Or alternatively, making sure that you're on the stroke so the circle that is empty inside, you get the color picker icon here. You drag and drop it onto your color and you select it in this way. I selected white. [LAUGHTER] The disadvantage is that once you select it, it's been selected but you still have to click on it so that it gets applied to your stroke or to your field. But now it's deselected back to the Pencil tool. I'll go to the Layers panel and I will remove this test line. Then I will select the leaf that I would like to edit. You see the marking that it has been selected and I will start drawing. As I go over here, I can also adjust the thickness of my line so I'll make it a little bit thicker and I will clip it. So now it's clipped. Then I will draw another line. As I go, I can also adjust its size and its width over here. I want a variety of lines, I want some of them to be a little bit thicker and some of them to be a little bit thinner. Every next line that I'm drawing is already creating a child layer. It means it's been clipped to this original leaf layer over here. I want this one to be a little bit thinner, I want more variety. Of course, this thinness will be remember and the next line that I'm going to draw will keep the same settings. That looks pretty good. I will stop here and I will move to my next leaf, which is going to be this one. I make sure it's selected. I have my pencil tool selected painting only with stroke. I draw my first line and then after drawing, I change its width. Then I drag it onto this parent layer and I create a clipping mask. I continue creating new lines, changing the width. Only this one line because it's on a dedicated layer will be affected by my changes in the size, and I draw a few more lines in here. Let's make this one even thinner. I move from the bottom up because this is what I set up in my pressure sensitivity panel. If I did the other way round, I would start with a thicker beginning of the line. Now I'm going to group this color because I'm planning to add an extra color, which will be much brighter. Let's group those clipping masks together based on their color. Starting again with the biggest leaf, I am moving to its clipping masks with this darker color. Then on the Pencil tool, just making sure I'm on it, I will draw one more line, and I will change its color either from here, from the color picker, or here. You can just pick this color. The line was changed back to the Pencil tool. I would like to drag this darker color on top. Let's make this line thicker and let's continue drawing with this color that is brighter underneath. I think it will create an interesting effect. I'm also changing the width of the line so that I have some interesting variety in my shape. After I'm done, I'm grouping it again. Now, this is my main leaf. It has two groups of clipping masks. One group with the darker color, which is on top, and one group with the lighter color, and I will repeat this process with the rest of the leaves. I think I would like to experiment with this color here. I would like to see if it's going to look better when it's a little bit brighter. Again, the advantage of having everything in one group is that I can manipulate the color on the group level. I don't have to go in and select every single layer manually or even through gestures. I can just make sure that I'm on the right group. In this case, I will be selecting multiple groups because they all have the same color. I just have to make sure that first of all, I open everything. I select one and then I swipe to the right to select the rest of them. I think for better visibility because I have some darker colors in here, I will bring back the checkboard from the menu. Now, what's better? I think with lighter colors, the other option was better and with darker colors, the checkboard is better. Swiping to the right to select this one single color. Then I go to the color studio. I remember that I'm only painting in the stroke. First I will select with the color picker tool the original color. I will tap it once so that the stroke gets this particular color assigned to it. Zooming out so that I see better. Now, I can play around with the luminance, and I see the changes happening across those clipping masks and across all those assets. I can see if I wanted even darker towards black, lighter, changing the saturation, bringing it down or bringing it up, or changing the hue completely. I'll go back to my original color, I think, and make it a tiny bit lighter. For assets already, Number 1, Number 2, Number 3, and Number 4. In the next lesson, we will be dealing with adding some extra details to those round filler flowers. I wanted to show you how to utilize blend modes or blending modes in affinity. 22. Blend Modes: In this lesson, I wanted to show you how you can utilize blend modes in affinity or blending modes. I wanted to continue adding a few more details to those round filler flowers. I think in themselves this could already be a good set of assets, but I wanted to add an extra dimension of detail. Now, I wanted to demonstrate a small trick that will look good against a background. We will start by creating a new vector layer that will be right underneath everything else. On that new layer, we will create our background. To create a background, we can use the rectangle tool. This tool is in exactly the same spot in Affinity Designer version 1. We click on the Rectangle tool. We go to the color studio, we set up our field. We take the color picker, we set up this for our fill, and the same color for our stroke. Now back to our assets are at birth. We started drawing our rectangle. Then we head to the move tool. We make sure that snapping is activated. We position the corners of this rectangle into the corners of the art board and we make a square out of it. Once you have snapping on and you're trying to adjust something perfectly, you will see those guiding lines and they will give you a hint that everything is aligned properly. Now we have our background layer. We can do the same in Affinity Designer version 1 very quickly. Create a new vector layer. Select the rectangle tool. We'll just select some color, draw our rectangle. It has both filled-in, fill-in stroke. We can reduce the stroke to, let's actually click on it and change it just to one point. Now the reason why I wanted to show this step again in affinity version 1 is that snapping is in a slightly different position. In version 2, it was in the upper right corner. Then version 1 that's in the lower left corner here. You will recognize that it's on by seeing this blue circle around it. Now we have the background layer in version 1, and in version 2. We can also create here a new vector layer just to nest those new shapes. You can drag them all the way underneath. Then we head our pencil tool. We switch back on the fill and the auto close option. We select the same color using the color picker tool. Now we can draw a shape just to test it. If it hasn't changed then you can click on it and you can make your adjustments over here in the color studio or here on your menu. I'm adjusting the fill. I'm moving to the stroke and I'm flipping it up to switch it off completely. Let's remove this and let's test it again. Now it's working. On this layer, we have the shape that we have just created. We can go to the three dots menu. You remember that we also have the opacity slider over here. Right underneath, we have our blend modes or our blending modes. By default, every shape is set to a normal blending mode. But there's a whole variety of those blending modes. The most popular one is multiply, and this is what we will be using in a second. It makes the color darker, and it's really great for adding some extra shadows. Color Burn is also interesting along with linear burn. I also tend to use quite a lot screen and add because they're really good for adding highlights. Let's make one of those shapes and screen. Let's put two fingers on the screen and make a copy. Whoops, we have to be on the move tool. Let's make a copy of the same shape. Now this duplicate of this copy, let's change it to multiply so that I can show you what the difference is. Now I can select both of those shapes. I'm pressing and holding one finger on the screen, tapping the other shape. We're still on the move tool. I can make them a little bit smaller. Now, I'm moving them over those little flowers and dragging them above so that you can see and understand those blending options more clearly. Once those blending mode layers are on top of our normal mode layers, they're able to interact with the colors that are beneath them. This shape here is set to multiply, which will make anything that is underneath it a little bit darker. We can see here that this red got darker and this purple got darker. Also, it interacts with our background. If we for example change the background color, this purple set to multiply will also interact with the color of the background. That's why you can create really, really interesting effects later on when you're using blending modes and you see how they interact with the background layer. For instance, we can, let's go to our swatches we can see some other colors. You can get pretty unexpected color combinations. Now, this multiply layer interacts in a very interesting way with our background layer as well. This is really cool, and the other shape is set to screen, which makes everything lighter. We see that the shape of the flower, the petals got brighter and also those red lines, the glider and this red turned into pink. I will be doing exactly that. I will be drawing some extra shapes onto our flowers and a bit outside of the flowers. We get interesting color combinations, both when the blend mode interacts with our main shape, which is this little blue. By drawing some shapes also outside of our bloom, it will interact in a very interesting way with the background color as well. Let's go back to the original color of the background. Now, I'll show you two ways in which you might want to work. I choose for the fill the same pink color. Auto close again, it's closed. I start to draw in one shape. Then afterwards, I will set this layer to multiply. I will go to the three dots menu. Choose, multiply, de-select, and see if I like it. In case I like it, I can just open the group with this flower here, and I can drag it where I wanted. For example, I can put it right underneath those red lines or I can put it on top of them so that they are also included. Let's use the Move tool, move this flower, and now we have a completely different assets. That's option number 1. Now let's tackle this flower here. Another option to see better what I'm doing would be to go directly into the group of that filler flower to add a new vector layer, drag it in place in case it pops right here to the top. Then I would go to the pencil tool. Make sure that this layer is set to multiply right away from the very start. Now I will draw on this new flower. I would see in real time how the shape is affected. I think this one is maybe a little bit more efficient because you can see better what you're doing. The advantage of using this approach is that you can see things better as you draw. You just have to remember that multiply is set on the vector layer that we created. Let me show you. If I go to the menu, I see it's multiplied. But the shape, the curve that I created inside, it's not set to multiply, it's set to normal. I would still leave it at that. If I want to tidy up, I would probably go in and turn this one into multiply, drag it out of this group and delete this unnecessary nesting. But for now I'm happy. Sometimes when you create assets, it's all about being fast because it cannot be stuck forever. Trying to make your groups perfect, rename everything perfectly. Sometimes you just want to be fast and efficient and create a lot of assets at the same time. Now, let's tackle this little bloom. We will repeat the first approach where we first draw and then we set everything to our blending mode, pencil tool, trusting that I know where I am, I'm drawing my shape. Then afterwards I set it to multiply. Of course, you can modify it further. You can move to the move tool. You can make it smaller. You can go to the Node Tool and you can manipulate your notes further or delete some of them, clean it up. Just make sure to open the group and to put this layer into the group. Now we have another unique asset. Then on this flower, we will repeat the second approach. We will go inside of the group. We will create a new vector layer, which sometimes gets created within the group and sometimes it just pops up above. Let's put it in here. Let's set this layer to multiply back to the pencil tool and now we can start drawing. Now, I can see better. That's also great. I think I will finish those three blooms using the second approach where I first create my vector layer, set it to multiply and I see better what I draw. When using blending modes with the same colors from your planned color palette, you will usually come up with a harmonious and consistent design because it will feel like the colors belong together. They will just have a different brightness or hue to them. In the next lesson, I will teach you more about the knife tool combined with using Blend Modes. 23. Knife Tool: In this lesson, I will teach you about the Knife tool. The previous lesson about the blending modes also applies to Affinity Designer version 1. You can access blending modes here also very easily. Let's, for example, select this shape. You click on the three dots, and it looks pretty similar to designer version 2. Here is the Opacity slider, and this is where you can find your blending modes. Now let's tackle those berries here. First of all, we will make a copy of the stem. We go here to the three dots menu, in the upper left corner and we hit Duplicate. Now we have two copies. Next, we will change the blend mode of the layer that is on top to Multiply. We select the Move tool. We make this shape a little bit smaller and we create a small offset by shifting this shape to one side, for example to left. I de-select. Now we can use the Knife tool to remove the tops of those leaves over here. You can find the Knife tool in Affinity Designer version 2 only. So if you upgraded from version one to version two, you will have it here. It's located on the left side menu more or less in the middle, right below the pencil tool, you see the Knife tool. It is a new addition to the iPad version, which is not available in version one. It's a tool that lets you freehand cut your vector curves and split them into separate objects into smaller bits. I think it's best if I show you it in action. We make sure we are on this top layer, the multiply layer. Then we select the Knife tool. As always, we have some extra options here in the upper side of our screen. If you're not sure what those symbols mean, you can always hit the question mark and you will see this little cheat sheet. You can cut your vector objects, for example, by using a straight line, this symbol over here, or you can cut them in a freehand way in the same way we were using the pencil tool. Here you can also use the Auto close function so that the shape that you create with the knife also closes automatically. I would like to cut this shape using the straight line option. I will select it, then I'm drawing a straight line from the middle of the stem toward the outside of the stem. You will see that this has already been split into two parts. I will delete this one. I'll go back again to the original multiply layer, making sure I'm on the Knife tool still. I will cut another line and this will cut out the top layer of the other small leaf. I will remove it. This is the effect that I wanted to show you. On this layer, we have the original stem of our berry and the layer on top is the copy of this element, but set to multiply with some bits of it cut out. This one is done. Now we can move to this one. Let's open the group. Let's click our stem and the leaves. We can make a copy from the menu above by selecting Duplicate. Or there's another way. From the Move tool, having selected this shape, two fingers on the screen and now you have created a copy by moving it a bit to the side. Let's already reposition it a bit off this shape, and let's change the blending mode to Multiply. Of course, you can also reduce the opacity of this layer so that you get maybe a more subtle effect. For this one maybe let's reduce it to 75 percent, for instance. Then we go to the Knife tool. This time I don't want to cut it in a straight line. I want to select Auto close. I would like to cut those leaves freehand but with a little bit of stabilization. In a way, the Knife tool is pretty much like the Pencil tool, but the Pencil tool creates new shapes and the Knife tool cuts shapes and removes them. Let's choose maybe the rope stabilizer, set it down a little bit, and let's start cutting. I start outside of the shape and I finish also outside of the shape. We can remove it and the job is pretty much done. Back to this multiplier apply layer. Now I want to cut this top over here and remove those extra bits. I de-select. This is done. That looks pretty interesting. Now, our last berry. From the Move tool, we make a copy. We change the blending mode to Multiply. We go to the Knife tool. You can also experiment with no stabilization. We can also switch off the Auto close and we can start cutting. I start outside of my shape, and I also finish outside of my shape. This has been cut and now I remove it. Now my big berry assets are complete and pretty much all our assets are ready to go. 24. Scale With Object: In this lesson, I wanted to highlight how to resize your stroke, especially when it is applied in your asset structure. This piece of information deserves a separate lesson as it is a very overlooked problem that many beginner vector artists encounter if they're not entirely familiar with the tool. Let's take those berries, for example. They will be perfect for me to show you where the problem lies as all of their branches were drawn only using the stroke. Let's have a look at this berry, for instance. Let's open the Layers panel. This one here. Let's have a look at those branches. In the color studio, you will see that those blue twigs were drawn entirely using stroke. Now, let's go back to the entire group for this berries, switching to the move tool. Let's see what's going to happen when I want to resize it. See, as I'm making it bigger, my stroke lines get a little bit weird. [LAUGHTER] Let's switch the other berries so that you can see better. Those stroke lines didn't follow the entire shape and scale of the object as a whole. Let's also see what happens when we make it smaller. See this also becomes a problem. How to solve that. This is a very common problem that people who use Affinity for logo creation encounter. They, for example, design a logo only using the stroke, and then they don't know how to set the stroke properly so that it follows the scale of the entire object. The first step that you've got to do is you have to keep the size of this berry as you want it. For example, for me, I want this width of my lines, and then what you got to do is you have to go to those layers or to those groups that were drawn only using the stroke, and you have to take one small setting so that this problem is fixed. In order to do that, we have to go to the Stroke panel here, and for this entire group, we have to tick "Scale with Object". Now, let's select it. When we move back to the entire group and we want to resize it, this time, our stroke will follow the proportions of this berry bush. Also, let's make it super tiny to see if it's really working. Yeah, it's working. The proportions of our berry bush have been preserved. If you'd like your stroke lines to be resized with a variable line width that will follow the rest of your shape, then you have to make sure to tick this box for every layer that uses stroke or for every group that includes stroke lines. Let's maybe make this invisible. That means we have to do the same step for all those stroke lines here. You can also do it in bulk, you don't have to do it one by one, you can select one layer and then continue swiping to the right, and then you can do it in bulk, so to say. "Stroke Studio", "Scale with Object". Now, when we want to resize it, the proportions will be preserved. What does it mean for your assets portfolio? You have to go through all the categories that you created and you have to ask yourself the question, "Okay, where exactly, in what groups, and then what layers did I draw only using the stroke?" For instance, I remember that when I was drawing those ginkgo leaves, I was also using stroke lines for the stems of those leaves, so I have to open each of those groups. Remember, you do it only one time, [LAUGHTER] and then you save the asset and you have it forever. It looks like a lot of steps that you have to carry out, but it's just something that you've got to be mindful when you're creating your assets and you got to make sure that they are set up correctly, and then everything is great, you have them forever, and you can enjoy [LAUGHTER] designing with them. For all those ginkgo leaves, I had all the stroke lines selected. You see, the fill is empty and the stroke has a color selection, and then, again, going to the "Stroke panel", "Scale with Object". I think I also had it here. Let's switch off the leaves. Go back to our big blooms. I also had it here, here I used stroke. I will repeat this step for all the asset categories. Here, I also have stroke those lines. I just have to go group by group and double-check if this setting has been ticked because otherwise, you might encounter some problems with resizing your design later on if this option is not ticked. Now, that this last step has been done, let's start saving those beautiful assets into our Assets panel. 25. Assets Panel: Now we can start saving our assets into the Assets panel and categorize them. You can find the Assets panel in both Version 1 and Version 2 in the upper right corner below the layers panel. In Version 2, it's here. Here I have all my assets stored. The icon is just a little bit different in Version 1, but it's in the same spot. This Assets Library is an area where you can store any design elements that you tend to reuse. Once you have it saved into this library, they will be accessible in every new document that you create. It's going to be available across the entire device. For those of you who work both in the iPad version and the desktop version, It's really handy because you can, for instance, create your assets on your iPad, and then you can export them to your computer and use them on the desktop version of affinity. Let's go ahead and create our first asset category. Two X is our options in the assets panel, you have to go to this upper right hamburger menu. Here you have an option to add a category to import it, to export it. The third option also very important is to add a subcategory. You can also rename your category or make a copy of it, and you can delete it entirely, or sorority or categories by date added. All your assets categories, depending on how many you create, will be available in a pop-up menu at the top of the assets panel. You just got to click on the title of your assets and this menu will show up. This is where you can quickly access all the remaining assets. Let's create a new category and hit Add Category. Here you can rename it. I'm going to call mine magical florals for my new collection. But of course, you can name your category, whatever you wish it could be flow roles, botanical garden metal. Perhaps you have a group for animals or for social media icons. Now for every new category, you need subcategories. Subfolders for your assets in order to store them inside of this library. Again, clicking on the hamburger menu, you select Add Subcategory. Now you have the option to choose this outer hamburger menu that belongs to the subcategory. By default, it's going to be called assets, but we can also rename it. Over here. I'm going to rename it to flowers. I already know which assets subcategories I bulk created basically when I was creating, drawing of my assets. I'm going to go ahead and I will add all those subcategories right away. Add subcategory. I want one more folder for the leaves. Let's rename it to leaves. Then I definitely want one more. It's a folder in which we're going to be putting our assets. I want one more for the berries. Let's create one called berries. Pretty much every time I create a new assets category, I always have one extra group at the end that is called fillers. For any filler elements, it could be botanical fillers, but it could also be some spots or dots or stripes, any geometric shapes. Let's rename this last subcategory to fillers. Of course, you don't need to be that super granular. You can go as detailed or as simple as you wish. Each of those categories, they host unlimited number of those subcategories. You only have to bear in mind that assets cannot exist directly in categories. That's why we needed to create those subcategories and you need at least one. Now the most important thing, how to store an asset. It's super easy. Let me show you. You can do it individually or in bulk. I'm going to show you both the scenarios. We will be navigating again in the layers panel. I want to start with my main flowers. Each time we choose a group and then add our asset from the selection. The group level will be recognized as an individual asset. We just got to be careful that this top-level, meaning the entire group of this big flower is selected, because sometimes it can happen by accident that you have only maybe a few layers selected and then you add them as an asset and some parts are missing. The best way is to click a few times just to make sure that the entire group is selected. Then we go to our Assets Studio. Hamburger menu for the flowers subcategory. Add Asset From Selection. This is how it's there [LAUGHTER]. This is how you add your assets individually. But I wanted to show you in this class how you can bulk-create your assets. Now I'm going to show you how you can bulk-add them. This technique will save you a lot of time. This one has been added. I go to the remaining flowers from this group. I mark all of them with two fingers. Then I choose again, Add Asset From Selection. Now all of them were added at the same time. This can save you a lot of time. Now, off to our secondary flowers. I'm selecting all of them on the group level. Again, add asset from selection. It's there. I really love adding assets. I love this part. This is the best because you've been working so hard. You've been really polishing off those assets so that everything is okay with the nodes and the colors. This stroke is working perfectly. It's just pure pleasure to arrive at this stage and to put them into your library. Now, the leaves are going to the leave. Subcategory, Add Asset From Selection again. It takes a few seconds. Big berries selecting all three of them. I'm going to put them into my berries subcategory. Now, the other group of berries, Add Asset From Selection. Each of those groups has been recognized as a separate individual asset, as you can see. Now we move to the category of filler flowers. This is the last subcategory. Finally, our round filler flowers. When it comes to those clusters of flowers or any blooms, I suggest that you actually save them twice. I will explain why. For starters, I will save the entire main group that hosts all of those individuals filler flowers together. I will select this top layer group, Add Asset From Selection. You will see that those filler flowers were added from this top group level as one asset. But this one asset includes all those seven filler flowers. Sometimes when I create a pattern, I want to add clusters of flowers really fast. I don't want to add them individually. I just want to slam them onto my canvas and keep on designing. If I have such a cluster asset, it's very easy because all I got to do is to click on it. Then you will have an option to either delete it or to insert it. I choose Insert, and now another group of assets has been added. Sometimes this makes my design process much more efficient because we're adding many elements at the same time. But let's go back. This was the first time that we saved those elements. The second time I would like to go inside of this group and I would like to select all of those flowers individually on their subgroup level and then go to my assets panel and again Add Asset From Selection. Now you will see that each of those individual flowers, which has their own dedicated group in the layers panel, they were saved and add it into the Assets panel individually. Now, what are the advantages? Sometimes I don't want to add so many filler flowers at the same time. I only want to add maybe one, two or three. Then it's very handy to have those fillers also saved separately. I can click for example. on this one and choose Insert, and maybe just add one instead of the entire group. Another way to add your assets is to long-press one and then to drag it onto your canvas. Then I can just select a shape that I like the most out of this group. I can add them onto my canvas separately. We're pretty much done, our categories already. In our last practical lesson, I will show you how to import and export your assets for creating backups and for sharing. I'll see you there. 26. Importing & Exporting Assets: Assets can be exported and imported as add-ons. Add-ons stored as files must be inputted manually into affinity., you can practice inputting new assets by downloading and importing my gift. I created a basic set of simple botanical fillers for affinity designer that you are free to use in your designs or in your patterns. In case your assets panel is empty right now, go ahead and populate it a little bit by improving the assets that I created for you. To download those resources, go to weronikasalach.com/filler-assets. I'm showing you how to download your freebie in Lesson 5, you're free assets download. But just as a reminder, you can import any assets over here in the hamburger menu by selecting import category. Exploiting is as easy. All you need to do is to select the option expert category. We can, for example, go to our magical floral category here. We can export them by selecting Export Category. Next, you will be asked to save it somewhere into your storage. I save all my assets into my iPad storage and every now and then I copy them to my external hard drive as an additional backup. This way, you can also import and export your asset groups from your iPad to your desktop version and vice-versa. I have a folder here on my iPad called Affinity Assets. Again, it's saved on my iPad. In case you don't have this folder as you click Export, you have an option here in the upper right corner to create a new folder and maybe to also name it Affinity Assets. I want to save this category into this folder and I hit "Save." Now it has been saved and let's see if this is actually working by going to Affinity Designer Version 1. In my case, I can test it on version 1 because I don't have this category here yet. It works in the same way in Version 2. Hamburger menu, import category. It's already recognizes my folder, but I can go again to show you the folders that I have on my iPad. You've got to find the folder Affinity assets, so however you called it. Here I can see my assets category. It's called magical florals. It has a file extension, AF assets. I click on it and it's here. In this way, we refreshed both the exporting and importing our assets. With that regard, our course is complete. 27. Next Steps: You've made it, you have mastered creating beautiful vector assets in Affinity. I know how daunting it can be to dive into a new program, especially the one for vectors. Now you are miles ahead in terms of understanding the app and some of the cool things that you can do with it. What next? I suggest that you create at least 10 new assets every month to grow your library. The more the better. You can set up a goal for yourself and maybe even schedule some time to show up for it. Remember that assets are building blocks for any design, be the pattern or a vector illustration. Please share your work and your thoughts in the project gallery. You can simply just take a screenshot and you can share it with our community, and if you're a more experienced artist, I would love to see what you create with those assets, perhaps you design a pattern. If you're sharing your work on Instagram, you can use the #magicalvectors and tag me so that I can feature your work. Please make sure to follow me on Skillshare to get notified about my new Affinity Designer and Procreate classes. In the meanwhile, you can also check out my YouTube channel where every now and then I'm uploading some shorter tutorials on Affinity Designer and on Procreate. If you liked this class, please leave a review on Skillshare. This will really help me to rank better in the search engine and it will help my small business. Thank you so much for taking my Affinity Designer class. I hope that you really learned a lot. I'll see you in my next Affinity Designer class. Happy creating. 28. Giveaway (03/2023): Hi guys. Till March 20th, 2023, you have a chance to participate in my Skillshare giveaway. You can win one year of Skillshare for free. The extra free year will be added to your current Skillshare subscription. Say your subscription finishes on April 2023, if you win it will get extended without any extra cost till the next year so April 2024, so that you can continue taking all the cool courses and learn. To participate in this giveaway, you got to do two things. Number 1, please write the review for this course on Skillshare. Tell me, for example, what you like the most in the class and some of the things that you learned. Number 2, create a project in the project gallery on Skillshare and show us your assets. You can really keep it simple just by taking a screenshot from your affinity interface and then uploading this as your project. We would really love to see what assets you created and how you categorize them. This is one example of a screenshot that you can take. You can show us the artwork that you created by using those assets and you can also open your assets panel and show us how you have those assets categorized. Here's a second example. Alternatively, you can spread all the assets that you created on one art board. See, so I have it on this one art board and then I opened my assets panel and in this way, you can also take a screenshot and you can upload this into your project gallery. The winner will be announced on March 21st, 2023, here on Skillshare and on my Instagram. Best of luck.