Affinity Designer: Beyond the Basics!

1. Class Introduction: You're ready to take your affinity designer skills to the next level, then this is for you. Today, I'm excited to announce my brand new course, Affinity Designer beyond the basics. This course is for anyone who already knows the basics of affinity designer, but wants to take their skills even further. We'll start off the course with the most important tool in affinity designer, the Pen tool. This tool can be a little tricky at first, but it's going to be your best friend by the time you finish the course. We'll start with the basics of the pen tool and then create a fun little design to put our new skills to the test. But here's the little secret. Once you've learned the pen tool, you can make anything. After learning the basics, we'll build on our pen tool skills as we learn to take an ordinary photo and turn it into a beautiful vector design. Vectorizing photos is so much fun and I'll show you easy ways that you can put your own personal style into your designs. But we won't just work with photos. I'll also show you how you can take a sketch that you've drawn on a piece of paper and turn it into an amazing piece of vector art. Turning a hand drawn sketch into vector art is my favorite thing to do an affinity designer. There's just something magical about turning a little sketch into a beautiful piece of art. Even if you don't think you can draw very well, you'll still be able to turn simple drawings into amazing vector designs. All of these projects are a lot of fun to make and you'll be learning so many great skills as we create them together. After doing these projects with me, you'll be totally prepared to make beautiful art all on your own. Then to finish the course, we're going to learn about one of the most incredible things you can do in affinity designer. Making three D art. We'll start off by learning the basics of three D art as we create this simple design. This is a fun way to get started with three D, but of course we won't stop there. After we've learned the basics of three D, then we can create some really amazing designs. Just look at what we'll be making together. No, these aren't photos that I'm showing you, yes, you will be able to make them. You'll have all the skills you need to make these with me, and then you'll be totally prepared to make three D art all on your own. But before we dive into affinity, I want to mention that this course comes with a few example files that we'll be using throughout the course. I encourage you to download and use them because practicing what you learn is the best way to retain all of the new skills that you'll be learning. You can download those files in the next lesson and then you're ready to begin your journey to becoming an affinity designer master. Let's get started. Okay. 2. Download the Class Files : Before you begin this class, I recommend you download the exercise files. These files will be necessary for you to follow along with the tutorials to download the files, come to the project and resources tab. Then click on the download link. The files will then be downloaded to your computer and you'll be totally prepared to follow along with the rest of the class. 3. The Paper Cutout Effect: Let's start off this course with a fun design technique that I'm calling the paper cutout effect. Notice the beautiful curving lines of this design. We'll use the pen tool to create those. This is going to be a fun way to review designer and warm up for the rest of the course because we'll be using the pen tool a lot. Let's get started. 4. Layer Effects: Let's talk about layer effects. Layer effects are so useful and throughout this course, we'll mainly use them to add shadows and blurs to layers. I know that we already learned about these a little bit in the beginner course, but I want to make sure that we review these two effects that we'll be using throughout this course. To start reviewing how these work, we'll need a layer to work on. I'm going to add a shape. And then I'll make it a nice bright color. Now we're ready to add some layer effects. I'll come right down here to the F x icon. I'll click on that, and we have this huge dialogue box open up right here. Now, like I said, we're mostly only going to be using shadows and blurs. We'll stick to these two down here. First, let's take a look at Gaussian blurs. Since they're the most simple. All you need to do is raise the radius, and just like that, we have a blur added to our shape. It's pretty simple. Gusciu blurs will really come in handy in our three D chapter. In flat design, it's not used quite as much. Next, let's look at outer shadow. I'll turn off this gauciu blur. I'll click on outer shadow, and then we can take a look at a few of these settings. First, offset. As I drag this up, the shadow becomes, wait for it. More offset. I'd like to raise this first to see where our shadow is placed. Then I'll come over here to where it says angle and I'll adjust the angle. Once you like the placement of your shadow, you can soften this with the radius slider. I'll increase this and you can see that softness there. The last slider is intensity, and I don't usually like using the intensity slider because I find that it just counteracts the radius slider. As I bring this up, the shadow becomes harsher again. Mainly the three settings you need to worry about are radius, offset and angle. That was pretty easy. To demonstrate this next part, I'm just going to lower the radius and I'll close out of this dialogue box. Now, watch what happens as I adjust the shape. I'll grab the move tool and then I'll increase the size. Notice that the shadow looks less offset. It seems closer to our shape, and as I decrease the size, you can really see this. The offset is way offset from our shape. This is weird, I wish that this wouldn't happen, but we can fix this. I'll undo by pressing command or control Z. Then I'll come back over here and I'll click on the F x to bring up this dialog box again. With this open, I can come right down here and go to scale with object, and I'll just check that on. Now, the shadow will keep its offset distance, no matter how big or small we make it. I honestly wish that the scale with object setting was on by default. It's pretty frustrating that it's off the default because I forget to turn it on sometimes. If you forgot to turn it on and your effect isn't scaling properly, this is how you fix it. I have one last tip I want to show you, and that's the quick effects panel. To show you this, I'm just going to create a new layer. I'll make it a new color just for fun. Now, I want to show you how you can quickly add layer effects in a different way to access the Quick effects panel, you'll need to come up to Window and then down to where it says Quickeffx. Click on that. Now we can tuck this window right over here next to our layers panel. And there it is. The way this works is first, you need to have your layer selected. Then come right over here to quick effects, and you can actually apply any of these layer effects. Watch what happens as I check on Gaussian blur and bring up the radius. This works exactly the same as the layer effects panel. But it's just a little quicker. You don't need to bring up that huge dialogue box every time. But this does come with some drawbacks. You can see this in the outer shadow setting. I can bring up the offset and radius. It's missing the intensity slider, but that's okay because I don't really like using it. You can still adjust the angle. But notice that there's no scale with object setting. This is really the only downside to using Quick effects to access the bigger dialog box, you'll need to click on the gear icon and then click on scale with object. Now that should work just fine. But honestly, in my workflow, I really like using this quick effects panel anyway. It's a lot faster and easier. I love that this huge dialogue box doesn't come up and block the entire screen. Because I like the convenience of this, we'll be using the Quick effects panel quite a bit in this course. Go ahead and add it to your workspace. Okay. All right. Now that we've reviewed the layer effects, I want to show you some cool layer effect tricks, and we'll do that in the next video. Okay. 5. Duplicating Layer Effects: Let's learn how to duplicate layer effects. You can duplicate your layer effects across multiple layers, and it's actually really easy. I actually recently learned how to do this, and let me tell you, I don't know why it took me so long to figure this out and it saves so much time. Before I would apply one layer effect, memorize the numbers that I used in the settings, and then punch them in to every single layer. It's actually a little embarrassing to talk about. I actually found that there's three different ways to apply the same layer effects to multiple layers, and you can use whichever method works best for you. To start, let's add the same layer effects to all of these heart layers. I'll hold down shift to select all of the layers. Then I'm going to press on the FX button right down here. Because all of these layers are selected at the same time, you'll affect them all at the same time. I'll add a gaussian blur and you can see all of them have that effect added. You could also do the same thing using the Quick effects panel. I just want to note though that if you use this method and you want to go back and change how the effect looks, you need to have all of your layers selected again. Then make sure that you click on the FX right down here. Do not click on the FX next to the layer. If you do that, you'll only be affecting the layer. I'll click on FX down here, and then I can adjust this. The next method is to drag the layer effect onto another layer. To show you this, I'll select this first little cloud. Let's go to the quick effects panel, and I'm just going to add an outer shadow. I like this effect and I'd like the other clouds to have it. All you need to do is click and drag on the F x and apply it to the next layer. Now they both have the exact same settings, the exact same shadow. You can only do this one at a time though. If you have a lot of layers, you'd like to do this two, this might not be the best method, but it is pretty fast. The last method that I want to show you is to simply copy and paste. To see this, I'll apply an outer shadow to one of these stars. Then with that layer selected, I'm going to press Command or Control C. Then I'll select one of the other star layers and I'll paste the effect. To do this, press Command or Control Shift V. This is a different shortcut than simply copy and pasting. Command or Control Shift V, means that you are pasting the style only, which you can actually see right up here in the edit menu. To paste, you do Command or Control V, and to paste the style, which is what we just did. It's Command or Control Shift V. If you're copying and pasting like this, you can do this to multiple layers. I'll select both of these and then press Command or Control Shift V. I really like using this, but I do want to point out one problem you might run into. If you paste the style onto another layer, you're pasting the layer effects, but you're also pasting the colors. If I were to copy the star layer and then paste it on one of the hearts, command or control shift V, you can see that all of the style was copied over. It's lost its gaussian blur, it has a shadow and it's yellow. This is just something to be aware of with this method. All right. With that, you now know how to apply layer effects and how to duplicate them super easily. I wish I had learned how simple this was sooner, but at least I can share it with you now and save you some time. In the next video, we're going to dive into learning more about the pen tool and the node tool. 6. The Pen Tool: In this video, we'll do some pen tool practice. We'll keep it pretty simple and just focus on curved lines. We'll work more with adding sharp corners in the next chapter. Go ahead and select the pen tool. You can find it right here. Now, in the beginner course, we only stayed in polygon and smart mode because those are the most simple for beginners to use. But in this course, we'll only be using pen mode, which is the default mode. Pen mode is much more customizable. You can make any shape that you but with it. Along with being in pen mode, I always like to turn on rubber band mode. I always work in this mode because I really like having a preview before I lay down my next points. One last setting, make sure that you don't have snapping turned on. Your button should look just like this. Now that we have the proper settings on our pen tool, let's go ahead and start with this first shape here. When you use pen mode, it's a good idea to click and drag as you lay down your first point. This will just make it easier to adjust the node later on if we need to. Go ahead and click and drag that first point to get it started. Then we can lay down our next point right here. When you're laying down these points, you can click and drag more to make the line more curved or less to make it less curved. When you get to the end of your line, go ahead and press escape, and this will end the line. Now, for this first shape, you'll notice that I have markers down for where you're supposed to lay each node. Notice where these are positioned. They're positioned in the places where the line quickly changes direction. Of course, when you're tracing out a pen path, you won't have these little markers, but you can imagine the markers are there. Let's go to the next shape to try this out. I'll start here and I'll click and drag. Then I'll go to about where it changes direction and I'll click and drag. I'll just guess it changes about here. Then I'll do the last point and I'll press escape. Sometimes you might get your node placement wrong and that's okay. It's super easy to change where the node is placed, and even how much you dragged the node out. We can use the node tool to fix any of our problems. You can find the node tool right here. Then we can adjust the nodes. I'll click and drag on them to adjust where they're placed. If you want to change how much the node has been dragged out, all you need to do is select the node, and then you can see it's two handles. That's what these little points are that's around the node. You can click and drag on those to adjust the curviness of the node. Okay. This verse line I did wasn't perfect, so I think I'll adjust this as well. For this next shape, I'll get out the pen tool. This time, I'll use a shortcut. I'll just press P on my keyboard to get it out. It looks like we're still connected up here to this node. I'll press escape on my keyboard to end that line. Now we can go ahead and start tracing it. Now, this one is a little bit trickier, whenever I'm tracing a trickier shape, I like to adjust my points as I go. It doesn't always make sense to end the shape and then go back and adjust the nodes. Sometimes it's easier to adjust it during the process of tracing it out. I'll start right here. He click and drag a bit and then I'll draw this next point here and this next point here. This looks pretty good, but it looks like I placed my node wrong. A quick way to bring up the node tool is to actually hold down command or control on my keyboard. Then I can quickly adjust the placement. I can even adjust the handles a little bit if I want to. All right. That looks good. I'll lift up on command or control, and now we have the pen tool again. I'll continue to do this. Oh, and that doesn't look very good. I'll close the shape and then we can go back and adjust that node. This time, I'll just get out the proper node tool by pressing A on my keyboard, and I'll bring that in a little bit. I'll also adjust this line right here. All right. I think that shape looks good. Okay. Very nice. As we traced out that shape, we had a lot of helpful guide points, but let's try tracing the shape again without those points. I'll press P for the pen tool and we can get started. If I were to trace this without knowing where any of those guide points were, I think I would place my points like this. I think I'd set this one here, and then maybe one right here. I think I might place my next point here honestly. Then maybe here and here. I think I'd place a point here, and then I'll end it like that. Notice that the shape turns out pretty much the same. Even though I place the points in a totally different way. We have an extra node here and here. This is placed way higher up here than this last one. This just goes to show that you don't need to stress too much about where you place your points. As long as the line lines up to where you're tracing the object, your shape can still be accurate even if your points have been placed differently. I know that this pencil can be tricky to get used to. But the more you practice it yourself, the more natural it will begin to feel. I've been using it for a long time now and I feel pretty good with it. I definitely still make mistakes as you could see in this video, and I'm sure you'll see me mess up more as we work through this course together. But even though I make mistakes sometimes, I still feel confident that I could trace out any shape that you put in front of me and you'll feel the exact same way by the end of this course. It just takes some practice, but I know you can do it. To continue practicing the pen tool, we're going to do a mini project in the next video. This mini project will be our first look at this paper cutout technique that I was telling you about earlier. I'll meet you in the next video. Okay. 7. Avocado Mini Project: This video, we're going to do a quick project together. We'll make this super cute avocado design. We'll use the techniques that we've been learning throughout the chapter to make the shadows and create this cutout effect. Let's get started. To start off, let's make a rectangle to fill this background with color. I'll grab the rectangle tool, and then I'll click and drag to fill the entire background. Now, to make things easier, we have an exercise file that we can place in our document. I'll go over to the Place Image tool, and then I'll select this file right here, the Afcado mini project file. I'll open that up and then I'll place it in our document. These are the colors that we can sample as we go to make our ovocado really pop. For the background. I think I'll select this lightest color here. I'll grab the color picker over here and sample that. With the rectangle selected, I'll apply it. For our main ovocdo shape, I'll grab the pen tool, and I'm roughly going to create the shape of an vocado. Before I do that, let's just make sure we're in pen mode with rubber band mode turned on and snapping turned off. Then we can go ahead and trace out the shape. I'm just going to roughly trace the shape of an ovcado laying on its side. After you've traced the shape, you can grab the node tool if you'd like and refine your shape a little bit. But I like that it's a little imperfect. I think that makes it a little bit more funky of a design. Then I'll grab the move tool and I'll just make it a little bit more centered. With that traced out, I'm going to choose the darkest color. I'm going to apply that here. Now, by default, we have a black stroke on the shape. I'm just going to select that and tell it not to apply a color. There we go. We're off to a good start. Now we're going to make a few layers to fill this vocado. This is where things get easier because we already have the main shape. We can just trace a smaller version of the shape for the inner two layers. I'll grab the pen tool again and we'll do that. I think I'll grab the node tool and just fix this up a little bit. You can make this as close to the edge if you want this to look even more like it's the peel of the avocado. But I think I'll just space mine out a little bit like this. All right, looking good. Now we can go ahead and select the next darkest color here. Let's do this one more time for another layer. I'll undo that. I messed up a little bit. Here we go. All right. These inner layers are getting a little bit more funky as we're running out of space, but that's okay. I think this one just can't have quite as many nodes as the last ones. I'm going to delete this node by pressing delete on my keyboard. All right. I think that looks pretty good. It doesn't perfectly follow the shape, but I think that's all right. I'm just going to apply this lightest color to the inside. To finish off this design, you might be curious what this color is. This is for the avocado pit. I'm going to grab the pen tool and I'm just going to trace a little pit right here. We could have used the ellipse tool, but I think it's fun to trace a more imperfect circle for the pit. Then I'll sample that color and apply it. I think I'll grab the move tool and just make this a little bit more centered in the avocado. Now we no longer need the color swatch, so I'll turn that off. I think this already looks really nice. But we do have one more step we need to do to give this the cutout look. I'm going to select all of our vocado layers, so I'll hold shift and click to do that. Then I'm going to apply a quick effect shadow to them. I'll check on outer shadow. Then let's bring up the offset quite a bit. Then we can bring up the radius just to soften it a little. For resizing reasons, I'll just click on the gear icon and turn on scale with object. And there we have it O beautiful avocado. After working through this project, you might be wondering why I didn't just duplicate the original avocado shape and decrease the size for the inner layers. I agree that would be easier and faster. But to make this effect really look like it's cut out pieces of paper. I think it's more realistic if the shapes are slightly irregular. It's a stylistic choice, but I thought I should probably explain that. After all the work that you've done in this chapter, it's time. You're ready to wrap up this chapter with a big beautiful project. I'll meet you in the next video. Okay. 8. Colorful Map Project: This video, we'll make this beautiful, colorful project that reminds me of a topographical map. I really like all of the layers, and I think this will be a fun way to practice using the pen tool. Let's get started. This project is pretty free form since the shapes are just curvy blobs. We don't need to worry about having a sketch or making these shapes perfect. But I do have another swatch of colors for this project. I'll go to the place image tool. I'll select this swatch right here. Then I can go ahead and place this in the corner. To start off, I'm going to grab the rectangle tool and make a rectangle to fill the entire document. I'll just bring this watch to the top so I can sample the color. Then with that rectangle selected, I'm going to sample this orange color and then I'll apply it. I think I'll turn off this watch for now just so we can begin to trace the shapes without worrying about that blocking our view. The next step I want to do is I want to make the largest shapes that we're going to have in this topographical map. I'll grab the pen tool and I'm going to trace out a few large blocks. These can be as free form as you want. Don't worry about them being perfect. And I forgot to turn on rubber band mode, so I'll do that. Just have a little fun with how you're making these. Try to make about four blobs. Okay, I have all my blobs made. I want them to be a little bit more centered. So I'm just going to select this one and I'll bring it up. I'll bring them all up a little bit. There we go. We want to leave some space on the outside because we're going to create a frame of other layers. You'll see that in a moment. But for now, here we have our four main blogs, and we have the rectangle underneath them. With all of these shapes made, I want to subtract them from this rectangle. If you remember in the beginner course, we actually used the add and subtract operations quite a bit and we'll be using the subtract operation a lot in this video. I'm going to select all of the layers, our blobs and this background included, but not this watch. Then I'm going to subtract them. Now, just as a reminder, when you use the subtract operation, all of your layers will be subtracted from the bottom layer. As you can see that worked out just fine. We now have that cut out and I want to fill in that space. I'm just going to grab another rectangle. I'll click and drag it out. I'll place it beneath the cutout layer. Then with our swatch turned on, I think I'm going to select this nice blue color, and I'll fill that in. Just so that we can start to see what this effect is going to look like, let's add a shadow. I'm going to select this cutout layer, and then I'll go to quick effects. I'll turn on outer shadow, and let's just give this a little bit of a shadow. Now you can start to see what I'm going for here. This blue area looks like they are little lakes that have been cut out of the orange Earth. I think that looks pretty nice. We're off to a good start. But before we go any further, I suggest that you save your work. It's so important when you're working on large projects to do this. I forget to do this all the time and I have lost some of my work before. It's really frustrating and I don't want it to happen to you. Get into the habit of pressing command or Control S. Then you can go ahead and save your work. It looks like my document got a little off center, so I'll press command or control zero to recenter it. Now we're going to continue. I want to fill in these blue areas with little islands. I'm going to grab the pen tool. Then just like with our avocado project, I'm going to trace along the inner area here. Now, this is a little bit tricky. Rubber Band mode is on, but because it's blue, it's blending in with this blue color. This will only be a problem for this first layer. Sorry about that. All right. Got that done. I'll just continue to do this for all of the blobs. If you ever make a mistake, remember that you can always press command or control Z to undo, or you could always press on the node tool to adjust your points. Now that we have all of those traced. I'm actually going to select all of these by pressing shift and clicking on them. Then I'm going to group them together with command or control G. This will make it easier to change their colors and properties all at the same time. With that group selected, I'm actually going to sample this outside color orange and I'll apply it to all of them. Now they all have this nice orange fill. I see that they have a black stroke though. Just click on this to make sure that that goes away, so there should be no stroke and an orange fill. In fact, I forgot to check. Let's see, yes, this one also has a black stroke. I'll remove that. This one, it doesn't matter because it's covered on the outside, if there's a stroke, we couldn't see it anyway. I'll continue to fill in these shapes with a few more layers. With that top group selected, I'll just continue to trace them with a pen tool. Remember that as you're tracing, you could always hold down command or control on your keyboard to adjust your nodes. With all of those done, I'm going to select them all and then group them with command or Control G. Then I'm going to turn on the swatch and I'm just going to select this red color here and I'll apply that to all of them. I think I want to do this one more time, one more little island. I'll continue to do this with the pen tool. I don't think there's enough space on the smallest island here to put another layer. I think I'll leave that one alone. Then I'll select all of these. I'll group them together. This time, we're actually out of colors on our swatch. I want to show you what I would do. If I wanted just a slightly altered color. I'm going to apply this red color that we had on the layer beneath it. Then I'm going to change this from a color wheel into sliders. Then I'm going to make sure I have HSL slider selected right up here. Now, if you want a slightly lighter or darker color, all you need to do is change the luminosity slider. If you wanted, you can make this a slightly darker color, I think that looks pretty cool. Or you could do a slightly lighter color. I also think that looks cool, so I think I'll keep it at the lighter color, but either way it looks really pretty. I'm going to be using the HSL sliders quite a bit in this course to get slightly lighter or darker colors. I really like using the color wheel, but I think this is just a little bit easier for those fine tuning of colors. I will keep my color panel set to this throughout the course. Go ahead and change yours if you want to follow along a little bit easier. At this point, we can do a little bit of a sneak peak here and apply this layer effect to these groups. This is pretty fun. I'm just going to click and drag it and apply it to the entire group. I'll do that for all of our layers. You can already see this beautiful paper cutout effect. To finish off this project, I want to add a few more layers to the surrounding area so that it looks like a frame of layers. But this is a little bit tricky. Let me show you why. If I trace out the shape that I want to frame these layers, I'll just quickly do that. Then I apply a color to it. I think I'll go with this red color we already sampled. Oops, that doesn't look right. It's covering all of the work that we just did. We'll actually need to do some subtraction. I'm going to grab the rectangle tool and I'll trace out a rectangle over the top of everything. With this layer that we just traced placed on top. I'm going to subtract it from our rectangle. I'll select both of those layers and then use the subtraction operation. Now you can see we have our beautiful frame. This was a little bit of a puzzle for me to figure out. That's just the way we're going to do it for these last few layers here. I'm going to do that again. I'm just going to trace another layer around this one. I'll follow along the outside. Then I'm going to fill it with the lighter red color. Then I'm going to have to cut it out again. I'll take a rectangle across everything. I'll put our cutout layer on top and then I'll subtract it. This looks really nice. I'm just going to do this one more time with the pen tool. For this last layer, I'm going to go outside of the document a little bit. There isn't quite enough space to fully do it on the inside, but I think that's just fine. For this last layer, we're going to bring this orange color back in. I'll apply that. I'll do a rectangle across everything. I'll place this layer on top, select them both and subtract. Okay, take a look at this. This looks really nice. Everything is now in place. I'm actually going to select all of our layers. Then I'm going to apply a shadow all at the same time. Go to our quick effects panel, I'll first increase the offset. As you can see, this is affecting all of our layers at the same time, even the ones that already had a shadow. This is overriding that, and now they'll all have the exact same shadow that I'm giving them because all of the layers are selected. I'm just going to mess around with this a little bit. I think that looks pretty good. We can also change the angle if we'd like. You can see this really affects the effect. This really makes it pop. You can choose whichever angle you want. I like it going to the bottom area here. I think that looks really nice. Even though I don't anticipate resizing anything, I do think it's good practice to turn on scale with object. I'll do that. With that, we've completed the first chapter of the course. I think this was some really good review, and it will lead really nicely into our next chapter. Where we'll start working a little bit more with the pen tool to create beautiful flat designs. 9. Using Photos for Flat Design: So you want to turn your photo into a vector. Well, you're in the right place. This chapter is the perfect way to really refine your pen tool skills and B we'll be using photos, you don't even need a well designed sketch. We can just jump right into vectorizing. Let's get started. 10. Finding Reference Images: This video, I'll walk you through where to find reference images, and what type of image to look for to create an interesting design. First, let's talk about where to find images. There are a few different websites that I like to go to for reference images, and they are Pixabay, splash and Pexels. I'll leave all of these linked below this video. All of these websites let you download images for free, which is so useful for practicing and designer. If you've ever taken any of my affinity photo courses, these websites might look familiar to you because we use them a lot for reference images and photo as well. Now to find your images, all you need to do is come right here and type in whatever you're looking for. I'll just type in woman, then I'll press Enter. Now you can see we have so many wonderful images to choose from. Here's what I look for, especially in designer to find a picture that will be interesting to turn into a vector. First, I try to look for an interesting pose. If you have your model just sitting straight toward the camera smiling, it might not look quite as interesting for this technique. Try to look for someone who is posing in an interesting way. These pictures will come across a little bit better for your design. Even this with her hand up a little bit, that'll look a little bit more interesting than just sitting there straight on. Another thing I like to look for is interesting colors. These colors could be a good jumping off point. For example, this yellow against the green looks really pretty. Try to look for an interesting pose and interesting colors, and you should come up with a really pretty design. Once you've found a photo that you like with an interesting pose and interesting colors, all you need to do is download it just like this. This little pop up will come up, you can donate if you like, but it's free, so you don't have to, and then you can use that photo and designer. Now that you know these criteria that I look for, let's try searching for a more simple subject and see if we can still find an interesting picture here. I'm just going to type in fruit. Now, fruit already comes in so many beautiful colors. That's pretty easy to check off the interesting colors box. But it can be a little tricky to find fruit that's posed in an interesting way. A lot of times the fruit is just sitting there, but maybe with it cut open, that's a little bit more interesting. I think it'd be pretty difficult to trace all of these blueberries. So keep that in mind, or all of the detail of that kiwi would be pretty difficult. But maybe a more simple orange cut open, and avocado, little throw back to the last chapter. This is interesting, pineapple wearing sunglasses. That could be fun. Even when your subject doesn't seem to be that interesting, there can still be interesting ways to pose them. Now, I really like this image right here. I think the colors really pop. There's a lot of monochrome yellow going on, which I think looks really pretty in a design. In addition, the banana looks a little bit more interesting. It's laying on a plate and peeled, which maybe gives you a little bit more to work with as you're designing. I think I'm going to go with this banana and I'll press download. Now, I had to scroll pretty far to find this banana. So if you don't see it, no worries. I made sure to include it in the exercise files. We're going to trace out this banana in the next few videos. So go ahead and open up designer, and we'll begin working with it in the next video. Okay. 11. Adding Reference Images: This video, we'll learn how to set up a reference photo in your document in a way that will make it easy to trace without it getting in the way. First, we'll need to place our image with the place image tool. I'll do that. Once you have it placed where you want it, it's a good idea to lock your layer over here by pressing on this lock icon. That way you don't accidentally move it as you're working on it. An optional thing you can also do at this point is sample any of the colors if you think you'll want to use them later on. For example, maybe I want to sample this light color of the banana. I'll just sample that. Then I'll trace out a little rectangle up here and I'll apply that color to it. We can do this for the other colors as well, if you'd like. I'll just grab the move tool and I'll hold down command or control and shift that will duplicate it and keep it nice and in line with the other shape. Then I'll sample the color of the yellow peel. Then let's do this one more time, command or control and shift. Let's just sample the background color. Now we have the color sampled, which is good because now we're going to adjust the opacity of this reference layer and the colors won't show up quite the same. I'm just going to come up here and lower the opacity. You can lower it a different amount depending on the contrast of your photo. This photo doesn't have very high contrast, I think I'll just lower it a little bit like this. Lowering the opacity, we'll just make it easier to see our pen tool as we're tracing a path around the banana. Usually, I'll lower the opacity a little bit more than this, but like I said, there isn't much contrast here, so I think this should be just fine. That's it. That's how you set up your reference photo in your document and get it ready for tracing. This video was short and sweet and now we have our reference image ready to go. In the next video, we'll dive into tracing this banana. 12. Pen Tool Sharp Corners: Let's learn how to work with sharp corners with the pen tool. So far, we've really only been clicking and dragging to make curved lines. But making corners and being able to quickly change direction is crucial when tracing out designs. Let's look at how to naturally do this as you're dragging out a line. Before we trace this banana, I'll just turn off this layer so I can show you my strategy for changing direction really quick. I'll grab the pen tool. I'll make sure we're in pen mode with rubber band mode turned on. Then I'm going to increase the stroke of this line just so we can see it better. Then I'll begin clicking and dragging. You already know that we click and drag to make a smooth line, leading the bezier handles here in the direction that we want. Wherever we place the handle, that's where our line is going to curve from next. If you want to quickly change direction, all you need to do is hold down Alt or option as you're clicking and dragging. Then you can see the handle break and now we have a sharp node. Now you can put that handle in whichever direction you want to go next. Then you can lift up on alter option and continue to trace your line. It's really important that while you're clicking and dragging, you hold down alter option the entire time, then you release your cursor, and then you release alter option. That might sound a little complicated, but all I want you to know is that you need to hold down Alt or option the entire time. That way, the node stays sharp as you adjust it. As I'm tracing, I keep my finger hovered over alt or option. That way, I can quickly press it down and change direction as I go. Another thing I want to point out with sharp nodes is if you just click, it will automatically be a sharp node, and then you can continue to change direction. But the downside to just clicking is that you can't customize how curved it is before you hold down alter option and change directions. I would suggest just holding down alter option to change direction, not just clicking, but sometimes that could work too. I know that was a little messy. Let's see this in action now. I'm going to have this layer selected and I'll just delete it. Then I'll turn back on the banana layer. Let's start by tracing the peel of the banana. I want to trace all of the parts of the banana separately. Starting right here, I'm going to click and drag for my first point. Then I'll come down here, just clicking and dragging all along the way. Then it looks like we have a little bit of a sharp change in direction. I'll hold down Alt or option and then I'll move my handle in the direction of the change. I'll lift up on my cursor, then I'll lift up on alt or option. Then I can continue to trace these out. I'll hold alter option again for this curve. Then we can continue to trace. To end my line, I'll just press escape. All right. That wasn't too bad. Let's do this piece of the PL next. I'll click and drag to start this. Then I'll just click and drag in the direction of the curvy lines. It looks like if I just click right here, this curve is actually perfect for the pal. I think I will just click to lay down a sharp point. Then I'll click and drag to continue tracing this out. As a reminder, if your points don't look exactly the same as mine, that's okay. Remember that as we were learning about using the pen tool, sometimes your nodes might not be laid in the exact same place, but you can still trace out your shape just as well. All right, let's trace out this next part. I think I'll do this one next. I'll click and drag to get it started. I'll hold Alt or option to change direction, and then I'll continue on. I'll press escape to end my line. Let's just trace the main banana now. All right. This is looking really nice. Last, let's just trace this last part of the p here. Okay. All right. And it looks like I overdrew a little bit right there. I'm just going to press A for the node tool. I'll click on the banana, and I'm just going to move this node upward. Now that I'm done tracing the banana, let's go ahead and trace the plate too. Because this is a perfect circle. I'll just use the Ellipse tool. I'll click and drag while holding Shift, and then I'll resize this will holding shift and place it right over the plate. Now, right now, we have a fill. I'll just say no fill, and I think that lines up pretty nicely. Maybe I can bring this in a little actually. Now that we're done with that, we can turn off the reference layer and see what we just traced. I'll also turn off the color swatches because we're not going to worry about filling in the colors for this video. We're actually going to learn more about filling in our designs in the next video. No need to worry about that for this design. To wrap up this video, I just want to tell you that it's so important that you get comfortable using the pen tool because it really is the cleanest way to create smooth designs. I know it is a little intimidating. That's why in the beginner course, we mostly made our designs using the pre built shape tools. But this isn't the beginner course anymore and I'm confident that you'll feel comfortable with the pen tool. The more you practice alongside me. If you want even more practice, there's actually an online game that you can play. I'll leave that linked below this video if you want to check that out. This is the Bezier game. This game helps you practice the different shortcuts that you need to use to use the pen tool and quickly change direction. Using the skills that you now know about the pen tool, you're ready to dive into a little bit harder of a project as we learn how to trace a rose and fill it with color in the next video. 13. Fill Color Strategy: Let's learn some strategies for filling your designs with color. Now that we know how to draw lines that match up perfectly with the design, I want to show you some strategies that you can use to color your design in a beautiful flat design style. But before we can get into coloring, we first need to add our reference image. I'll press the place image tool and select our rows. I'll add this to our document. I'd like this stem to go off of the document a little bit like that. Then we can just lock this in place and sample some of these colors. Since we will be filling in the colors this time, this is a pretty important step. First, let's sample the yellows. I'm going to sample this lightest highlight yellow color, and I'll grab the rectangle tool and draw out a little swatch and fill it with that sampled color. Using the move tool. I'll just hold down command or control and shift to duplicate that. Then I'll choose a few more versions of this yellow color. Let's go with this slightly darker version. I'll duplicate it again. Let's go with this darker version. And one last time, let's find the very darkest color that we can somewhere in the shadows. All right. Very nice. Next, let's do the greens. I'll hold down just command or control to duplicate the square and I'll place it down here. Let's do the same thing. I'll choose the brightest green color I can find. I'll duplicate it. Let's choose a little bit darker of a color. Maybe this one. Again, maybe this color. That already looks pretty dark, but let's see if I can get an even darker color like that one. Oh, wow, that's very dark. Perfect. We now have all of the colors swatched out. I'll just group those together since there's so many layers there. I'll press command or control G. And then with the row selected, I'm just going to lower the opacity here. I think around 50% looks pretty good for this. Now we can begin tracing. I'll grab the pentle and let's go ahead and start. Now, I want to trace each part of this row separately, so we have the leaves, the rose petals and the stem. Let's start with the leaves, and let's start with the very back leaves and then work our way to the front. I'll start right back here. Okay. I'll click and drag for my first point. I'll make sure rubber band modes turned on. There we go. Then I'll click and drag to trace this too quickly change direction, I'll hold Alt or option down. Once I release my mouse, I can release Alt or Option and then we can continue. This rows will have quite a few changes in direction, especially if you choose, and this is optional, if you choose to trace over some of these spiky parts. I personally think tracing over these spiky parts looks really cool in the final product, but feel free to do whatever you want. If you want to just skip over those areas, that's totally fine. However, it will be really good practice if you do choose to include them. I do encourage you to give it a shot if you'd like. I'm also going to come over here and trace this one in the very same shape. These will be the exact same color anyway, so I think it's just fine if we include them together, holding Alt or option to change direction there. Now, you might be wondering why I'm choosing to overlap so much and that's because these leaves are behind the rows. All of this extra area right here, it will all be covered up, so it's totally fine if I overlap it there. Now, I'm just going to fill this area with color. I'll choose this nice dark color here and I'll apply it to the fill, but I'll remove the stroke of the shape. That's a pretty good start. I'm just going to drag this underneath the rows so that we can still see the rows. In fact, for right now, I think I'll just turn off this layer because next, I want to trace the main row shape. We'll go back and add pedal details more later on. But for right now, I'm just going to roughly trace over this rows. One thing I like about tracing objects that are very natural in shape. They have a lot of variation is that you don't have to be quite as perfect as you're tracing them out. It's okay if sometimes your lines are a little farther away from your subject. Keep that in mind as you're tracing, it's okay if it's not perfect. But do try to get it as close to your subject as you can. With that, I've now traced all around the rows. I overlapped it a little bit with these leaves that are going to go in front of the rose because if I tried tracing this rose right along this line, and then I came back and tried to trace the leaf right along this line. There's a good chance they wouldn't line up perfectly, and maybe we'd have some white space peeking. By overlapping, we're ensuring that the colors will line up nicely together without any crack showing through. I'm going to apply a yellow color to this rose. Let's just go with the second color right here. This is looking really good so far. Because of this rose is sitting on top of our leaves, you can see that all we see of the leaves is what we should see, which is just these parts here. This is going really good so far. Next, I think I want to trace the stem. I'll just turn off these other two, so I can fully focus on the stem. I'm actually going to start my trace down here. I'm going to overlap with the rows. I think I'll place this behind the row, so I think that'll be just fine, and I'll close my shape. For this one, I'll choose the lighter green color like that. Then with my petal layer turned on, I'm just going to move this to the top, you can see that that stem sits right underneath that. Okay. Let's finish off the last section, which are these leaves that overlap in front of the rows. Actually, now that I'm looking at this leaf over here, it looks like this leaf is tucked behind the petals. Maybe I'll trace that first and place it behind the rows. I'll go ahead and do that. I'll turn off the rose layer so I can see it a little better. Then I'll begin tracing this leaf. Now this leaf has quite a few little spiky guys, I think I am going to trace those. This is where alt or option will really come in handy. In this case, there's a lot of times where also we could just click to lay down a point and change direction. Either way works. I'm going to overlap with the petals here, and then I'll apply this green color, and I'm going to place this behind our petals. That way, they don't show up. That looks really good. Now it's time to do the very last leaves, these leaves that overlap in the front, they actually look like they connect to each other. Here, let me turn all these off so we can see that better. Oops. It looks like these leaves are connecting. I'm going to trace them all in one shot. I'll go ahead and start down here and I'll begin tracing these. Now, this is going to take me quite a while, so I'll probably speed up this part of the video. But I'm going to be using Alt or option quite a bit as I trace all of these little spiky parts. I know this process takes a really long time, but it's really good practice, and I think the end result is going to look pretty. A lot of times when I'm tracing things that I know are going to take me a long time, I'll put on some music or put on a little show to watch in the background or listen to in the background because I'm probably watching what I'm tracing. But make sure you just relax and enjoy yourself as you try to trace this out. It will take a lot of time. But that's okay. That's all part of the process. All right. That took me a very long time. As you can see, toward the end, my tracing got a little less precise, but I think that's all right. I'm just going to apply a nice green color to that I'll place this on top of all of my rose pieces. Let's go ahead and turn all of those on. Then we can turn off the reference layer and see how we're looking so far. This already looks really good. I love all the spiky leaf details. I do think that turned out nicely. However, I think we need to change of the colors to make this more interesting and more true to the reference photo. To start, I think I'm actually going to work on the stem in the reference photo, you can see that the left side of the stem was in shadow, and the right side has this big highlight on it. For our SEM, I'm going to use child layers to add in that bright spot. To start, I'm just going to click and drag on this side, then I'll bring it around like this. Then I'll select this brightest green color over here and I'll apply it, and I'll make this a child layer by clicking and dragging it on top of the stem layer. Now you can see what that looks like. For the main stem, I think I should actually make this a little bit. I'm going to select this darker color here. That looks pretty dark. Maybe I'll bring this up a little bit with luminosity slider. Okay, I think that looks really nice. Next, I think I want this leaf to be a little bit darker. I'll just select that one. With luminosity slider, I'll just darken it like this. For these leaves in the back, I honestly think they look a little bit too dark, so I'm going to brighten them with luminosity slider. At this point, I think the leaves look really nice and they're pretty true to how our original photo looks. But you might notice that the yellow petals really should have a lot more detail than what they have now. Well, using child layers, we're going to be able to really give this a little bit more dimension and use some of these other yellow colors that we had sampled. I'll turn on the reference layer so we can begin. With the rose layer selected, I'm going to start by tracing this main highlight petal right here. I'll just bring it around like that. I'm going to apply this brightest yellow color here and I'll make it a child layer to the rose. Now you can see this is only showing up on the rose. That looks pretty nice. Let's do that again. I'm going to create another child layer. Let's start actually right here in the center. I'm going to make this central part of the rose a bit of a darker color. Let's go with this one right here. This has also been placed as a child layer because the last layer we had selected was also a child layer. This should go pretty fast now. With that looking good, I think next, I'm just going to trace this petal here. I am just scooching around all of these different layers. Actually, I think I'll trace this all along the outside here. Then I'm going to come right in here for this darker area. I think I'll just connect it like that. For this one, I think I'll just make this slightly lighter. Then I'm going to trace this main petal right here on top of everything. I'll trace this along right here. Going outside of the rose a little bit here, and then I'll bring it back in. And then I I'll actually overlap it with this yellow part because I think I'll move this yellow part to the front. I'll make that a little bit lighter. I'm going to move this brightest yellow piece to the very front of these child layers, and then I'll turn off our reference layers. You can see what we have going on. Sorry if that was a little confusing. It can be hard to explain when I'm trying to just layer layers on top of each other. But basically, what we have going on are all of these different layers. As they layer on top of each other, they cover each other up. We have this center. We have this petal that's off to the side. We have this petal covering up both of those. So you can see how that looks. Then we have the main yellow highlight. Now these colors really don't look right at the moment, so I'm just going to alter them a little bit. I think I want this main color to be more true to this second color right here. Maybe a little bit lighter. I'll move the luminosity slider up and the saturation slider up. That looks pretty good. Next, we have this more brown looking area right here. I'm going to raise the saturation and the luminosity. And maybe bring the hue slightly more to the right so it's more yellow. That looks pretty good. Then for this part, I want this to be a bit darker. Then you see this more sickly looking color right here. I think this is actually the main rose. I'm going to adjust that color. I'll raise the saturation up, darken it. Maybe let's make it a little more toward orange. After all of those child layers, I think this looks a lot better before we had a bit of a yellow blob, but now we have some refined details. With that, we now have our beautiful flat design. I think this turned out really nice, even though it took quite a bit of time to trace all of these shapes out, I think the effect is quite striking. Now that you've done that, and you've really practiced up on using Alt option to change direction. You're ready for the next video where we'll use this very same technique to trace a person. Okay. 14. Flat Design Model: In this video, we'll create this beautiful flat design. Notice the interesting pose of our model and the contrasting colors. These two elements make this design really pop, and I can't wait to create it with you. Let's get started. First things first, we need to bring our reference image into our document. I'll do that. As I trace this out, you might notice we have this large lighthouse in the background. Now, we're not going to be tracing that. We really are only going to be focusing on our model here. I'm going to make this a bit larger and I'll center the model. I think that placement looks pretty good, maybe a little smaller. Now I'm going to lock my layer and lower the opacity. I'm not going to sample the colors in this image this time because I don't think they're very interesting. We can choose our own colors later on. Okay. With that I'll set up, I'll grab the pen tool, and I'll make sure we're in rubber band mode so that we can get started tracing. Let's start with the head. For the head, I can see three main areas I want to trace. The back of the hair right here that's going behind the face, then the face. Then the hair that's overlapping with the face. I want to trace all of these elements separately so they can stack on top of each other nicely. Let's go ahead and start right over here. Since I know this hair and the head are going to be on top of this part of the hair. I'll make sure to overlap the hair that I'm tracing right now with those areas. For this hair at the bottom, I'm going to make it a little bit spiky by holding down alt or option and moving the handle inward. I'll just do that a few times. And then I'll overlap it with her head and close it like this. This image is a little bit pixelated and fuzzy. It's a little hard to tell where to put these hair details that I'm adding. Just give it your best guess. I think this should look pretty good. Right now, we have a black stroke. I'm going to remove that, and I'm going to add a nice yellow color for her hair. I'll bring up the saturation and the luminosity so we can see this better. I actually think that color looks really nice. I'll just move this layer to the bottom of everything. Then we can continue our tracing. I'll do the face next, and that will include her ear here, but I won't worry about tracing her neck yet. This time, I need to make sure that I do a good job tracing this side of her head. I'll use Alt or Option to change direction on some parts. Remember you can always press command or control Z if you mess up. And where we're going underneath the hair. It doesn't really matter where you place your points. Just place them anywhere to close out the shape. To get the color of her skin right, I'm going to start by sampling her skin color here and I'll apply that to the shape. Then I'll turn off the reference layer so we can see how that looks. Actually think that color looks pretty nice, so I'll keep it. Now we can move on to tracing this main part of her hair that overlaps with her face. Because nothing is overlapping on top of it, we're going to be very careful with where we're tracing our lines. I don't know if I like this piece of hair that's overlapping with everything. I'm going to ignore that and just continue downward. Just like with the hair on the other side, I'm going to make these hairs a little bit spiky as well by using alt to create these spiky edges. Okay. With that done, I'll turn off our reference layer and I'm going to sample this yellow color here. But to differentiate this section of hair from the other, I think it would look nice if I lighten the hair just a little bit. Maybe let's increase the saturation as well. All right, there we have it. We now have the head done. I'm going to come back to fill in the face details a little bit later. But for now, I think let's move on and continue tracing the different pieces of the body. Next, I think I'll just trace the neck, which seems to be behind everything. This is actually pretty easy. I'm just going to trace around like this. Great. This will go underneath everything. I'll turn off the reference layer for now, and I'm just going to sample the skin color. But I'll make it darker since this area should be in shadow. Maybe I'll decrease the saturation a little. Nice. Next, let's trace the shirt and the jacket. Now, these two pieces should probably be separated, and it looks like the shirt is underneath the jacket. We'll start there. I'll start up here and we'll place this layer underneath the hair layer as well. It looks like the shirt goes behind the jacket right here, so I'll just do that and bring it back around. Okay. And then I'll just bring it around. Now here we need to make a decision. Are we going to place the shirt on top of the pants or will the pants be on top. If we place the pants on top, then we don't need to worry as much about this edge here because the pants will just cover it. But as I'm thinking about the placement of our layers, I know that the jacket will need to be on top of everything. The shirt and the pants don't really matter which order I put them in. I think I'll try to stick the shirt on top. That means I'll need to trace this nicely. Now I'll just close up the shirt. Making sure that all of this part is included. Then with the reference photo off, I'm just going to make this a really light color Now I'll go ahead and trace the jacket. Now, this is just going to be the outline of the jacket. We're going to come back later to include all of the jacket details, including the pocket stitching and the cuffs here. Let's just do the entire outline all in one shot. Since this will be on top of everything, even the hands and the pants. I need to really make sure I trace this following every detail. We don't have any room for overlap, so we'll make sure to really stick to the lines of the jacket. I With one part of the jacket done, I did notice that up here we are overlapping with the hair. Just make sure to raise those points enough so that they are fully overlapping with the hair. I'll just use the node tool to raise them up. Now we can choose the color for the jacket. Now, this is a good starting point. Let's just choose one of these shades of blue here. I'll use that as the fill. Then I'll turn off the reference image. This color is pretty dull, I think I'll raise the saturation up and maybe push the hue a little bit more toward green. Okay. All right. I think that's a good color. I'm going to use that for the other side of the jacket as well. So I'll begin tracing that now. Okay. With that done, I'll just sample the color of the other side of the jacket and I'll apply that. We're really starting to come along now. You can see we have the entire top part of the body. Oh, except for the hands, let's trace the hands, and we're going to place this underneath the jacket layer. I'll just turn the reference back on and also the layer underneath the jackets, we can start the hands a little bit higher so they overlap there. All right. With the hands done, I'm just going to use the face color for them. It's been nicely placed underneath the jacket, but if you look at our reference image, we actually have an area right here that should be hollwed out. I'm going to trace that. Then I'm going to use subtraction, also like this layer I just traced and the hand. Then I'll use the subtraction operation to remove that. Now you can see that's gone. Let's do that with the other side now. It looks like we'll have some areas to subtract here too, so we'll keep that method in mind. Now I'm just going to trace over the hand. I'll use our sampled color to add that color in. Then I'm just going to remove this part. I'll select both of those and subtract, and I'll also remove this little part right here. Okay, now we officially have the entire top half of the body done. I think this looks really nice. Now, as a reminder, make sure you press save. This is a really large project, so you do not want to lose your work and have affinity shut down. This doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen sometimes. Okay. Make sure you do that as you go. Now, I'm noticing here that the hand should be overlapping with the hair. We may need to adjust some of these placements. If I move the hand on top of the hair, you can see that looks good, but it overlaps with the jacket. If we move the jacket on top, well, now that overlaps with the hair. We have a bit of a problem. I'll move the jacket back down so it's underneath the hair. Instead, let's refine it right here. I'll turn the reference layer back on, then I'll grab the node tool so we can adjust these points. With this point selected, I'm going to hold down Alt or option and I'll break that, so it becomes a sharp node. I'll move this node up, adjust that handle. Move this here. I don't think we need this node anymore, so I'll just press delete. That should look good. However, we need to make sure that it lines up with the jacket nicely. I'll just turn off the reference and select the jacket layer. Now, because this jacket is now underneath the hand, we can just raise it up so it overlaps like this. That way we have no white spaces. I'll try my best to line up the corners. I think that looks pretty good. Now we have the hand overlapping with the hair, and the jacket area looks good. That was a little bit of a puzzle, but I think that looks nice. Let's move on to tracing the pants. I'll turn our reference back on. Now, these pants need to go underneath the jacket. I'll just select a layer that's underneath the jacket. Actually, I think we can place it underneath the shirt since we did such a good job there. Actually, we don't need to worry about any of the area up here. We can just trace it around. We don't need to be too careful. But I'll make sure to trace these areas nicely. Now that I'm looking at the pants, I think I'm going to trace the legs separately. Let's start with the back leg first. I'll select the lowest layer here, and then we can begin tracing right up here. There are a lot of wrinkles in these pants. I don't know if I want to include all of those in my design. I think I'll actually smooth out that area a little bit. Then I'll just guess where these pants are lying. It needs to end here. All right like that, I'm going to close out my shape like that. Now we get to choose what color the pant should be. I don't want to make them the white color that's in our reference image or she's really just going to blend into the background. Instead, I was thinking we could make them a bright yellow color. Let's sample the color of her hair as a starting point. Then we can make it and maybe more saturated. I do like that color. Let's turn the reference image back on and then we can trace the pant leg that's going over the one we just traced. For this one, I'm going to start it up here. Then I'm going to come right along the seam line. I'll just trace all along here. Okay, I just traced that pant leg. I'm going to turn off the reference layer, I'll sample this color and apply it. Now, right now, it looks like she's wearing a skirt. To differentiate these two pant legs, I'm going to make this front pant leg slightly lighter. Okay. All right. We're almost flattening in the colors. To finish off, we're just going to do the pants leg area. If I turn on my reference image, we can see we have a few parts here. We have the leg, the shoe, and I think I would like to trace the bottom of the shoe separately, add a little bit of detail. Let's start with the ankles. These ankles will be placed underneath the pants. I'll start it right up here. Let's overlap with the shoe as well. I don't want to have to keep turning off my reference layer. Instead, I'm going to sample the face color right from our layers like that. Just save a little bit of time. I'll make sure that this ankle is placed underneath our pants layers. I'll do the same thing on this side, overlapping with everything, and I'll use that same sampled color. Now let's trace the shoes. I'm not going to trace the laces, so don't worry about that part, but I am going to try to outline it the best I can other than that. And I'm going to overlap it with the sole of the shoe here. All right. I think that looks pretty nice. Now, we could use this color for the shoes. That looks pretty good. But to make things more interesting, sometimes I like flame with black colors and making them maybe a little bit red toned or blue toned. Let's see how that looks. If I make this a dark red color, I think that looks pretty nice. But I do like the dark navy. Let's do that. It's not a perfect black. It's a little bit more interesting. Perfect. I'm just going to sample that color for the other shoe. Now we can turn the reference layer on and trace this other shoe. And I'll apply that blue color that I sampled. Now we can finish off the shoes by tracing the soles. Now, I'm going to place the soles on top of the shoes so that they overlap with this part. Let's go ahead and start that the shoe is coming out of the picture a little bit, so we will have to guess where that is. In fact, let's just start there. I think I'll just place it like that. Okay. For the sole of the shoe, I think it would be fun to use another yellow color. Let's sample the yellow of the pants, and then I'm going to darken this. I think that looks pretty good. Now, I'm just going to trace the sole of this side of the shoe. I'll start it somewhere in the middle here and bring it around. I want this yellow color. I'll sample that let's check in with the design. Over here, I didn't overlap it properly. I'll press A for the node tool, and I'll just move this part of the shoe like that. That's better. I think this area looks a little funny without having a shadow to differentiate what we're looking at here. I'm going to turn the reference photo back on and using the move to. I'm going to trace out an area that will put a darker sole to the shoe. I'll trace it out like that. I'll use this yellow color but make it darker. Then I'll make it a child layer to the shoe. Let's turn off the reference and check in. That is way too bright. With that layer selected, I'm just going to darken it even more and decrease the saturation. All right, so now we have the colors in. Let's just save it with command or Control S before we move on. Now, I'm realizing that this project is taking up quite a bit of time. I think it'd be a good idea to take a break here and when we come back in the next video, we're going to add more details into this design by adding details to the jacket and the face. I'll see you in the next video. 15. Flat Design Model (Part 2): All right. Welcome back to the project. In this part two video, we're really going to finish off this design with some finer details. To start, let's look at our jacket here. I think this jacket would look pretty nice if we made the sleeves a darker color. Let's turn on the reference layer, and let's select one of the sleeves. Then I'm just going to trace right along where the sleeve is. I'll end it here and here. Then I'll bring it around. Now, turning off the reference layer. Let's sample this blue color, but make it darker. I'll make this a child layer to the jacket, you can see it snaps right there nicely. I think that looks really nice. Let's sample this dark blue color and we'll do the same thing to this other part of the jacket. That's a really good start to the jacket. Next, let's add some stitching lines to the jacket and we'll do this by using stroke instead of Phil. Let me just get some stroke settings before we get started. I'll trace out a line. And with stroke selected, I'm going to use that dark blue color that we had for the jacket sleeves and I'll increase the width of the stroke. Oh, this has been placed as a child layer. That's why we can't see it. I'll place this on top. Now we can see the width of the stroke. I think that looks pretty good. With those settings saved, I'm just going to delete this curve. I'll turn the reference back on, and now we can do some tracing. Any areas where you see a lot of stitching, you can go ahead and trace those. Feel free to include more or less than what I'm doing here. It's all up to whatever you think looks good. As you go, make sure you press escape on your keyboard to end your lines before you start another one. I'm going to turn off the reference to see how we're doing here. Good. All those lines matched up really nicely, but I will press A, and I'm just going to move this line a little closer to the edge, as well as this one. I think that amount of detail looks pretty nice. Let's see what else we could include. I think I want to include this line right here. Like that. Maybe I'll also include this button hole. Okay. Let's check in. That's lined up nicely. I think that button hole looks good. Okay, I think that's nice. I'm going to mimic the same thing on the other side now. Okay. All right. Those lines were placed on top of everything. I'll just turn off the reference. Make sure they all look good and then I'll select all of those layers and I'll lower them down to where the other ones are sitting. Something that's throwing me off with this jacket is that we can't see the cuffs or this collar piece right here. I think what I want to do is I want to use child layers to make those areas stand out better. I'm just going to trace where the cuff is. I'll make this a child layer too. The jacket right there. I'm going to group all of these lines together. That was really hard to find where the jacket layer was fs command or Control G to group them. Now we can focus back on the cuff. I'm going to turn off the reference once again. I'll use this arrow to fill this with color and take away the stroke. But this color should be lighter. I'll use the luminosity slider to bring that up. I like how that color looks. I'll just sample out for the other cuff. In fact, I can see where the cuff is. I can see where these little corners are, so I'll just line that up, bring it around. Ops. I'm holding command or control to adjust that point. Then I'll fill it with color and make it a child layer to the other sleeve. Oh, that looks so much better. Let's do the same thing, but we'll do it with these collar pieces. Then I'll just go around the outside. I'll use that light blue color again and I'll make sure it's a child layer to the right sleeve. Perfect. Let's do the other one now just to finish things off. Okay. Turning off the reference, once again, I can see we have a little bit of a problem area right here, and this area is actually a child layer as well. If I place this on top of that collar piece, that looks better. Although I think I should move that point in a little. The cuff should be on top of everything. There we go. We have cuff, sleeve, collar. Perfect. I really like to look of this jacket. Now that that's done, the finishing touches for this project will be to add some details to the face. If I turn on the reference, we can see what those details should include. We have some nice eyebrows, the eyes. We'll trace out her nose best we can. It will be a little tricky, but I'll give you a technique that you can use for that. We have the lips and teeth. That shouldn't be too hard. We'll use the pen tool to trace out stroke lines for all of those. I'll just make sure that this is placed on top of the face. Then I'll grab the pen tool and we can start with the eyebrows. I'll just trace a line like that. I'll press escape. Then with the reference layer turned off, I'm just going to adjust how our stroke looks. The stroke width, we can make these pretty thick eyebrows if we want them really to stand out. I think that looks pretty nice having them be thick Instead of black, this is a little funky but stick with me. I think I want to change the stroke color to this dark blue. Okay. Yeah, I like how that looks. Let's do the same thing again. Trace a line and press escape. Lily, where I have my layers placed. This has been placed underneath the hair. If yours isn't underneath the hair, just make sure it's right there. This looks good. Next, let's do the eyes. I'll trace a line out and press escape. Wow, this really needs to be a smaller line. Let me just bring that down. I think that looks good. I'll do the same thing to the other side. Next, let's do the nose. For the nose, this is a little bit tricky. We could trace the entire thing like this, but I don't know if that would be the most flattering look. Instead, I think I'm just going to trace a line following the bridge of the nose. Actually, maybe I'll do it a little off center like this. Then I'm just going to trace this bottom part of the nose. Actually, I just realized I don't know what the bridge of the nose is, which part of the nose that is. Let's just trace out this lower part, the nostril part and this part. I need to study up on my anatomy. Turning off the reference layer, you can see these lines are very dark and they stand out in a bad way. I'm going to slick both of those layers by holding shift and clicking on them. Then I'm going to sample this neck color here. I think I'll also decrease the stroke. In the stroke panel, I'm just lowering the width down. There we go. I really like the color of those lines and how they're looking. I think I want to add them to the upper eyelid. Just to emphasize that her eyes are closed. Using the pen tool. I'll just trace that out. And then press escape, and I'll do the same thing to the other side. Let's see how that looks. I like that. To finish, let's do her smile. Now, this is a bigger area, and I'm not sure if using the stroke would look quite as good as if we just traced out the entire shape of her lips. Let's start. I'm going to trace just the upper lip. That shape got a little bit messed up. I'll use the node tool to adjust these points a little. All right. Then we can choose a color from the lips. I'll just sample the darkest color I can find. I'm going to say no stroke, but fill it with this dark color. Okay. I want this to be brighter. I'll do that, maybe a little darker. Now we can do the same thing tracing the bottom lip. Using the pen tool. I'm just going to go ahead and start right here. I'll make sure that it's overlapping with where these lips are, and then I'll bring it down like this. Turning off the reference, I'm going to sample this dark lip color. I think I'll make the bottom lip slightly lighter. And I'll make sure this layer is underneath the top lip. Okay, and this last part is pretty easy. I'm just going to fill this whole area with white teeth. Okay. I'm not going to make them perfectly white though. I'm going to sample this color of the shirt, and I'll apply that and make sure it's underneath all of the lip layers. Look at that. Isn't she beautiful. We now have all of the details done. I think our model looks so good and very true to the original. We adjusted a few colors and added our details in our own way. But, I think that looks really good. To finish off our design, I don't want her to just be standing in a blank white space. I'm going to add a little bit of a background color detail, and I'll do that using the rectangle tool. Now, to make things a little interesting, I'm going to click and drag out a rectangle. Then I'll make sure that it's beneath everything. Let me just group all of the layers for our design and then bring this rectangle underneath everything. I'll change the color of the rectangle so we can see it better. What I want to do is I want to adjust it so that it looks like she's stepping outside of the rectangle. I think I'm going to turn snapping on just for a moment so I can make sure this is centered in our document. I don't want it centered with her. I want it centered with the documents. Let me just turn her layer off. There we go. Nice and centered. Now I can turn her on and lower this down. I think that looks really good. But I don't like the color. I think instead I want it to be a pink color. I'll just move the hue slider over. Maybe toward purple. I'll desaturate this. Make it a. Maybe a little more toward red. Okay, I think this looks good, but I think I want to add a little bit more detail. Of course. Let's grab the pen tool and make a little bit of a squiggle going across the document. Then I'll close it out. I'll make it this pink color, but lighter, and then I'll make it a child layer to the rectangle. I think I'll actually raise the child layer a little bit. I don't want there to be just this triangle of dark color there, so I'll just raise it so that's fully covered. I'm not sure if I'm crazy about this shape. I think I'd rather be a little simpler maybe. Yeah, there we have it. With that done, feel free to adjust any of the colors and layers as you'd like. I think this turned out really nice. Great work on this project. Now you know how to trace humans, actual people in affinity designer, which is a huge accomplishment. It's a really tricky skill to learn. Now that you know how to trace objects and use the pen tool better, you're ready to move on to the next chapter, where we'll learn how to turn your sketch design into a vector. 16. Turning Sketches Into Vectors: Okay. We've used photos to make our designs, and we did a little bit of free handing to create designs in that first chapter. But now it's time to take your very own sketches and turn them into beautiful vectors. I can't wait. Let's get started. Okay. 17. Sketching: This video, I want to briefly walk you through my process of creating a sketch. With almost all major projects that you work on in Affinity Designer. It's actually easier to start with a hand drawn version of your design. That way, you don't need to worry about starting write in affinity designer and using all of the technical tools to create your design. Instead, you can simply sketch it out with a pencil, take a picture of your design, and then open it in affinity designer. Here we are with a blank sheet of paper. Where do we start? Well, I suggest that you begin by picking a subject matter and then looking at references. You can use the same websites that we previously used, or you could just use Google images to search for pictures. In this case, I'm going to search for pizza Then we can start to see some different images that come up here and we can start to narrow down what images that we like. These are just for inspiration. We're not going to be tracing these images. As I'm looking here, I like the look of an individual slice. I also think it's more interesting when there's more toppings on that gooey cheese is pretty fun. As I'm scrolling through these, I'm just collecting ideas. I'm looking at the shape. After that, after I've narrowed down the qualities that I want my pizza to have, I can go and sketch the pizza. Once I've narrowed down what I want the sketch to include, I can draw out a really quick, rough sketch. Here's what I came up with. Now, I just want to note that I will not be teaching you how to draw in this course. That's a whole other skill. But I just want to give you a few pointers for creating a sketch that's useful in designer. Notice how messy this is. I drew a lot of different lines so I could get the shape just right. But this would be very difficult to trace and designer, which lines would you follow? There are just so many. Once you have your messy sketch, it's time to create a cleaned up version. You can do this by completely redrawing the sketch like I did or by just erasing the extra lines. But in the end, you want a sketch that looks like this with just clean lines that you can easily trace with the pen tool. Once you have your sketch cleaned up, you could add a few shaded areas to your design to represent where some shadows would go later on, but that's not completely necessary to do. The next step after you've drawn this is taking a picture of your design and then bringing it into affinity designer. Go ahead and start a document that's the size you want to use. Then you can place your sketch into the document using the place image tool. Now, I've included my sketch in the exercise files. Go ahead and open that up. Then we can trace it out and place it in the document. Once you have it placed in your document, you can go ahead and set it up for tracing by locking the layer and lowering the opacity. Now we're ready to begin tracing this sketch and turning it into a vector. We'll begin doing that in the next video. I 18. Knife Tool: Let's learn about a really fun tool called the knife tool. Now, the knife tool is really simple to use. To show you how this works, I'm going to start tracing the outline of our pizza. I'll grab the pen tool. Let's make sure we're in rubber band mode and make sure to turn off snapping. Now we can go ahead and start tracing the outside. I'm just following along my lines here. I'm going to go right through this cheese drip. I'm just going to continue following along here. I'll go through this pepperoni as well. Now for this change in direction, I'll just click and drag and then hold Alt or Option and bring it around. Just like that, we've traced the outside. Now I'm going to adjust the stroke just to make it a little bit thicker and easier to see. All right. Next, I'm going to trace right along where the cheese is, and I'll include the cheese drip in that. I'll start right on the outside, and then I'll bring this around. I'll use Alt to make that bend. And then I'll end it along here, and maybe I'll even go a little to the outside. I'll press escape to end that. Now we can use the knife tool. I'll select it. It's right over here. It looks like a knife. Once you have that selected, you can use the knife tool to slice your line into two to create multiple layers. For example, right here where my lines overlap, I can hover until the cursor changes into a little pair of scissors, then you can click. Then using the no tool, you can now see that this has been turned into two separate lines. I can just delete this part that I don't need. Maybe I'll move this in a little bit, like that. This works even better for areas like this cheese strip right here. I want to cut this line, so I'll make sure to select that one. Then I'll grab the knife tool. You can also just press k on your keyboard to quickly get out the knife tool. Then I'll just cut right here, and I'll cut right here. I'll press A to get out the node tool. Then you can see that this is a separate line, and I've separated it over here as well. Now we can just press delete on our keyboard to get rid of that. Last, we have this one last area where it's overlapping. I'll select this line, and with the knife tool, let's just make a cut right there. I'll press a for the node tool, and it looks like I selected the wrong side. I'll select this side and press delete. Then I'll line that back up. And easy as that. That's how I use the knife tool. Let's do this one more time up here with this pepperoni slice. I'll grab the pen tool and I'll trace that, but I'll need to press escape first. There we go. Now I'll just trace this around. Okay, I'll grab the knife tool and I need to cut this line. I'll make sure to select that layer. Then I'll just zoom in here and make a cut and make another cut and using the node tool. I'll just grab that node and then I can press delete. The knife tool works really well with strokes like this, but it also works really well with solid shapes. I'm just going to come over here to the side and I'll grab the ellipse tool, and I just want to show you this. To start, I'm going to give this a brighter color so you can see this better, and I'll remove the stroke for now. Let's see how the knife tool works on a shape. I'm going to cut with my knife. You can see over here in the layers panel that now this is two separate shapes. If I grab the move tool, I can select just one of the shapes, and you can see that, they're perfectly divided. Let's do that one more time. But this time, I want to show you what it looks like if you have a stroke. I'll just make that black stroke there. Then using the knife tool, I'll cut this circle in half. You can see this has become two shapes just like the other one, and both of these shapes have a stroke. Right where I cut, there's still a stroke. It's just like any normal shape. Now you know how to use the knife tool. You won't use it all the time, but it can come in handy. With that all finished, I'm just going to delete these shapes here. Then in the next video, we're going to continue to trace the shape. 19. Pen and Node Tool Review: This video, we'll do a little review of pen tool and node tool features as we finish tracing this pizza. I know you already know how to do so much with the pen and node tool, and all of this really will be a review. We won't be learning any new shortcuts, but that's because you already have everything you need. Let's go ahead and continue tracing this pizza. I'm going to grab the pen tool. Because I want to keep all of the toppings grouped together in the layers panel, I'm just going to pick up where we left off and I'll continue to trace the pepperonis. Now for the pepperoni, I think it would be nice if we added a little bit of a area like this. Just to show that it's a three D piece of pepperoni. I'll press escape to finish off that. Then I'll continue to do this with this pepperoni. Here's our first review. You can press A to get out the node tool and adjust your nodes at any time. To keep things organized, I'm going to select all of these pepperoni layers by holding shift and clicking on the last one. Then I'll just press command or control G to group them all together. Let's move on to the next little topping here. I think I'll do these little more squared off peppers next. Grabbing the pen tool. Now, this one has sharper corners. I'll click and drag to start, click and drag and then hold Alt or option to change direction. Alt or option again, and then I'll finish it off like that. I'm going to continue to do that with all of the little pepper pieces. I'm noticing that it's a little hard to start on an area where you want it to be pointy. I think you might have seen me struggle a little bit with this one. Since I didn't start with a sharp node, this just gets a little twisted and strange. I actually think sometimes it's better if you start with a more curved area and then work your way around and get all those sharp nodes later on. That's just a little tip for you. The things don't get so twisted up. I have one more pepper I'm going to do, so I'll press P for the Pen tool. And what did I just say? Start on a curved area, bring that around. All right. With the peppers all done, I'll just select all of those and group them together. Now we're going to do the olives. I'll group all of the all of us together, and then we can come over here and finish this crust area. For the crust, I wanted it to look like this was curving around like that. I'm going to try and best to connect it right here, and I might need to adjust this later. I definitely need to adjust this. I'll press A for the no tool and make sure that this curve looks right. Then make sure that this is nicely tucked in here. Last we have this little curve here. I'll just follow this around. I think that looks a little strange. Using the no tool, I think I just will lower this down a little bit, maybe shorten it. Okay. My last pen tool lines, I'm just going to press escape. Then I'm going to trace these little outside areas here. These are just fun little lines to emphasize the pizza, frame it out. Just following the curves of the pizza. You might also notice these lines. Don't worry about those. Those were just included in the sketch, but I have a different idea for adding detail to the pepperoni later on. Now that we finish tracing out our pizza, in the next video, we're going to work on making our strokes look even better. 20. Stroke Pressure: In this video, let's learn how to taper the ends of your strokes using stroke pressure. Let's just start here by grouping these last lines that I made. These are all of the outer lines. I'll group those. I'm also going to turn off my sketch. Stroke pressure is something you can find in the stroke panel. It's right down here where it says pressure. To start, I'm just going to zoom into one of these lines here, and I'll make sure that I have it selected. With the line selected, all you need to do is click right here on pressure and this little graph will pop up. Now, on this graph, we have two points. These points represent the ends of your stroke. The first one is wherever you started your line, and this one is wherever you ended your line. It doesn't actually line up to this one equals this one. It's actually this one is wherever you started. Just keep that in mind. Now, to adjust the pressure of these lines, all you need to do is click and drag to adjust this. Now you may be noticing that it's going down at the same time. This isn't actually tapering your lines. That's the default. I never actually like to use it this way. Instead, I like to use a shortcut to make this more useful. Hold down Alt or option and then click and drag on one of the points. You can see we're starting to get that tapered line action that I was talking about. Only one of the sides is getting smaller because I used this first point, that means I started tracing my line on this side. If you wanted the other side to be tapered, you could just go over here and while holding Alt or option, you could click and drag on that line. Another thing you can do with the pressure is you can actually taper both sides of the line. The way you do this is you add a point by clicking right in the center, and then you can click and drag without holding anything down. There's no shortcuts here. Just click and drag to lower them both at the same time. Now you can see, we have a nice tapered outline on both sides. Once you've done this, you can move the midpoint to change which area is. You can see as I move it over here, that changes the look. You can still hold down Alt or option if you just want to affect one side. Maybe I want one of the sides to be a little larger. There's a lot of customization that you can do in this. Let's see it in action with this design. I think I'll delete this point by selecting it and pressing delete, I think I will just taper the one end of the line. Now I'll just quickly go through and do this to the other lines. With the pressure panel, I'll hold down Alt or option. You can decide it doesn't really matter which side you shrink. On these outer lines, I think it just looks nice to mixes it up a little bit. You can see that this is just making those outer lines look a little more interesting. Let's move on and do the next lines here. Let's zoom into the crust. Here we have this nice line. I think this line would actually look nice if we tapered both sides. I'll click a point in the center and then bring them both downward. That looks pretty good. For this next line here, I want to make sure that I just tapered this side. If I tapered this side, you wouldn't be able to see it very well since it's already connecting to the crust like that. I'm going to open up my stroke pressure, and then I'll hold down Alt or option, I believe that I started this right along the crust, which means I ended it here. I'll hold down Alt or option and drag it down on this side. Oh, good, I was right. There we go. Moving on to our next one, we actually have a group and it's all of the olives. Now, the olives are a little bit interesting because they're a closed shape. When you open up the pressure and you hold alt to adjust just one of the sides, you can see that it looks a little strange. But in this case, I actually think this looks cool for the olives. I'm going to do this to all of the olives. Now, I wouldn't normally do this because it is a strange effect. But I'll show you what I normally do on the next layers here. Here we have the peppers. Usually when I have a closed shape, I do the technique where I add a point to the middle and bring down both sides. You can see this means that wherever I started my line, it looks a little bit skinnier, I think that looks pretty nice and natural, so I'll leave it like that. I'll just do this with all of the rest of them, adding a point in the middle and then lowering each side. I just wanted to point out here that if you don't like how the pressure is looking by doing it in the middle and bringing the sides down. You could also do the opposite where you leave the sides up and bring the center down, and that will just reverse the effect. I think I liked how it was, but I just wanted to point that out that you can do the opposite. In fact, I think I might want to do the opposite on this shape. The perspective looks a little funny having the thicker side be farther away from the camera. I'm just going to drag these points up and then bring down the other side. Okay. The peppers all look really nice. Let's do the pepperoni next. Okay. Now, for the pepperoni, keep in mind that these are all two pieces. We have the lower piece and the main circle. In this case, let's see what looks good. Maybe I'll add a point to the center and bring down both sides. You can see that looks a little strange because the sides are overlapping. Maybe instead, I should bring down the center. I think that looks pretty good. Now I'll do the circle, adding a point and bringing it down. Now we're running into a little problem where it's overlapping there, that looks a little strange. Maybe if I move it over, it will look okay. Or maybe if I don't bring it down quite as much. Hmm. Maybe if I reverse it. All right, so this is not turning out exactly how I had hoped. I think I'm going to go back to this line. I think I'll hold down Alt or option to adjust the one side that's having a problem. Looks like they both went down, let me redo that. Alt or option. I'll continue to hold alter option until both sides line up nicely. It still has some tapering with it being skinnier in the middle right here. But now they just line up a little better. I think to avoid this problem in the future, I'm going to actually start with the main circle. I'll adjust how that looks. After that's adjusted, I'll go back to this line and make sure this lines up properly as I adjust the pressure. I'll just started in the middle there. I actually think that looks pretty good. Maybe tapering the edges on this line is actually a good idea. I think that looks pretty good. Let's do this last one here. I'll click a point in the middle and bring it down. Then I'll taper the ends of this line. Oh, that turned out pretty nice. I was getting a little worried there with our first pepperoni. We have a few layers left to go and that is this cheesy layer and the outer layer. Now for these ones, I actually think I'm going to select both of these layers, and I'm just going to increase the stroke width. With it a little thicker, it just makes it stand out a little bit better from the toppings. Now as we adjust the pressure, the lines won't look quite as skinny. Going to my cheesy layer, I'll open up the pressure, and let's see what looks good. If I bring down the center, you can see what that looks like. It just gets very skinny in the center, or I can taper the lines at the end, which I think looks a little better in this case. Then for the main pizza layer, let's see what this looks like. If I taper the ends. This is a little interesting. Notice that wherever we broke the line, it's getting very skinny, here by the pepperoni and here by the cheese drip. That's interesting. I think I like how that looks. I think I'll do it that way. But keep that in mind. Wherever you break lines, that will be a new end to your line and the stroke pressure will treat it like that. After messing with all of the pressures of the lines, it's a good idea to grab the no tool and just zoom in and make sure everywhere where your lines are meeting up still looks all right. You don't want any areas that look like this where it's bumping out because we've changed things. Go ahead and look around. I think I want to adjust this point actually. There we go. I think that actually looks pretty nice. Now we're officially done with the strokes of all of these objects. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select all of our strokes. Then in this stroke panel, I'm going to turn on scale with object. This means if we ever choose to resize our pizza, everything will be scaled properly with the stroke pressure, the size, all of that. Then I'm going to group all of these together with command or control G. This will just keep things organized better because in the next video, we're going to start coloring our design. 21. Placing Colors Behind Strokes: In this video, we'll color in our design. Now, for coloring in this particular design. We have a lot of strokes here and some of them are overlapping with each other, meaning that it would be pretty difficult to fill in the pizza in a normal way. For example, if I selected this layer right here, I went to the color panel, and then I tried to fill it with color. You could see it would not be filled in a normal way because the lines are split in different areas. This just wouldn't work. Instead, I'll remove that fill. We are going to trace out new shapes underneath our stroke lines to fill this with color like a coloring book. Also like the sketch layer so that our layers go underneath all of these lines. Then I'm going to grab the pen tool. To start, I'll go ahead and trace the crust. Now something I want you to keep in mind as I'm tracing this out is that it's okay to overlap because the colors that go on top will hide any imperfections with the way we've traced this out. I could cut across this, no problem. Now I'm going to remove the stroke and add a fill. Now I want this to be a nice crust color, so I'll make it brighter, maybe a little darker. I think that looks pretty nice. Let's just make sure that it's fully covered. That looks pretty good. Now that I've done that, let's go ahead and do the cheese next. I'll press escape to end my line. Then we'll begin again tracing just around this cheese area. One thing I like about having such thick stroke lines is you don't need to be as exact as you're tracing out these lines. In fact, in some areas, you could probably just click click click without clicking and dragging. All right. Now we have our cheese. Let me just make this a yellow color. Let's make it brighter, more saturated. Looking good. Let's do the pepperoni next. I'm going to color the entire thing the same color. Later, we're actually going to go back and shade these pepperonies and shade the different parts. They might end up being a different color in the end. But for now, let's just trace around the entire pepperoni and choose a nice dark color for them. Actually, maybe not too dark. I like that color, so I'll sample it and use it for the rest of the pepperoni. All right, I'll do the peppers next. I think it'd look nice if they were a green color. I'll just trace around. Like that. Then let's turn these green. Maybe a yellowy green. Not quite so saturated. Yeah, I like that. I'll sample that color and use it for the rest of the peppers. All right, all of our colors are filled in. I think this looks really nice. Feel free to change any of the colors if you want. I think I'm just going to desaturate all of these greens a little bit more. Maybe make them a little more yellow. Okay. Once you have your colors, how you like, we can go ahead and add a little bit more detail. Remember that I mentioned, you don't need to trace that line on the pepperones that was in the sketch. That's because I think I want to add detail in a different way by using the ellipse tool and then tracing out little circles on the pepperoni. Now, these circles should be a red color. Let me just sample the color of the pepperoni and then make it. These little spots will just add some nice texture. I made one circle to start and now I'm going to use the move tool and while holding down command or control, I'll just click and drag and then rotate them around to give them a little bit of variety as I fill in the area. All right with one done, I'll just continue dragging it over here with command or control. Just like that, we are done. I think this looks really good. I'm going to group all of these little pepperoni circles together because there are so many of them. Then I'm going to group all of our color layers together. Now that I'm seeing it altogether, I don't really like the color of the cheese. I'm just going to adjust that really quick. Colors can be tricky sometimes. Now that I'm done with that, we're going to continue to add more detail to this design in the next video as we learn how to add shadows. Okay 22. How to Shade: In this video, we'll learn how to add basic shading to a flat design. Shading is something that definitely takes practice. But for a flat design like this, it's not too difficult to figure out where to put your shading. All we need to know is where our light source is coming from. I actually already planned the light source. When I made my sketch, let me just bring this to the top so we can see it better. When I was making this sketch, I put shading here where the crust is, and then on this side over here. If there's shading going on here, we can infer that the light source is coming from this direction. This part should be lit up, the top of the pizza should be lit up, and maybe there's some shadows going on underneath the toppings. Once you know where your light source is coming from, you can start adding shadows based off of that light source. I'm going to click on the color group so that the shadows show up on top of that, but still underneath the stroke layers. Then I'll grab the pen tool and we can begin to add in our shadows. To start, I'm just going to trace here. Actually, I think I'll end it right at this point here, I'll hold down Alt or option, and I'll follow this crust around. I'll shade this whole area down here. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, it might actually look good if we shaded underneath the pizza as well. I'm going to try to follow the curves of the lines as I do this. I'll bring it down here. If the light is coming from this top area, it would be shining down like this. We should have a little bit of shadow under this pizza drip. I'll continue to follow the curves of the lines here and I'll finish it off here. Now we can start to shade the actual pizza. I'll bring it up like this. Again, I'm just following right along the curves here. I'll dip it down a little bit for this pizza drip. Okay. Then holding Alt or option, I'll make a turn and I'll just add a little bit of a shadow here. I'll follow the stroke here and connect it here. You can see all of those areas I shaded. Now I can lower the fill color. You can make this black or you could make this a tint of color. I think I'll make mine slightly brown like this. Then so that this blends better with our pizza. I'm going to lower the opacity of this layer. I think I'll lower it quite a bit. Now you can see what that looks like. Now that we've added that, I'm just going to make sure that I remember this brown color for later because we're going to add a little bit of shading to the toppings. Let's start with this topping right here. If the light source is coming from here, that means we'd have light here, but the pepper itself would block the light from coming in right down here. I'm just going to add a little bit of shading here. I'll bring it around to the front area here. I think I'm just going to shade underneath the pepper, not the actual pepper itself. I'll add this brown color. We can come back later to lower the opacity of that. It looks like this has been placed on top of everything. Let me just lower that. Then we can continue. I'm going to add shading to the same area of this pepper. And I'll make it brown. Now for this olive right here, I was thinking that since it's a hollow olive, maybe what we can do is add the shading to the same side as the peppers, but then bring it around so that the inside of the olive is also shaded like that. Now for the pepperonis, I think I'm going to add shading to the same side as the peppers, so a little bit on this side and then bring it up. Then I'm going to shade it so that this extra piece of the pepperoni is in shadow, and I'll add the brown color like that. I'm just going to continue to do this, adding the shadows to the same side on all of these different shapes. With that done, I'm just going to select all of these brown layers, and I'm going to lower them the same amount that I did for the other shadow on the pizza. I think that was around 30%. Let me just check that. 31, perfect. I'm going to group all of these shadows together. Then I just want to quickly show you the before and after because I think shading makes a huge impact on design. Here's what it looked like before, and here's the after. Okay. Now that the shadows have been added, we're going to learn how to add highlights to our design in the next video. Okay. 23. How to Highlight: Let's learn how to add highlights to our designs. Just like shading, highlighting can be tricky. But I always like to do highlighting after I've added shading. That way, I can already see where the darkest part of my image is. Then I can just add highlights to the opposite side. Generally, I don't like to add too much highlighting because it can make things look a little too shiny and plasticky. I'd just like to add a little bit of highlight here and there. To start, I think I'm going to add a highlight to the opposite side of the cheese here, which would put it right over here. I'm just going to start tracing and I'll bring it right along the edge. This will look like rim lighting. And then I'll end it about here. I'll bring it back around. No need to go outside of the pizza, the backgrounds white, and I think that would look a little strange. Now I'm going to go ahead and make it a super light color. You could make it white if you wanted to or you could give it a little bit of a tint to match the area. I think this looks pretty good. I'm just going to drag it underneath. It's on top of the shadows, that should be just fine. Then I can go ahead and lower the opacity just like I did for the shadows. That's pretty faint. I think I'll increase it just a little more. You can see that's just giving a little bit of shine. That looks pretty good. I'm going to save this highlight color. Keep in mind this is 52%. We'll try to adjust it about that. For this last highlight, I'm going to add. I'm going to add a highlight to the crust right up here to make it look a little bit shiny. To do this, I'm just going to trace out a little circle shape like this. That turned out a little strange. Let's just fill it. Then I'll grab the node tool. Okay. I think that looks a little better. Now I can lower the opacity to make it blending better. That was some very basic shading and highlighting, but I think it's made a really big impact on our design. Now we're actually done with this pizza design. I'm going to select the shadows and the highlights so that you can see what this looked like before. Here's the after. I think this pizza looks so good and I hope you enjoyed this little project. Now we've collected all of the skills that we need for this technique, and we'll do a project together in the next video where we'll turn a sketch into a vector from start to finish. 24. Teapot Project: This video, we'll make this colorful teapot and cup, going from sketch to vector. We'll do everything from drawing the stroke to adding the shadows and highlights, and this should be pretty fun to put together. Let's get started. Here's what my original sketch looked like. You can see we had the basic shapes, but there were quite a bit of extra lines, and this would have been confusing to know where to place our pen paths. I made a cleaned up sketch. Here it is. You can see we have much better defined lines, and you can see I also added a little bit of shading here so that I can reference that later on. Over here in affinity, I have my new document, and I'm just going to add the sketch using the place image tool. Okay. I'll click and drag to bring that into our document. And once I like where it's placed, I'll go ahead and lock it and lower the opacity. Okay. Let's start by making the pen paths. I'll grab the pen tool. I'll make sure we're in rubber band mode and that snappinss turned off. Now, looking ahead, we know that later on, we're going to want to change the pressure of these lines. That means we need to pay attention to where we start our line, that'll just make it easier to manipulate this a little better. Usually, that means you want to start your shape at the bottom or the top of your shape. That way, the perspective will look nice once we shift the pressure. Let's do that. I'm going to start right down here at the bottom, and I'll start by just tracing out this main shape of the teapot. With that traced, I'm going to go to the stroke panel and I'll just increase the width here so we can see our line better. As I'm tracing this out, I just want to remind you that you can always use the knife tool to clean up any of your strokes, or you can use the node tool to simply adjust the placement of the nodes. As always, remember that there are a few shortcuts you can use. You can hold down command or control to quickly bring up the node tool and adjust your points. You could also press A to switch to the node tool or P to go back to the pen tool. Now you can also press K to get out the knife tool. Those are just a few things to keep in mind as I'm tracing this out here. And of course, I can't forget about my very favorite shortcut command or Control Z. You can use that to undo any point that you set down. Now that I've finished tracing out this design, I'm just going to press command or control S to save my document. Now we can begin to adjust the pressure of these lines. We no longer need the sketch layer though, so I'll just scroll down and turn that off. Then I'm going to start at the very top of our layers and I'll work my way down to adjust the pressure. First, I have this part of the handle. I'll bring up the pressure, and let's just see what looks good. I think maybe it would look good to taper the ends. Or it might also look good to taper the center. I think in this case, I'll taper the ends, and I'm just going to skip down here to this layer and I'll taper the ends of this one as well, the outer handle. Nice. Now we have all of these lines that are in the middle of the teapot here. I think I will taper these on each end as well. I have a feeling we're going to be doing this a lot with the lines. This is a really quick and easy way to add pressure to your lines, and I think it usually looks pretty nice. Moving on down here. I think I want to do the same thing to this one, tapering the ends. Nice. Now we have our full cup shape. Now, I started my line right down here. I can add a point to the center here and bring this down if I want the points that are fest away from my starting point to be th. In this case, I think that looks pretty nice. I'm going to quickly go through my project and taper the ends of most of these lines, and I'll pause if there's any places where I'm going to do something a little bit different to the lines. For most of these, just taper the ends just like this. I could taper the ends or I could do what I did on the pizza sketch and bring down just one of the sides. I think I'll do that. I'll just bring down the edges here. Very nice. All right. In this one, I think I want to do the opposite. I'll just bring down the center point. That way, this area is thinner than where our starting points are. Okay. And for the main teapot, I'm going to bring down the center point so that this area stays nice and thick, the area where we started, and the area farther away over here gets smaller. That was the last one. Now we can just zoom in here and bring out the node tool to adjust any of these points, making sure everything still lines up nicely. I'm having a little trouble with this spout line right here. I think what I'm actually going to do is decrease the width. That way, it just blends in more right there, and I'll bring this node in like that. That looks a lot better. Let's double check everything else. Now we can move on to coloring our design. I'm actually going to select all of our layers that we have here other than the sketch, and I'll just group them with command or control G. With those all grouped up, now we can begin coloring our design. I actually have a swatch for this. I'll go to the place images tool and select our swatch and I'll bring it into the document. I'll just place it right up here. Then I'll select our bottom layer and I'll grab the pen tool so that we can begin to color this design like a coloring book. I'm going to use this orange color to fill in this teapot. First, I'm just going to outline the entire thing, and then I'll fill it in with other colors later on. Go ahead and trace out this entire kettle. Okay. And if you're getting a really thick black line as you're tracing this out, just go up here and make sure that no stroke is turned on. That way, you can see what you're doing a little bit better for these thinner lines. I'll just select this orange color here. I'll apply it and you can see that looks pretty good except for this area right here. I'm just going to trace around this area, and then I'll use the subtraction operation to get rid of it. To introduce a few more colors, I'm going to use this dark brown color to add a few accents to this piece. First, I'm going to make this bottom area right here, the dark brown color. To do that, it's pretty easy. I'm just going to trace right along this line and then bring it around like this. Then I'll sample the brown color and apply it, and I'll just move it down as a child layer. I'll do that for this part as well. I'll roughly trace around this and fill it with brown. Now for the scalloped areas, I thought it would be fun to introduce some other colors here. I'm going to use this color for this middle area. For this one, I will need to trace it a little bit more carefully. Let me just bring this around here. Okay. All right, I'll sample this light orange color and apply it. And then I'm going to apply even lighter color to this top part. If you want to save a little time here, you can just bring it around like this. Then select this color but brighten it up. I'm just going to place this layer underneath the other one, so it's tucked in like that. Now you can see those colors look pretty nice. Now to mix it up, I wanted to make this t cup a blue color. I'm just going to trace this entire t cup and apply that color to it. I'll make sure to select the entire group right here. That way, these layers are placed on top of it. All right. Once again, we have this little handle area that I need to remove with the subtract operation. Now, to bring up some color variety here, I think what I'm going to do is take this top area inside the cup and make it a little bit darker. Ops. There we go. I'll bring it around, I'll select the blue color and make it darker. Then I'll make it a child layer to the cup. The colors are added, which means we're almost done. I'm just going to press command or control S to save. Now we can begin to add in our shadows and highlights. I'll just group these two color layers together and we'll select the entire group so that the shadows go on top. Now, in our sketch, I actually put where I wanted the shadows, and that was right on this side, wrapping around like this. I also have a little bit of a shadow tucked in here. From this, we can say the light is probably coming from this side, this side should be lit up. Maybe they'll be a little highlight right there, and we'll do the same down here. Now, just like with the pizza, I want to add a little bit of a shadow onto the background to make it look like the teapot and cup are both sitting on a surface. We'll also add in a little bit of a shadow like that. To start, I'm just going to start right up here and I'll bring a shadow down this way. I'll curve it around and bring it over like this. Then I'll make sure that this whole bottom area is in shadow. Once I get to about this point, I'm going to bring my shadow out like this to begin to create that shadow on the surface. And then I'll bring it up again. I'll go ahead and include the handle in this and we'll use the subtract operation later to remove it from the middle area. I'm just going to use the node tool to adjust this point right here. I'll use Alt or Option to break it. I don't really like how these nodes turned out. I think I dragged a little too farther. That should be good. Now, I'm just going to make this a dark color. I think I'll just select this brown color and make it even darker. Before we lower the opacity, I'm just going to grab the pen tool with P. Then I'm going to trace around this handle to remove this area. I'll select both of these and use the subtract operation. Another area that I want shadowed is right here under the lid. What I'm going to do is trace right along here. I'll overlap with this shadow. I'll come down like that, and then I'll just bring the shadow up like this. I'll apply the brown color. Actually, I need to sample this one since we darkened it, and now they're the same color. Now these are two separate layers, which means that if I lower their opacity, you can see that the overlap area is darker. To avoid that, I'm going to select both of these layers and then I'll add them together using the add operation so that they become one solid shape. Then you can see that the opacity isn't affected in this way. Okay. We're almost done here. I'm just going to add that little shadow right here. You can see that this shadow was the brown color I sampled and it's at 57%. I'll make sure to use those settings. Once I'm done tracing this out. All right, I'll apply the brown and make it 57%. I'm going to do the same thing over here, adding a shadow to this little cup. I'll start right down here and I'll just trace out the shadow it's casting. And then I'll curve it around like this. Now for this one, I think I'm going to use a dark blue color. I'll sample that blue and darken it. This has been placed on top of everything, so I'll just lower this down like that. I like this blue color, I'll sample it, and I want to add a shadow to the inside of the cup as well, right here. Then I'll select both of these layers and we can lower the opacity. I think this looks a little strange, actually, having the shadows different colors. I think instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this brown color. I'll just sample that I'll make both of these tcup shadows brown. That way, the shadow here on the ground is the same color. Now that I've done that though, I'm not sure I like how it's reflecting on this teacup. I think actually, I'm going to trace around everywhere where the shadow is here, other than the outside. Then I think I'm going to make this the dark blue color that I wanted to use. I'll select the blue, make it. Then I'm going to make this a child layer to the teacup shadow. Oh, this was a separate layer, so I'll need to do that one more time. I'll just trace around, make it blue, make it dark, and make it a child layer. Now you can see that's a much better color for the tea cup. But the shadows that are on the surface still match. Now it's time to add some highlights. I'm just going to add a little highlight right here and right here on this side of the tea cup. I'll make it white. I'll make sure that this isn't a child layer. I'll just drag this up here. Then I'll lower the opacity. That looks pretty good. We have 38% opacity and I dragged it all the way over, so it's white. I'll just do the same thing over here. I think our shadows and highlights look really nice. I'm just going to select them all and group them together. Then we can see the before and here's the after. What a huge difference. To add some finishing touches, I'm just going to add a background color to this. It's going to be some variation of this blue color. I'll just sample that. I'll turn off that swatch. Then using the rectangle tool, I'm going to click and drag out a rectangle. I'll make it blue and drag it to the bottom, and then I'll make it quite a bit lighter. Okay. Okay. As one last finishing touch, I'm going to go into our strokes, and I'm going to find these two lines right here, I'm just going to make them white so they look like steam. I'll select the stroke color and bring the color all the way over to white. At this point, you can adjust any of the colors that you want. In fact, I think I want to make a few adjustments here. In my shadows, I am not liking this brown shadow on this blue background. Instead, I'm going to select all of these layers, all of the shadow layers we have here, even the blue ones, and I'm just going to make them black. Then I'll adjust their opacity all at the same time. You can see that just looks a lot more consistent between the two. You can still see the orangish brown color because the opacity is lowered. Black has mixed with that orange there, and Black has also mixed with this blue. I think black actually looks a lot better in this case. If you wanted to adjust any of this, make sure that with your stroke selected, you go to the stroke panel and check on Scale with Object. Great work on this project. Now that you know how to go from sketch to vector, we're going to spend some time learning how to add some extra style to these types of designs. We'll get started with that in the next chapter. 25. Adding Style to Vectors: This chapter will take your flat designs to the next level. We're going to focus on creating a hand drawn look like you just sketched out that vector. Hopefully, by focusing on this more free form style, you'll feel like it's easier to put your own personal style into your vectors. Let's get started. 26. Loose Sketching: In this video, I'll give you a few quick tips for creating a looser sketch. Here's the sketch that I created for this chapter. It's a little duck and he's dressed up like a detective. You might even call him a duck tchive. I'm going to walk you through my thought process as I created this sketch. Now, the main difference between this chapter and the last chapter is that in this chapter, I'm inviting you to have a little bit more looseness to create a more hand drawn look. It all really starts right here with our sketch. You can see that I didn't connect all of my lines. As you look throughout all of the details of this, you can really start to see that. Now, there's this temptation in creating vectors where all of your lines need to match up perfectly. That way, it's easier to fill it with color later. But I would challenge you in this chapter to try a more open approach. Now, this doesn't mean clothes lines aren't allowed. I still did close this tie here, and this hat is pretty closed. But I just mean that you can incorporate a little bit more open lines, don't worry, the coloring later on will still look nice. This is just a way to add a little bit more flavor and style to your design. This really isn't too different from our previous sketches. I'm just trying to embrace more imperfections for a hand drawn look with this technique. Like before, I did add a little bit of shading here that you can see and a shadow on the floor here. We can refer to that later on. Now that we have this loose sketch prepared, we can bring it into designer. Okay. I'll lock the layer and bring down the opacity. And then we can get started with tracing all of these lines in the next video. Okay. 27. Open Strokes: Let's learn about easily creating open strokes. Because we're using open strokes throughout this design, we're going to change up our strategy just a little bit as we're tracing this sketch. To quickly practice, I'll grab the pen tool. I'll make sure we're in rubber band mode, and then we can get started. I'm just going to go over here off to the side so we can practice a little. First, I'm going to click and drag and I'm just going to draw out a little squiggle. I'll go to our stroke and let's just adjust this now. I'll make this a bit larger like that. Then you can see here, I need to press escape to end my line. Let's do that again. Squiggle squiggle. Escape. One more time, squiggle squiggle, Escape. As you can see, with these open stroke lines, we need to press escape quite a bit, which will change up our strategy a little bit as we're tracing. You might want to keep your finger hovered over the escape key and then bring it back down to alt or option as needed when you need to change directions. That practice was really just to show you that we need to press escape a lot. I'm just going to delete these lines. Then we can get started with our tracing. I think I'll just start right here at the bottom. Then I'll press escape to end that line. Now so that we can see our sketch better as we're tracing, I'm just going to move my tracing lines beneath the sketch. Then we can continue to trace all the way around pressing escape as needed, moving the finger back down to alt or option as needed to change direction. I'm just going to quickly go through and trace these lines. Now, for areas like the ti, remember that we're going to be changing the pressure later on. It's a good idea to start at the top or the bottom that way the pressure looks right. In this case, I think I'll just trace this like that, but this top part of the ti, I'll start right down here. We have another close shape right up here with the beak and with the hat. I'll just make sure to start at the bottom of those shapes. For the feet, I did one version where I held Alt or Option to change direction, which created a more sharp look to the feet. Then for this one, I just smoothed it around putting a node here that was lightly dragged out. I think that actually looks at. I'm going to delete that other curve I made, and I'm just going to redo that now. With that, I believe we are done, other than the eyes right here. Now, for the eyes, we could just draw a line, but I think it would look better if we drew a shape and then filled it with black. I'm just going to trace that out now. Then I'll switch the fill and the stroke color like that. I'll just do that one more time over here. Now that we're done with that, I'll just turn off the sketch layer, and you can see all of our beautiful sketch lines. Now, I think it's time to adjust the pressure of all of these lines. I'll just go through these and begin adjusting the pressure. For a lot of these, I'm probably going to do the same thing I did last time, where I just taper off the ends. But I'll pause if I decide to do anything different. I'm already pausing. For all of these leg lines, I'm just going to select them all at the same time, and then I'll adjust just one side of them. I'll hold Alt or Option to do this. I think that looks pretty cool. Then for all of these lines in the hat, I'll just select them all, and I think I'll do the same thing. I'll just bring down one of the sides. I think I'll bring down one of the sides for this hat line as well just to mimic these lines, and I'll do that for the other side as well. All right. You can see they all get smaller as they get closer to the top. I think that looks really nice. For this hat, I'll just bring down the middle. That way, it's closer to the camera and gets farther away. I'll do the same for the beak. Let me just continue here, tapering the ends. In fact, if I know I want the rest of these tapered, I could just select all of them and then taper them all at the same time. That saves quite a bit of time. With all of that done, I'm going to select all of the layers. Then I'm going to turn on scale with object and I'll group them with command or control G. Now that we finish the outline of our, we're ready to move on and pick out our colors in the next video. 28. Color Hunt: Let's create a color palette for our design. The more I've gotten into creating digital art, the more I realize how tricky it can be to choose nice colors for your design. I have a tendency when working digitally like this to choose colors that are faded and desaturated because the bright colors on a computer screen can strain my eyes while working. Also, this happens because I'm quickly choosing colors as I go, just winging it and hoping for the best. Because of this, a lot of times my designs can look dull. I like to get some help choosing color palettes before I begin applying my colors. And this is where the color hunt comes in. Now, we briefly learned about this website in the beginner course, but I find myself using it more and more, as I've used it, I've actually realized that it's even better than I originally thought. You can actually come up here and search for specific colors that you want included in your palette, and you can add as many colors as you need. This is so useful when you already have a color in mind that you know you want to include. For example, if you know you want a certain skin tone, maybe you want to choose Big. Now, every example has some variation of beige in it that you could try to use for a skin tone. If you want a specific hair color, maybe you're going for a orange red head look. You can see that now all of these palettes have beige and orange, so you could incorporate these colors. Now, for our duck, I'm just going to get rid of these. I know that I want my duck to be yellow, let's just put in yellow right now. Also, I think I want orange just so we can color in the beak and the little webbed feet. Last, maybe I have an accent color in mind. I think it would look nice if the tie was a blue color. Let's just put that in. Look, we still have so many palettes to choose from. I was very specific and I put in a lot of colors, but we still have a lot of options here. Now I can scroll down and try to find one that I like. I really like that the color hunt is limited to four colors. I like the constraint of this, like you've already seen, we can easily darken and brighten these colors to create shadows and highlights. Even though it's just four colors, we can still adjust these shades to create an interesting design. I actually think this palette would look really nice. I'm going to select it, and then I can download it as an image. By the way, this exact palette is in the exercise file, so you can find it there. As we've gone through this course, you might have noticed that we've already been using color hunt palettes for a few different projects. Now you know exactly how I found those palettes and you can find beautiful palettes for yourself. I'll leave the color hunt linked below this video. Now that we've chosen these colors, we can use it to add colors to our design in the next video. 29. Blend Mode Shadows: Let's add some shadows using blend modes. We already know that we can use darkened colors to add shadows, but I want to show you another option that you have to get really interesting looking shadows and we'll do that with blend modes. But to start, let's add some shadows on top of these colors. I'll select the color group with my pen tool, I'm just going to trace out some shadows. Now, the shadows are going to go on the right side of the body. I'll just start right up here and I'll begin tracing it down like this. Then I'll just trace the lines to bring it back. Now, because we have open strokes, it's a little tricky to follow it exactly right along this line, but just do your best to get it close. All right, I'm just going to grab my node tool and I'll break this by holding Alt or Option. There we go. All right. And now, I'm just going to fill this with black. Okay, I'm just going to continue to trace a few more shadows on our duck here. Okay, I just finish tracing out all of the shadows that I wanted to do. I'm just going to group them together. I'll also close up this stroke group. There we go. All right. So with all of those, I'm just going to quickly lower the opacity. We can see if we have any problem areas. I know that I had some overlap with this piece and this piece. It doesn't seem to be a problem, but I'm just going to add them together just in case. I think everything looks pretty good. I tried my best to line up all of these shapes. You might see a few little problem areas like this and you can feel free to adjust those and make them a little bit better. But it can be tricky. No worries if it's something super small like this. I think I'll just leave that. Okay, perfect. Now, I'm just going to select the whole group and let's bring up the opacity so that I can show you all of these different blend modes. Now, blend modes are found right up here in the layers panel. I'll just select this. Then I'm going to go down here and show you the difference between all of these different blend modes. As I scroll through these, you can see that the colors change. By using overlay, you can see that we get some pretty bright colored shadows, but they still look pretty interesting. This keeps colors very saturated, so I like this one. Another one that I like is soft light. These colors aren't quite as saturated, but I think they still look really nice. Okay. And you can go through this list. Not all of them act quite the same. But you can still get some pretty interesting looks. Reflect looks pretty nice too. I'm going to apply overlay. Then I'm just going to lower the opacity. I also want to show you that if you chose a color instead of black, this could also affect how these things are blending together. Right now, I just changed my colors to a blue shadow here's green, red. You can get all sort of interesting looks. The red actually looks pretty cool. I guess this is purple. If I darken this. Yeah, that looks pretty interesting. I think I'll just keep it set to black for now, but there's a lot of different variations that you can come up with changing the colors and changing the blood modes. I invite you to try that as you're making shadows for your designs. Now that the shadows are done, you can see that before and after of adding those shadows. I'll just turn that off. I just realize that I forgot to add a shadow underneath our duck. I'm just going to quickly do that. I'll just select this layer underneath the shadows. Actually, this needs to go underneath all of the colors, doesn't it? I'll select the very last layer. Then using the pen tool, I'm just going to trace out a little circle underneath the duck's feet. I'll bring it more over to the side here. And bring it around like that. I'll fill this with black. Then I'll change the blend mode. I think I'll go with soft light and I'll just lower the opacity down, so it's a little softer. Then we can use the node tool to adjust any of these points. All right. I think that looks a lot better. With that, we're done with this project. Isn't he so cute, our little duck tchive? I really like how this turned out. Now you have all of the skills you need to do this technique again. We'll finish off this chapter in the next video with a final project. 30. Extra Blend Mode Practice: Let's do a bit more practice with blend modes. After we finish the duct tective project, I thought it would be a good idea to cover blend modes even more. Blend modes are so great and I don't think I explained them well enough or praised them enough. Let's take a look at some other ways to utilize blend modes. Here I have a few different circles and each one uses a different color overlapping on the circle. We'll use these to better visualize how blend modes can affect different color combinations. First of all, what even is the blend mode doing? I don't think I explain that very well. Basically, a blend mode is taking a layer and telling it how to blend with the layer beneath it. Blend modes will let you make the layer darker, lighter, blend the colors together. It'll do all these different things, and depending on what blend mode we choose, we really can do a lot with the individual layer. Now, let's start here with our first circle. I have a black layer that I lowered the opacity of, so it's at 50%. This is pretty reminiscent of what we did with the Doc project. As I go through the blood modes, I think you can guess what will happen. Pretty much nothing. These darker blood modes aren't affecting it. The lighter blood modes just disappear, and nothing happens until we get to overlay and soft light and we can finally start to see some blending happening. Now, the reason for this is that we have a black layer. It has zero hue. If this were a colored layer, we could play with these a bit more and have more variation. But since it's just black, just pure black, nothing's really happening. Because of this, if you really want to play with blood modes, I suggest you actually use a color. Otherwise, overlay and soft light still look pretty good. I think I'll just apply overlay to this one. For the rest of these circles, I used an actual color at full opacity. I did not lower any of these, and we can see what it looks like when we have a color blending with another color. For this next one, we have a dark red blending with a normal red color. When I come here, you can see that this first section makes the semicircle look even darker as it blends. But some of these blend in a slightly different way. This is dark but still saturated. This is very saturated but not as dark, you can just scroll through here and see all the differences. These are great for adding beautiful shadows to your designs. Now, this next section is a little funny because it lightens your layer. Even though I have a dark red here, you can see that it becomes a lighter red as I scroll through these. That's a little interesting. I think I would stick to using these sections more for highlighting. But once you go lower than that, all of the rest of these affect the lighting and colors in various ways. I'm not exactly sure how to categorize all of these. But basically, as you scroll through here, you can see what a difference all of these different layers makes a lot of these are pretty vivid and saturated, which I find interesting. You continue to scroll through down here. You can see we get some weird ones. I don't think I really ever used these ones. That's pretty much it. Honestly, usually I just stick to these first three sections, but you can see how different it is when you use an actual color versus using black. In this one, I actually think I'll use a multiply because I really like using that for shadows. I think that looks really pretty. Next, I want to show you what happens when you have a lighter color. Now, similarly to the last one, these darkened blend modes will darken the layer, even though it's a light red color. That's a little strange. I don't think I'd use that for a highlight. But since I have a light red, I'm probably highlighting, and you can see that all of these lightened blend modes look really pretty. Of course, we have overlay and soft light, which still look really nice. But since I'm trying to highlight this circle, I think I would stick to one of these other ones. I think screen looks really pretty, so I'll stick to that one. That's how it works when you're working with colors that are very similar, just a little lighter or darker. But for this next row, I want to show you how cool it is when you use a contrasting color. Here we have a blue circle on top of red. As I go through darken, you can see it does darken the layer, but a lot of these have a bluish tint to them. You can see that especially in multiply, which I think looks really cool. You can also lighten. In this case, I think it's interesting that it pulls a lot of the blue and mixes with the red to make this purple color. That's pretty interesting. Then the rest of these will just blend the two layers together in different ways. You can see how that looks. I think I really liked some of these lightening ones. I think I'll go with color dodge. I think that's a really pretty combination. Next we have blue and yellow, so we can see what this looks like. I think these darkened ones are very interesting because it just makes it a green color. It actually doesn't look that dark, but I think that's just because the yellow is such a bright color. Now the lightens pretty much just turn it white, which I think is also interesting since it is such a light color. But I really like how soft light looks on this one. That green is just so pretty. And last, we have red on top of yellow. You can see as we darken this, we have this really beautiful orange color forming. And we have some really beautiful orange colors down here. I think I'll go with vivid light. That looks really pretty. Now you can really start to see how cool blend modes are. You can get so many really interesting color combinations when you use actual colors instead of black or white. Now, these examples we're all just a really quick look at blend modes. But I want to show you another example next where you use multiple colors in a design. I'm quickly going to delete these. Then I'll just drop a really quick design. I'll use the rectangle tool and then I'll apply some stripes to it and I'll make all the stripes different colors and I'll make them child layers. Then I'm just going to drag out a rectangle on top of everything. This has been applied as a child layer, but a child layer that's on top of all the stripes, and that's perfect for this. I'm going to make this a blue color and then I'll make it nice and dark. Using this dark blue, I'm going to try to apply a shadow to all of these colors, and I want to see what it would look like when it's combined with red and yellow. Can we make this look good? Let's take a look. Go through these darker blend modes up here. You can see darken looks really bad. It looks okay on the yellow colors, but on the red, it just combines in a really weird way. But multiply, I think actually looks really nice. I think if I were to use multiply on this layer, I would lower the layer's opacity a little. But look how nice that looks. It's blending with all of the colors so well. Let me just bring the opacity back up and we can take a look at a few more. Okay. Now, I'm not trying to lighten, so I think I'll skip through this section pretty fast. As usual, overlay and soft light, always look really pretty. They're very subtle. I think that's a pretty safe bet to keep your colors looking good but still have a little bit of a blue tint. I think I'll stick with overlay for this one. But then I want to show you how changing the color can affect the look. If you bring it to a warmer color, you can have warm tone shadows, which I think look really pretty. It reminds me of shadows at sunrise or sunset. But if you want a cooler tone shadow, This also looks really nice. You can see how all of these different colors blend together. Honestly, I think overlay and soft light usually look pretty good when you're blending layers. If you're going through all of the different ones and you're not finding one you like, I would say those two are your best bet. That's a more in depth look at blend modes. They can be really fun to play with, and if you use actual colors, they can really make your layers look interesting. I hope that clears things up better, and now we can move on to the final project of the chapter in the next video. 31. Rainy Day Project: In this video, we'll do the final project of this chapter from start to finish. To start off, let's add the sketch to our document. I'll just bring this in and make it nice and big. As you can see, I made this sketch here. I actually modeled it after my husband, Ezra, so cute. You can see that I made sure to keep a lot of the lines nice and open. In fact, the entire bottom area is open. This will be interesting as we color it in. I also added a bit of shading as a guide. I thought it would be nice if the light came from this direction and you could see his shadow on the umbrella like this. We'll work with that later on. But for now, let's lock this layer and I'll just lower the opacity of it. With the sketch in place. It's time to trace our design. I'll grab the pen tool, and then we can begin tracing. Make sure you have rubber band mode turned on and that snapping is turned off and you can feel free to adjust the stroke to whatever width looks good. As a reminder, keep your finger hovered over the escape key to quickly enter lines as needed, and then bring it back down to Alt or Option to change direction as needed. I'll just quickly go through this. Once you finish off tracing, make sure you press command or control S to save your work. Now it's time to adjust the stroke width. I'm just going to turn off the sketch, and then we can start to take a look at each one of these widths. I think to start off just to make this faster. I'm going to select all of them, other than these two, these are just the eyes. I'm going to select all of these layers though, a whole shift to do that. Then going to the stroke panel. I'm just going to taper the ends of all of these. Let's see how that looks. I actually think this looks really good, and it really speeds up the process. I think for the stroke width this time, I'm just going to do that. Then I'll turn on scale with object and I'll group these together with command or Control G. That was super quick. Now it's time to color our design. I have a swatch for this, so I'll bring this into our document. There we go. Now for this watch, I searched for peach and brown palettes. That way, we would have a skin tone and hair color that I would want to use. Now, I actually originally found this other one, and I liked most of the colors, but decided to switch out one of the colors like this. The color hunt is just there as a guide, not as a strict rule that you need to follow. I feel totally fine changing up these colors. I'm going to grab the pen tool and we can get started with these colors. I'll start by coloring in the skin tone. I'll just trace right along the edge here, I'll connect these lines like this. Oops, like this. Perfect. I'll just continue that all the way around. I'm going to add this peach color. Then I'll bring it to the bottom of everything. Now this is very typical. I forgot to do the open highlights. I'm just going to grab the node tool and make some adjustments. Now in this design, for the first time ever we're having the light coming from this direction. I'm going to come over here to the right side, and I'll just drag these nodes in to create that open highlight. I like to select a multiple at a time just to make this a little bit easier. There we go. I think I want to adjust this a little bit. This looks very jagged. I'm going to have this node selected and I'm actually going to convert it right up here into a smooth node. I'll convert this one to smooth as well. I think that just looks a little bit nicer. There we have it, our open highlight on that side. I think I want to drag this one over a little more. Perfect. Okay. Now I'm going to color in the hand. Now, this hand is going to be in shadow, so I can cover the whole thing with color. I don't need to worry about the open highlight. I'll just quickly do that. Next, I want to do a tricky area. I want to do the hair with open highlights. Now for this, I'm going to keep this a little bit messy since the hair is messy. I'm just going to trace right along like this. I'll bring it in. I think I'll actually start the highlight right here. I'll bring this over like this and end it here. Then I'll select this brown color and apply it. Now I'm going to do this section. I'm actually going to keep this in two sections with a part line right here. I'll just here. I'll keep it right along these lines. Then I'm actually going to highlight it and just squiggle my brown color all the way up like this. Then I'll apply the brown. You can see we didn't follow all of these curves perfectly, but I think that's going to look really cool for our highlight. I'm going to continue to add colors in this way, keeping in mind the highlighting on the right side, and I'll catch up with you after I'm done with that. I just finished coloring everything in. I just used the swatch for most of it, but there were a few areas I needed another color. For example, this pole right here of the umbrella and the zippers. For that, I just took this maroon color and I made it a bit more desaturated and a little lighter. You can see that. Then for the shirt underneath the jacket, I just made it the same green color as the jacket but made it d and less saturated. Now that I'm done coloring everything in, it's time to give our design some shadows. Now, for this image, quite a bit of it will be in shadow. I'm actually planning to start it from the zipper and just follow this line all the way up, bring it onto the face and behind him on the umbrella. Pretty much everywhere, other than the top of the umbrella and the right side of the body right here. I'll go ahead and get started with that. But first, I'm going to group all of these color layers together with that group selected. I'm just going to layer the shadows on top of that. I'll grab the pentel and get started tracing. I just finished tracing all of that. I'm just going to apply a dark color to it, and then I'm quickly going to go in here and remove it from this area. It's time to play with the shadows a little bit. I think this time, I want to give it a nice fun color so that we can actually utilize the blend modes in a more interesting way. I'm going to sample this brown color. I'm going to make it more saturated but darker. Now let's take a look at how this looks as a shadow. Go through the blend modes. I love how multiply looks. I think if I lowered the opacity, it would just look a little more subtle. But I really like the warmth that this brown color is adding to the image. If I went for more of a blue color, you could see how this changes the mood of the image. Now it looks like it's nighttime and maybe a street lamp is shining on him. Whereas with the orange, it looks like it's a sunny sunset and it just happens to be raining, something like that. I'm a big fan of multiply, but we can continue to go through these and see if we like any other ones. Honestly, I think multiply is the best one, so I'm going to stick to that. Before I finish, I think I just want to add a few additional shadow details to make this pop a little bit more. I'm going to do this by applying an extra shadow to the hand and to this area behind him just like in our sketch. I'm going to start right there in our sketch, we just drew it right along here and down and I'm going to do the exact same thing here. Starting here, just going to lay down a point and then bring it all the way down like that. To apply the same brown color that we used here, we could turn this on, increase the opacity, change it back to a normal blood mode, do all of that to get the exact color. Or I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Once you've applied a color and you move on to do pen mode stuff, the color is actually stored right here. All you need to do is single click on one of these points, and the same brown color will be applied. I'm just going to lower this down and place it on top of the other shadow. Then I'm going to change it to multiply. I think that looks so nice. I'm just going to do that same thing right down here. We've got some pretty intense shadows going on. I think they look really nice, but feel free to adjust the opacities of these just to make them a little bit more subtle. With that, we're done. I don't think I'm going to add a background to this one, but you can see how nice this one looks. I think it turned out really good and it looks just like Era. The resemblance is uncanny. Great work on this chapter. In the next chapter, we're going to learn about a really fun technique to turn your designs into a stained glass look. Okay. 32. The Stained Glass Effect: This is going to be a fun chapter. We're going to learn how to create stained glass designs in designer. This is going to be a lot of fun because it's actually pretty simple to create this effect and it looks really pretty. Let's get started. Okay. 33. Shape Builder: Let's learn about the shape builder. This is a new tool from the Affinity Designer Version two update, and I'm really excited to share how this tool works with you. Now, in Affinity Designer for beginners, we used the geometry tools right up here whenever we wanted to combine shapes. These tools are very similar to the shape builder tool. They're easier to understand, but the shape builder tool is a lot faster once you get the hang of it. Let's see how this works. To use the shape builder, we first need to select the layers that we want to effect. Over here in our layers panel, I'm going to select the first rectangle. Then I'll hold shift and select the last one. You can see we have all of these rectangles over here selected. So now that we have that, we can select the shape builder tool and we can start to affect these shapes. Now, using the shape builder, you can actually do three different things with it, depending on which setting you have selected. Let's start and add mode. Add mode is exactly what it sounds like. All you need to do is select areas to add them together. To start, I'm just going to click and drag to add this entire row into one piece. Then I'll just add these little areas to it. Now, you can see this whole shape is in one piece like that. We've added them all together simply by clicking and dragging on them, you can see in the layers panel, this has all become one layer. Next, let's use subtract mode. Again, this is just what it sounds like. You can use this to remove areas. You can just click, click and all of those areas will disappear. Just so you know, you can also do this while you're still in ad mode. All you need to do is hold down Alt or Option and then click. That way, you don't need to switch between the two modes if you don't want to. Just hold Alt or Option and you should be good to go. The last mode right here, we'll make duplicate copies of new shapes. To use this one, just turn it on. Then all you need to do is click on an area and it will become a new copied layer. So I just clicked right up here. Using the move tool, I can now show you that this is a separate layer. This is a super easy way to quickly duplicate things. Okay. Now, when you get out the shape builder tool by default, none of these will be selected. What that means is you can go ahead and click on whatever you want. Let me just select these again. What that means is you can click on whatever you want. For example, I'm just going to click on all of these little sections here, and then you can click on the mode. This is just another order you can do it in. It doesn't really matter. But with all of those selected, I'm going to click on the Create New shape. Now you can see, I just created this all new shape with separated sections, which is pretty interesting. That's the basics of the shape builder. But there's even more to it than that. You can use the shape builder to fix overlapping lines. Remember how we were using the knife tool to snip these lines and delete them. Well, it's actually a lot easier with the shape builder. To start, I'm going to select the entire stroke lines group, and then I'll grab the shape builder. Now, using this, I'm just going to go into subtract mode. Then you can see as I hover over these areas, each of these are divided into little sections. I can just go through here with the strokes and clean all of these lines up. That looks so much better. Over here in the layers panel, you can see that each of these lines is its own individual shape. But if you wanted to create shapes out of these sections, you could actually do that. I'm going to go into add mode. Then I'm just going to click in each of these sections. Now you can see that instead of lines, we have individual shapes that we've created. Now, why would I do this? Well, now that I've done this, I can fill each of these areas with color individually to quickly fill in my design. You see how quick that is. Using the shape builder is so nice for things like this, cleaning up lines, creating new shapes, even deleting sections of shapes. That's the basics. It's a very useful tool, and once you understand all of the modes, you really can do so much with it. Now that you understand that, in the next video, we're going to shift focus and learn about adding color with gradients. 34. Gradient Fills: Let's learn about gradient fills. In the beginning course, we learned how to add gradients. They are so nice to add gradual color changes to your design. Even though we learned about gradients, we mostly use them to add a pretty background to our designs. But in this course, I want to show you how to fill a small area with a colored gradient. Here we have our beautiful exercise file that we'll practice this technique with. Before I start filling this up with gradients, we have a few things we need to do to prepare our documents. The first thing is, I'm going to select all of these layers, and then I'm going to use this shape builder to remove some of these lines. I'll select the shape builder and go into subtract mode. Then I'm just going to delete all of these little extra lines on the corner areas and all of the lines in the center. I design this exercise file to look like a stained glass window. I just want to clean this up to make the effect a little more prominent, I guess. With that all cleaned up. Next, I want to create shapes using all of these sections right now in the layers. You can see these are all just individual little stroke lines. I'm going to go to add mode and then I'll just Click on each of these sections to make them their own layer. Once I've done that, we can come over here to the layers and see that all of these have been turned into individual shapes. Now, I think I messed up a little bit. There's a few extra diamond shapes, so I'll just select those and delete them. I think the rest of this looks good. Now that all those shapes are created, we can fill our design with flat color to to create gradients. Now, I actually have an exercise file for this. Let's select this little swatch and I'll just bring it in right here. I'll make sure this is on top of everything. There we go. Now I can start to fill these shapes with color. Now, it can be a little tricky to select the shapes in our document since all of the lines are connected. I suggest you just come right over here to the layers to select all of the different shapes. I'll start with this light pink color. I'll make sure the fill is selected, and then I'll start applying these colors to some of these shapes. Once your colors look something like this, feel free to change up the order of the colors. It doesn't really matter. But once they look like this, we're ready to add gradients and really turn this into a stained glass window design. I'll start by selecting this diamond in the center and then I'll go and select the gradient tool. Using this tool, I'm just going to click and drag to create a gradient. Now to really make this look like stained glass, I think I'm going to turn this into a radial gradient. And then I'll stretch it out a little bit. The dark yellow is just on the very edges. By filling just a small area with a gradient, you can see this is a much different look than just filling the entire background with a gradient. We're really able to manipulate each color individually. I'm just going to do this for the rest of the pieces. Having them selected, clicking from the center and dragging outward, and then turning it into a radial gradient. Then for these last pieces right here. I'm actually just going to keep this as a linear gradient. I'll just click and drag, and I think that looks pretty good. I'll do that for all of them. All right, and with that, we've created a beautiful glass design all with the help of the shape builder and the gradient tool. In the next video, we'll use these new techniques to create a full stain glass project. Okay. 35. Snow Globe Project: Let's make this beautiful stained glass snow globe. Because this chapter was a little shorter. We're going to have two projects to round out this stained glass chapter. We're going to start in this video by making the snow globe design. To start off, I already have my exercise file right in here. The layer is locked and the opacity is lowered. We're ready to just jump right into tracing our design. Now to begin tracing, we actually have a circle in our design. This is up to you, but I think what I want to do is create a more perfect smooth circle by using the ellipse tool. I'll just get that out. Then I'll click and drag. I won't worry about holding shift because we'll need to adjust some of these edges. I'll just bring that out. I'll lower it so that I can see the snow globe sketch. Then using these points, I'm just going to make some adjustments. I know my sketch definitely wasn't a perfect circle. I don't know if I could actually do that. But we'll just follow the lines the best we can. Once you like how yours is positioned, go ahead and come up to the color panel and remove the fill. Then I'm going to go to the stroke panel and increase the width of the stroke. I think that looks pretty good. Now that we have this main outside area of the snow globe, I want to continue to trace the outer lines, and we'll do that by tracing this base right down here. I'll press P to get out the pen tool, and then I'll start right down here at the bottom. I need to get rubber band mode out. There we go. Then I'll just trace this all the way around trying to meet up these lines here, but we can go back and fix those later if they don't line up perfectly. There we go. And bring it around. I'll press A to get out the node tool, and I'll just make sure that these are lined up nicely. That actually looks pretty good. Here's where the shape builder comes in. I don't want this line. I wanted a more flat line like this. I need to remove this line by using the shape builder. I'll select both of these layers by holding shift and clicking. Then to get out the shape builder, I'm actually going to use it shortcut because we're going to be using the shortcut as we do this project. That is S for shape builder. Up in the context toolbar, I'll put it in subtract mode, and then I can delete this extra line. You're really going to get used to these three shortcuts in this video, S for shape builder, P for pen tool, for some reason, it's a for the node tool. That one, I guess you'll just have to memorize. I'm going to press P to get out the pen tool, and now I'm going to trace this more flat line like that. I'll press escape. Then I want to cut off these end points here. I'll select all of my layers. I'll press S for the shape builder, and it's remembered to be in subtract mode, which is very nice. Now I can just click on these lines. We have the entire outline of our project. We're off to a great start. I'll press P, and we can continue to trace some of these lines. Now for this next step, there are quite a few lines to trace in here. I'm going to start by just tracing all of these background lines. Then we'll come back and trace all of these inner details later on. To start, I'm just going to trace this horizon line right here. Then I'll press escape, and I'll do the same to this horizon line. I'm trying to overlap all of my lines so that I can go back later on and clean them up and make sure that they're perfectly aligned right there. So go ahead and do this, overlapping every single line. I'm just going to quickly go through here and trace out everything I can. Remember, you can hold down Alt or Option to change direction as usual. Okay. Okay. At this point, I have quite a few of the background lines done. I didn't do the tree yet and I didn't do some of the other details, but that's okay. I'll go back to those. For now, I'm just going to select all of our layers and then I'll press S for the shape builder so that I can begin to remove some of these lines. I'll start by just removing these outer lines outside of the ellipse, and then I'll move inward. We can just remove any of these little sticky out lines that you see. If you mess up, remember you can always press command or control Z to undo. I ran into a couple of problem areas where my lines didn't overlap enough. I'll press A for the node tools, you can see this. You can see this line didn't overlap enough to connect points. I'm just going to lower this down a little bit more and I'll bring this up a little bit more. Then I'll press S for the shape builder, and you can see now I can remove this point. If I zoom in here, you can see we have a few extra points like this. I'm just going to remove this top point here, and I think this roof line looks pretty good now. You can see now as I hover over each of these areas, they're all separated nicely, which will come in handy later as we're doing our coloring. This is looking pretty good. I can see we have quite a few overlap lines here. I'll just remove one of those. But you can see we have some nice sections going on. It's a good idea just to check in and make sure our sections look good as we go. All right. I'm going to continue on. I'll press P for the Pen tool. Let's do the tree next. For this tree, I'm going to overlap quite a bit for this tree trunk. I'll just close out that shape, but we'll delete it later, so it doesn't really matter what you do. I'll need to hold Alt or Option quite a bit for these pointy areas. There's a lot we'll need to fix there, but that's okay. Let's just continue on tracing this tree. Now, I suggest that you try to keep your lines apart in areas like this. If I clicked up here, traced along this and then brought it down, it would be pretty difficult to remove the extra line later on. Instead, I'm just going to trace my line out and bring it lower. That way, I'll be able to see which line I need to remove better. Okay. And we have a little bit of snow right here, but I'll come back and do that later. I think we have enough lines to deal with. I'll press shift to select everything and then I'll press S, and we'll remove some of these extra lines. This is looking good. All of those shapes are nice and separated. I'll continue on now. We don't need this line right here. Perfect. Our tree looks really good. You can see as I hover over here, all of these are separated shapes that we'll be able to color in very nicely. I'll press P, and we can finish this off tracing this little snowy area. Then I'll press escape to end that. We're doing pretty good. I have a few more details on this house that I want to finish. Let me just go in here really quick. Oops. There we go. I'm just going to trace out this chimney with its little snow and I'll trace the outline of the windows and doors. Now, the windows and doors are actually going to be a little bit tricky for this project. Just trace the outlines for now. Don't worry about the window pane lines or the little extra lines on the door. We're going to go back and do those at the very end so that those lines don't get in the way of our coloring later on. Then I'll just go through and trace all of the little falling snow circles. This should be pretty quick, two little nodes and bring it around. I'm going to select all of the layers so that we can clean them up. I'll press S. Then I'm just going to go through and remove any of these extra areas. We have some lines overlapping with the snowy clumps. Then, any lines interfering with any other parts of the design. Just go ahead and remove those now. Now, I think I have just about everything traced other than the window pane lines and these lines of the door. I'm just going to hover my cursor over all of these different sections. Oh, it looks like I missed that. Let me just remove that. I'm just making sure that the whole area gets filled with these stripes to make sure that I can make them individual shapes later on. Okay. I think we're good. I think we're ready to move on to coloring our design. Now before we do that, make sure you press command or Control S to save your work. We've done a lot of work to create this so we don't want to lose it. Now I'll go over to the Place image tool, and I'll just add in our color swatch here and I'll open that up right here. Now, we don't actually need this sketch anymore, so I'll turn that off. We will use it later on as we trace these lines, but we don't need that right now as we're coloring. Now using these colors, I'm going to fill in my design. We have quite a few colors. This is going to be used for snow. The light blue is going to be used for the sky. This is for the tree. This reddish color, I'm actually going to use for the chimney and the door just to create a little contrast with the next color brown. The house is going to be brown to look like a gingerbread house. We'll also use the brown for the trunk and for the base. Last, we have this nice yellow color that we'll use to fill in the windows. Keeping these colors in mind. I'm going to go through and turn all of these different strokes into individual shapes that we can color in. With all of those selected, I'll get the shape builder out, and I'll change it to add mode. Then I can begin to make these all into shapes. Now, as I'm doing this, I'm going to keep in mind these colors over here and I'm going to try to arrange them in a way where all of the layers are organized. For example, all of the blue sky layers are right next to each other. Let's just start there. I'll click on all of the sky pieces. Okay. That looks good. Next, I'm going to click on the Cloud pieces. These clouds are going to be the pinkish color of the snow. I'll just click on those as well as these two snowy pieces. Next, I'll do the green tree. Then I'll do the pink. That's just the chimney and the store. Next is brown, that'll be the house. I'll click on this and this. I won't click on the roof. I'm actually going to make that a white color. I'll click on the tree trunk and the base of the snow globe. Then for a yellow, I'll just click in these two windows. Now, I mentioned that I'm actually going to make this a white roof, these snow capped areas here and here, and all of the falling snow, I'm actually just going to keep a plain white color. But before I do that, I notice that I missed an area right here. I'm going to get out subtract mode, and I'm just going to delete this line and delete these little extra lines. All right. Then I'm going to go back to add mode and I'll click on the roof. These snow peaks. All of these circles should actually already be they all are. They're already grouped together and they're already closed shapes. I don't think we need to worry about clicking on those. I think we got everything. We can always go back and make some adjustments later on if I missed clicking on anything, but I think we're good to go to begin filling all of these with color. I'll start right at the very top. I see here we have our white snow. All of these I'll select and then I'm going to go to color for the fill color, I'm just going to make this a pure white color. You can see in the layers that they've been filled with white. It's a little hard to tell since we have a white background, but there you go. Next, I'll select the two windows, and I'll just sample this yellow color and I'll apply it. Next, it looks like we have all of the brown pieces. I'll just select all of those. I'll sample the brown and apply it. Perfect. This is looking really good. Next, I can only see the door. I think I might have messed up a little bit as I was arranging this chimney and the layer got misplaced or just completely deleted. I'm not sure where it went. I'm actually going to select all of my layers again. Then using the add operation on the shape builder. I'll just click right on the chimney to create that shape. It's automatically been applied with a pink color, which is perfect. That's actually what I wanted. Now I'll just continue on with our shapes. We have all of the green, so I'll sample that I'll continue to just color in all of these different areas. Okay. I've come to the bottom and realized that I clicked ad mode on these windows, but they were already closed off shapes. We actually don't need these layers. I'll just press delete. Now you can see that I filled everything with color. Oh, except for one area, it looks like I missed one. I'll select all of my layers again. I'll go back into Ad mode, and I'll just click right there. This should be a sky blue color. With the blue color selected and that layer selected, I'll just fill it with blue, and now we have all of those areas filled in with beautiful color. Now that we have the colors, we can go through with the gradient tool to make this look like stained glass. I'll just grab the gradient tool, and then I can go layer by layer and change these colors up to make them look more like stained glass. To do that, I'll click and drag from the center point on all of the layers, and then I'll turn it into a radial gradient. I really like how the radial gradient looks. But if there's any areas where you just want to keep it a linear gradient, that's totally fine. Feel free to do that. I think I'm going to do that a little bit for the house because the sloping line of the roof looks a little nicer if it's just a linear gradient. Feel free to change it as you want. Actually, as I'm going through here, I'm noticing that I'm using linear gradients quite a bit just to add shading details to some of these areas. Yeah, feel free to do whatever you want. It doesn't really matter, but I think that this look is turning out really nicely. Continue through layer by layer. I don't think I'm going to add gradients to all of the falling snow because I like how they look just as is. There's one last detail we need to add, and that's the lines for the windows and doors. I'm going to turn our sketch back on. Then I'll select the top layer of our design, and then I'll press P for the Pen tool. That way, the lines will just go on top of that part. I'm just going to click and drag to trace overdrawing these lines. With that done, I'm just going to select all of our layers. Then I'll press S to get out the shape builder, and I subtract mode, I'm just going to quickly go through and remove all of these little lines. Remember if you mess up, press command or control Z. Okay. With that, we're done with our beautiful snow globe project. Feel free to adjust any of the colors, however you want, adjust your gradients around. To do that, all you need to do is have your layer selected. Then grab the gradient tool, and then you can click and drag to adjust it. I think I do need to adjust this. That pink color was looking a little too intense. Now with that, we're done. I hope you really enjoyed that. I think it turned out very magical. To finish off this chapter, we have one more stain glass project in the next video where we'll make a rose design. Okay. 36. Rose Project: In this video, we're going to make this stained glass rose design. We're going to follow the same steps that we did last time, first tracing out our lines, using the shape builder to remove any excess lines and then filling it with colored gradients. Let's get started. Here I have my exercise image already set up. It's locked with a low opacity. I went ahead and brought in our color swatch that we'll use later on to fill in the colors of the rows. We don't need that right now though, so I'll just turn that off. Then we can get started tracing these features of our rows. I'll press P to get out the pen tool. I'll make sure we're in rubber band mode with snapping turned off, and then we can get started. Last time with the snow globe, we traced the outside and worked our way in. But I want to show you another way you could do this and this time we'll work from the inside out. I'm just going to start right at the very center of the rose and then I'll add petals on and use the shape builder to remove the extra parts. I'll start by tracing right in here. This is actually how I drew the row starting from the inside out. I think this is a nice way to do it. Next, I'm just going to go to the stroke panel and increase the stroke. That looks pretty good. Then we can continue with the next outer petals. I'm just going to start right inside of this one. As a reminder, we're doing this so that all of the rose petals will match up nicely where they intersect. If I tried really hard to line it up, it might not be perfect. We might have some overhang. By doing it this way, we just ensure that when we clean it up with the shape builder later on, it'll all look really nice and seamless. I'll select both layers and press S for the shape builder, and I'll make sure it's in subtract mode. Then I'll just remove these two nubs and we're good to go. I'll press P, and we'll continue tracing these petals. I think I'll do this one next. I don't think I'm going to do the shape builder every single line. Okay. I think I'll do it at this point. I'll select all of my layers. I'll press S, and then I'll remove all of the extra lines. All right, we're looking really good. Let's keep going and I'm just going to continue this for the rest of the rose petals. I really like how forgiving this rose design is because the petals are all very organic shapes. Feel free to switch up how they look a little bit. They don't all have to be perfectly aligned with the sketch, and I think that's a really nice way to quickly get a design done if the shapes don't have to be perfect. I just finished my rose petals. I'm just going to select all of the layers and then using the shape builder, I'll just clean it up really quick. Remember, if you ever mess up, command or control Z is your best friend, go ahead and use that. Now that I'm done with that, I'm just going to hover over all of the parts of the rose, double checking that they're all closed shapes. It looks like we are good. I'll just press P for the Pen tool. Next, I'm going to do the leaves. Now, I'm just going to trace the outside edges of the leaves. Don't worry about the inner vein part of the leaf quite yet. We'll get back to that. All right. I'll just clean up these leaves. And now comes the leaf vein. The reason I saved this is because it's connected to some of these outer lines that I'm going to use to create stained glass panels on the outside edges. I'm just going to press P for the pen tool. Then I'm going to trace the leaf veins. Keeping in mind that some of these are used for these outer panes I'm just going to continue the line all the way off our document like that. I'm trying really hard to line it up right here. Try to get that as close to this point of the leaf as possible. I'll just continue to do that now. I just finished and I don't love how all of my lines look. Before I clean up their little edges, I'm just going to press A to get out the node tool, and then I'll make sure that I like the curves of these lines. Okay. Now that I have my lines where I like them, I'm just going to make sure I have all of them selected and I'll clean them up. I'm just going to go through and check my leaves now, making sure they're all closed shapes. And we're looking good. But as I'm hovering over these, I'm noticing that these parts aren't lighting up. They're not closed shapes. You can see that we have all of these edges, but then it just disappears off of the edge. To create our closed shape, we're going to need to create a rectangle along the outside border. I'll grab the rectangle tool and I'll trace one out. Then I'll remove the fill by going to the color panel and clicking right there. Now for this, you could turn on snapping and bring it all the way to the edge if you really don't want to see this line. But I like how it looks. I think I'll bring a mine in just a little bit, and then I'll hover until my cursor looks like this so that I can reposition it right in the center of my document. Now, these should be closed shapes. I'll select all of my layers, and then I'll press S for the shape builder, and I'll just remove these ends right here. Now we should see these light up nicely, but we aren't. It looks like I didn't connect this line all the way. I'm going to have to redo that. I'll just press A for the node tool. Then I need this line to be moved. I'll drag this node inward so it's overlapping. There we go. Now I should be able to select everything and use the shape builder to remove that part. With all of our shapes selected, good. It looks like that fixed it. I think I started this line right on the edge instead of overlapping. That was my mistake. But now it looks like we're good to go so we can go ahead and turn all of the parts of the rows into individual shapes that we can fill in with color. With the shape builder still selected, I'm just going to change it to add mode. Then I'll begin in the center. Now, this centerpiece is already a closed shape. You can see that in the layers. I'll leave that one alone, but I'm just going to click around all of the other petals to make them into their own shapes so that I can color them. And then I'll do the same thing for the leaves and the outer parts. With all of those turned into individual shapes, I'm going to turn on our swatch now so that we can color them in. As I was filling in my colors, I noticed I have a layer that represents the entire rose. I really don't know where that came from, so I'm just going to ignore it. But I'm just going to continue on. Next, for the leaves, I'm going to fill it with green, and then I'll fill the background in with that orange color that I have there on the swatch. We have all of our colors, so I'll just turn off the watch. Now we can go ahead and turn these into gradients to make them look more like stained glass. To start, I'm going to work on these outer panels. I'll grab the gradient tool. Then with one of those panels selected, I'll just click and drag like this. Now for this particular stained glass, I wanted to be a lighter color on the other side. I'm just going to lighten that. In fact, I'm going to make it all the way to white, so we'll have it fade from white to orange. I think that'll look pretty nice. I'll just do that for all of these other panels. I think that looks really nice. Next, let's go ahead and do these leaves. Now, for the leaves, I'm actually going to change the default gradient, it looks like I have snapping turned off. Let me turn that off. I'm going to change this default gradient from going to dark green to light green. Instead, I want this outer handle to be more of a yellow color. You see how nice that looks? It looks like light is shining in from behind it. Also, a lot of leaves are more of a yellow green. I think this looks really nice. I'm just going to continue to do this for all of them. Clicking and dragging the gradient from the center outward, and then making this outer point more of a yellow green. You can see this is a little bit more tedious that I need to do every individual leaf on each side of the leaf. This is a similar thing I was talking about with the window panes in the last project, where if we save these lines for the very end, then I wouldn't have to go through each individual section and color it. I could just color the entire leaf or the entire window at the same time. But in this case, there's so few leaves that I don't think it's that big of a deal. That's just something to keep in mind as you're coloring with this technique. These leaves look really, very vibrant. Next, I'm going to do the rose and I think I'll start from the center. So far we've just been using linear gradients, and I actually really like how this looks. I think I'll continue to do that on this rose. Now for the rose, I'm just going to click and drag. You can see by default, we have this darker color here. Now throughout this rose, I'm actually going to be changing this outer color into a few different shades. I'm going to be changing it into a more orange color, but also into a more purply color just to create some variation with all of the tones in this rose. For this first one, I think I'm just going to make the outer color slightly more purple. Then as I continue through here, I'll mix it up a little bit, maybe this one will make more of an orange color and more of a light color. Feel free to change all of the sliders on these. It's really okay to mix it up a little bit more. I think I like the purple, but I don't want it to be quite so purple if that makes sense. I think instead I want it to be more of a dark maroon looking color. I'm going to go back to my center one and I'm just going to adjust that, making it a little more red and a little darker. There we go. I'm going to continue this going all the way to all of the petals on the rose and changing up their colors in this way. Okay, so now you can see my finished colors here. I really like the variety in the rose, but to be honest, I think these leaves are a little bit too neon for me. I think I'm just going to go back and adjust their colors a little bit. Maybe bringing down the saturation of this outer yellow green. I think that will look a little bit better. I think the leaves look a lot better now. I went through and reduced the saturation on the brighter color. I also went to the other side, which was our swatch color. I just made that a bit darker. I think that just looks better overall, more realistic. I think we are. We're now done with this rose project and we're done with this stain glass chapter. I think this stain glass design is so pretty and it was actually pretty easy to do. For the next chapter, we're going to learn all about creating three D designs. This is pretty exciting that we're finally ready to jump into that, and even though it's tricky, it's going to be a lot of fun. I'll see you in the next chapter. 37. Creating 3D Designs: Okay. It's time to tackle three D designs. I know this seems like a big jump from where we were just designing, but trust me, you have all the skills you need to create these designs. Just stick with me. You're going to be great. Let's get started. 38. The Importance of References: Let's talk about how important references are. It's always a good idea to use reference pictures as you sketch out your designs. But with three D, it's completely necessary. Unless you're some genius prodigy, I don't think it'd be possible to create a realistic three D design without a reference handy. Because it's so complicated to create these designs, I strongly suggest that as you're getting started, you focus on trying to replicate your reference photo. Don't try to do it from scratch until you've practiced replication. In addition to practicing replication, I suggest that you stick to replicating objects that have smooth surfaces like objects made of plastic or glass. Textures can be pretty tricky and take a lot of time. Keep that in mind as you look for photos to practice with. Now, where are you going to find good reference images? Well, I have some suggestions of places you can search. I have three different websites here. I'll leave them all linked below. These are all great for finding inspiration. Now for this first one, I'm just going to click right in here and type in three D character. You can see that we have all these different three D characters. I really like how smooth they all look. They all plasticky and they don't really have texture. That makes it very easy to replicate. These characters are also really cute. You can see we have quite a few different inspiration images we can pull from here. We could take a screenshot of it, bring it into affinity designer and try to replicate it. These are all really nice. Except you see how this one has a lot of texture on it. This would be super difficult to replicate and designer, and I do not suggest that you try that. Or creating something hyper realistic. Instead, these clay looking models here are actually going to be quite a bit easier. You can see we start to get very complicated. I don't think we're quite ready for that, but maybe this little potato wouldn't be too hard. This website, B haunts, B Hans, whatever it's called. You can go ahead and use that to look up any three D characters. I think this is a really great website. Another one is called deviant art. For this one, I'm just going to type in three D mug. I find using different dishware is also a really good place to start because it all has a very glass or plastic texture. You could practice making the reflections. I think these would be great reference images to practice off of. The last one I have here is called free pick. We'll go ahead and search here. This time, I'll type in three D food. You can see all of the food items that look like clay toys or plastic toys for a child. These would all be very good ones to replicate. They don't have tricky textures. This sushi has trickier texture. I wouldn't suggest that one, but these carrots look like they would be a great place to start. Now, these places are really great to find references to work with specifically for three D designs. Like I said, I'll leave them all linked below this video. However, in this course, I'm going to use images that I found on Pixabay, Pexels, and Unsplash. That's because those images are free for me to share with you in the exercise files. That's why we'll be working with photos throughout this chapter. Now that you know where you can find reference images, we'll get started with a super simple three D design in the next video. 39. The Basics of 3D: Let's learn some basics of three D design. You found your reference image. It has a nice smooth surface. It's pretty simple, low detail. This is a perfect starting point. Let's start to break it down. As we practice, we're going to practice making this mat ornament, as well as this reflective ornament. Notice the difference in detail here. This one is going to be a lot easier. We'll start here, but we will move on to doing this more reflective one. This will just give you a couple of different techniques you can use to create a different look. Starting right here, our first step is to fill it in like a flat design. This means that we're just going to trace out the shape and give it a basic color. Usually, I would do this with a pen tool, but we're pretty lucky in this case, we can just use the Ellipse tool. I'll click and drag while holding Shift. There we go. Then I'll drag it to the bottom. I want to be able to see the edges here. I think I'll drag this one in just a little bit, but that's looking pretty good. As a side note, we will be directly referencing this image quite a bit. I'm not going to lower the opacity of it. I want to see its full color and full detail as I'm trying to replicate it. Make sure that this layer just stays on top the entire time and we'll turn it on and off as needed to see our design down here. Now, I need to fill this with a color. I'm just going to remove the stroke of this ellipse, and then I'll sample the blue color. I think I'll just go for this color right over here. I'll apply that. Then before I forget, let's go ahead and apply the background color to this entire background. I'll sample this gray color. Then using the rectangle tool, I'll just click and drag out a rectangle and make it the gray color, and I'll drag it to the bottom. So far, here's what we got. Pretty simple. Now that we've filled it in like a flat design, our next step is to create a gradient on our shape. For this step, I just want to add a little bit of detail by adding a colored gradient to this circle. As you can see in our reference, we actually have quite a few different shades of blue throughout this. But the main thing that I'm noticing here is that we have a light spot right here that fades into a darker blue. I think I'll go ahead and turn this off. With the ellipse selected, I'll grab the gradient tool and then I'll drag from that point outward. Then I'll go ahead and make this a radial gradient. And you can see what that looks like. I think I'll drag this out a little bit more. But you can see that we've mimicked that light spot, here's what it looks like here, and here's our image. It's already starting to look more three D just with a simple gradient. But to make sure that this is nice and accurate, I'm just going to sample this darker color. Then with this ellipse tool selected, I'm just going to make sure that that outer color matches. In fact, maybe I should make sure that this inner color matches as well. I'll just sample this lighter blue color. I'll select this, and I'll make it the lighter color. Now you can see the colors are pretty much a perfect match. Step number three is adding shadows. The gradient helps quite a bit to add dimension. But with this rounded object, we now need to add a more rounded shadow. You can see down here, we have extra shading that we need to create. I'm going to grab the pen tool, and with our reference layer still turned on. I'm just going to click and drag to trace this area here. I'll bring it all the way around and then I'll bring it to the outside like this. Then I'm just going to sample the darkest color here. I'll apply it. And then I'll make it a child layer to our circle. Okay. I'll turn off the reference. Now, here's where things get real fancy. We're going to add a blur to the shadow. With the shadow layer selected, I'll go to our quick effects. I'll open up the gaussian blur, and I'll just bring up the radius. You can see the more I bring it up, the more blended this shadow gets, and I think that looks really nice. During this step, you can also experiment with changing the color, lowering the opacity, or experimenting with different blend modes. In this case, I think I'll just lower the opacity just a little bit, but you can see what this looks like now. We're off to a really good start here. But before I finish up with the shadows, I can see that there's a slight shadow on top right up here. I'm just going to quickly trace over that. I'll bring it around. I'll sample this color and I'll apply it. Then I'll make it a child layer, and we can go ahead and blur this one as well. I think this color needs to be a little darker, so I'll just change it right up here, dragging down the luminosity. All right. But there we go. Isn't this looking more and more like a three D sphere? Now, before I finish this shadow section, I think I want to add a shadow to the outside of this image. You can see in our reference, we have a shadow going right underneath it like this. I'll just quickly trace that. Okay. And I'll bring it around like that. Then I'll just sample this dark color here, I'll apply it. Then I'll drag this underneath our ornament but above the background layer like this. Make sure it's not in the group. It's right underneath our ornament. Then I'm just going to soften this blur. I'll apply a gausin blur to it to soften it. Then maybe I'll lower the opacity just a little bit, so it blends in. Here's what the references and here's what s is. Maybe it should be a little darker. I think I'll bring the opacity back up. And that's looking pretty good. Step number four for really bringing this three D shape to life is adding highlights. Now, this is pretty similar to shadows. Let's turn on our reference, and I'm going to start right up here with this top highlight that I see. I'll trace right along the edge. And then I'll bring it around the outside. I'll zoom in so I can sample the color better. I'm just trying to find the lightest shade I can and then I'll apply it and make it a child layer to our ornament. I'll turn off the reference so we can see that. Now, I'm just going to blur this just like I did with the shadows. Now, I don't want to blur this one too much or it starts to spread over the entire ornament. You could see in our reference image that this was just a thin sliver right at the top. I'm going to try to mimic that. Instead of blurring it too much, I'm just going to lower the opacity a little bit to blend it. I think this is looking pretty good, but it's a little bit too dramatic still. I'll press A for the node tool and I'll just move this point up a little bit so that we're just hitting the very rim of the shape. That looks a lot better, I think. I'm just going to brighten the color a little bit more. Then we can move on to apply the other highlight that I see, which is right here. Now, for this one, I'm seeing a few different colors. I see a purple color that's a little bit larger. Then as you go inward, I'm starting to see a little bit of a lighter spot in the center. I'm just going to quickly trace this. I'll press P for the Pen tool. I'll bring it around to the whole area that I see that purple color, then I'll sample the purple, I'll apply it. Then turning off the reference, I'm just going to quickly blur this. I think the blur needs to be brought up quite a bit, but I think that looks pretty good. Here's the reference and here's what we got. I think I might need to raise this layer a little bit. I'll grab the move tool and I'm just going to raise this up. I think that placement looks a little bit better. Now, I'm just going to trace around this inner bright spot. I can actually see two bright spots, one here and a brighter one here. With the pen tool, I'm just going to trace both of those. This one, I'll make that same purple color, but a little bit brighter. Then I'll trace this little one here. Again, I'll make it that purple color but even brighter. Now with those two bright spots selected, I'm just going to drag them down as child layers. Then I'm going to increase the radius of the gaussian blur to blend them in. I'll just turn off the reference so I can see that better. I don't think I want to blur them too much because in the reference, they didn't seem that blurred. I think I just made them a little bit too large. I'll grab the move tool and shrink these down a little bit more. Then I think I'll lower their opacity. Just like that. Now you can see here is our reference and here is our final result. I think this looks pretty good. I think I just want to lower the opacity of this top highlight a bit more. Maybe even more than that. Okay. All right. There's our Matt style ornament. This looks really good. It was actually pretty simple to recreate this using just a few blurs and gradients. Next, I want to do a little bit of a trickier one. This one right here is actually pretty tricky. You can see we have a lot of highly reflective details here. I'm going to try my best to mimic all these details, but this will take a while, so we might use a few shortcuts to speed this up. But let me just show you To create this more reflective ornament, we're actually going to follow very similar steps to the last one. We'll just tweak a few of the steps along the way. I'll select my ornament and then I'll trace it with the ellipse tool right on top like that. I'll make sure all of these line up very nicely. Perfect. Then we can fill it in like a flat design, just like with the last one. I'm just going to sample a color here, and I think I'll go with this inner color. I'll apply it. Now we can move on to applying our gradient. Now for this one, I want to do a similar gradient where it starts lighter in the center and gets darker on the outside. You can see that pretty clearly on this one. I'll just sample this dark color. With that sitting right up there in the color panel, I'll just turn off our reference, I'll grab the gradient tool, and then I'll click and drag outward like that. With this outer one selected, I'll apply this darker color, and I'll make our gradient radial. Now, for this one, you can see quite a bit of it is very bright and then it very harshly transitions to the darker color. I want to mimic that by moving this midpoint out like this. You can see that looks pretty good. We have quite a bit of this lighter color and then it very quickly turns into this darker color. In fact, we can bring it in even more to make it harsher. But now we're starting to get banding. You can see a very distinct line. I don't really like how that looks. I think I'll just bring it in a little bit like this. Our next step is just the same as the last one. We're going to add shadows. Now for this one, I can see that it's a darker blue color down here than it is up here. I'm just going to grab the pen tool and I'll quickly trace along that edge to create more darkness. I'll just bring it around like this. I'll sample this darker color. I'll apply it and then I'll make it a child layer to our shape. I'll press A for the node tool. I think I just need to adjust this point so it's a little smoother of a transition. There we go. Then I'll turn off the reference so that I can blur this shadow. That looks pretty nice. Let's finish adding the shadows by adding the outer shadow now. I'll trace it with the pen tool really quick. I'll bring it around like that. Then I'll sample this very dark color here. I'll apply it, but then I'll bring it down beneath the ornament. With the reference turned off. I can go ahead and blur this. I wanted to look pretty similar to this one. I think I'll blur it about the same amount. That's looking pretty good. Step number four is adding highlights to our ornament. You can see that the highlights in this ornament are very harsh. They're actually so harsh that you can pick up on the details of what's going on in this image. We have a window reflecting here as well as the person taking the picture, which is funny. This time, because the highlights are so harsh, we can't just trace them and blur them like we did for the last one. We're actually going to take quite a bit of time to trace all of these as exactly as we can. But before we get to that, I want to make sure that any softer highlights that we have, I quickly trace over. In this center of this ball, we can see quite a bit of a highlight just right in the center point. I'm just going to trace along that. I'll sample this lighter color and apply it. Then I'll make it a child layer and we can go ahead and blur that. By doing the softer highlights and shadows first, it just makes it a little bit easier. I think I'll lower the opacity of this layer. There's the before and after there. Just adding a little bit more of a highlight. I think I'm actually going to decrease the size of this with the move tool and I'll just move it more central like that. Now we have all of the softer shadows and highlights. It's actually looking pretty similar to our mat ornament up here. But now it's time to trace the more intense highlights here. I'll select one of the inner child layers right here. Then with the pen tool, I'm going to begin to trace over all of these different shapes. This is pretty time consuming. Go ahead and put on some music and take your time with this. We're going to start by tracing all of the white areas that we see. So I can see what I'm tracing. I'm actually going to place all of these layers on top of everything, and I'm going to make them a pure white color. Later we'll go back and make them a child layer to the ornament, but this will just make it easier to keep track of what you've already traced. Okay. Tracing harsh highlights is no joke. This really does take this much time. It's the easy version of adding texture to something. Adding texture, if you can believe it takes even more time than this. You really have to get in there and trace all of the little details of the fur or hair or whatever texture it is. But in this case, we're just tracing the highlights. They don't have to be perfectly perfect, but try your best to trace them as close to the original as you can. We're just tracing all of the white highlights right now. We'll go back to the other colors, so you might see a little bit of pink or light blue. Go ahead and skip those for now. We'll come back to those. Sorry that this takes so long. Honestly, I think it's going to take me quite a long time. I'll just pick this up at the end when we're ready to move on to the next colors. Here I am quite a while later. I've just traced all of the white spots, as you can see. Next, I think I actually want to go through and do all of these more faded colors in the background. You can see we have some faded white going around a lot of these dots, this faded line right here. I'm just going to go through quickly and trace through some of those faded areas. Now, this whole center area looks like it's a faded area. But if I turn off the reference layer really quick, you can see that this light color is actually going to stand in for that. Instead later, we're going to go through and trace these darker colors, this darker outline of this person, some of these darker smudges. Don't worry about tracing any light spots you see in the very center. Instead, I'm just going to go around to the outside edges, and I'm just going to trace some of these areas, sampling the colors as I go and filling them in. I want these lighter colors to be underneath all of these white ones. I think I'm actually just going to quickly group them together. That way, I can place things below them a little bit easier. I'm just going to quickly do that. While I'm at it, I may as well do some of these blue smudges and pink smudges. I think I'll just quickly go sampling the colors and filling in the rest of these outer details before we move on to the inner details on the inside. I just went around and filled in all of the rest of those colors. Now, I'm just going to quickly move into the center of our shape. I'm just going to trace a few of these darker areas right here. I'll just sample their colors and apply them. I'm just going to quickly do that and then we're almost done. Let's just go ahead and do that really quick. With that done, I'm going to select all of the layers that we just traced, including that top white group there. Then I'm going to add a slight blur to them. Just a little bit of a blur. Don't go too crazy or you'll lose all of your detail. Just a slight blur. Then I'm going to change the blend mode to soft light so that it blends in with the background. With that done, I'm just going to make them all a child layer to our ornament. Then I'll turn off our reference layers. You can see what we are working with right now. I think I might have given it too much of a blur, so I'll go back and just reduce that. It should just be a little bit of a blur. All right. Here's what we have. It's not a perfect replication. But you can see a lot of the detail there. We're actually going to make this look a lot better in the next video because we still need to learn one more type of gradient that will really help us to bring this to the next level. We'll do that in the next video. Okay. 40. Transparent Gradients: Let's learn about transparent gradients. Before we dive into learning about transparent gradients, I just want to clean up my layers a little bit. I'm going to select everything that we traced over. Other than this blotch, which I think is just this center one and this dark shadow. I'll just select all of these layers. I'm actually going to turn them back into a normal blend mode, and going into the quick effects, I'll turn off their gaussian blur. Now they're just how we traced them. Then I'm going to group them with command or control G, and I'm going to apply all of those different effects to the entire group as a whole, just to keep things a little more organized. Going back to blend modes, I'll make it soft light and using the quick effects panel, I will add that blur back. Just make it less intense. We just want the very edges to be blurred, not the entire thing. Now that that's set up a little better, we're ready to learn about transparent gradients. Now we've already seen that gradients are so important with three D design. Transparent gradients are super important as well. Now, we briefly learned about this tool in the beginner course, but I just want to show you the context for how this tool is useful in three D designs. Let's start by taking a look at the difference between our current design and the reference photo. Reference photo, you can see we have a lot more fading going on. Just take a look at the window. It's brighter on this side and it fades out to a lighter color over here or a lot of these spots that I traced. You can see there's a big spot here, but it fades out as it gets closer to the edge. All of this fading can be tricky to replicate, but not with the transparency tool. Let's start. I'll just turn off a reference layer. We're going to go through this group and try to mimic this fading effect. I'll start in the whites group we have here, and I'll just go layer by layer. I'll grab the transparency tool. Then we can see how this looks. Wherever I lay down my first point, our layer will stay fully visible, but as I drag it out, it becomes more invisible. I'm going to do this dragging it out just a little bit, keeping it close to the layer. That way we can see that fading. I'll just quickly do this for all of our layers. Now, it would take a lot of time to do this and keep turning on and off the reference layer. Instead of doing it that way, I'm just going to give it my best shot and make a guess for how I think these layers should fade. We can go back and fix them if any of them are glaringly different. But I think this is a good way to just quickly go through and add some fading to make this look a little more realistic and true to the original. While this does take some time, it's a lot quicker than tracing all of these individual shapes with the pen tool. I actually find this part a little bit fun because you're really starting to see your design come together. If you're having trouble finding your next layer as you select it. Just look for the blue outline going around your shape. That should make it pretty obvious where the shape is. For areas where the spots are overlapping with the very dark colors of the circle. I'm definitely fading them so that the light side is away from the dark side. If you know what I mean? That way, the colors just fade a little more gradually into that darkness. For some of these shapes, you might not want to blur them out much at all. If that's the case, feel free to just add a very subtle blur to the very edge, that's totally fine to do. Okay, going layer by layer like that took a very long time, but you can see this looks a lot better with a little bit of fading added. The transparency tool is super simple to use and it really makes a big difference. Now to finish off this project, I'm actually going to select these two shapes that I traced and I'm going to make them a darker color just so they stand out a little bit better. Then I think I want to add a little bit more shine to this project overall. To do that, I'm going to select the entire group so that this layer gets placed on top. Then I'll grab the ellipse tool and I'll hold shift and just drag out an ellipse like this. I'm going to make it a bright blue color, so I'll make it very saturated, very blue like that. Then I'm going to change the blend mode to vivid light. This is a very intense blend mode, as you can see, but now I'm just going to add a bit of blurring to it. You can see just the shine that that adds. I think that's really pretty. I'm going to adjust the color though. You can make it lighter, darker, maybe less saturated, maybe a little more green toned. Play around with it until you like what you see, but I think that shine is really pretty. Maybe I'll make it. Here's the before and after of adding that little bit more color. Now that I'm looking at it, I think I want to adjust this a little bit. I'm going to select this layer. Then using the transparency tool, I'm going to click from the center outward, and I'll make it a radial gradient. You can see now that the brightness is only in the center and it fades out. I actually want to reverse this. Up here in the context toolbar, I'm going to click reverse gradient. What this has done is it's turned it into a reverse doughnut where it's not applied to the center, but it is applied out here. Just to make it a little bit more subtle. All right. There we go. You still have that blue color, but it's not quite so intense. I think that looks really nice. Now that we're done with that, we're finished with this. You now know how to create both mat and shiny objects in three D. Make sure you zoom out of your design. I feel like when you're looking so close to your design for so long, it really starts to look weird. But as you zoom out, you can really see that this really does look like a reflective ornament. This was a great start to three D design. But before we move on to the next big three D project, I want to quickly teach you about how to use artboards in the next video. Okay. 41. Artboards: Before we move on to our final projects of the chapter, I want to introduce you to artboards. What is an artboard? An artboard is basically the document workspace. But what makes it unique is that you can create multiple workspaces in a single document. To do this, just select the Artboard tool. It's right up here, and then click on Insert Artboard. You can see right before our eyes that our document has been transformed. Now it's been labeled artboard one. If I click this again, you can see we've inserted another artboard that we can use to work on. You can also click and drag with the artboard tool out to create a different shaped artboard. Or if you wanted to duplicate an existing artboard with everything that you've done in it, just hover over it and hold command or control. If you hold Shift, it'll snap right in line with your last artboard. That's just another way you can do it. Art boards are useful for a few different reasons. First, you could create a new artboard while making a project to separate out the different progress. You can see in this example that we went from a sketch to flat colors then to adding shadows and highlights and the final cleaned up version. Another way we can use them is for creating multiple versions of a project. If you like what you've made, but you want to make some tweaks to the colors or other elements. You can replicate the artboard using command or control and clicking and dragging. Then you can try out your changes to see if they look good. Now, to be honest, I don't use artboards all the time, but they can come in handy. We'll try using artboards in the next project so that you can see them in action. Let's do that in the next video. Okay. 42. Game Piece Project: I'm so excited for this project. We're going to create a game board piece. We're going to replicate this image, and in the end, you'll be surprised that what you created isn't a photo. Let's get started. All right. Even though this shape that we're going to be tracing is a little bit more complicated than the ornament. We're still going to use the exact same steps to replicate this one. Step number one is filling it in like a flat design. I'll press P for the Pen tool. Then with rubber band mode turned on, I'll quickly trace out this shape. I'm just going to start right here with this blue piece. We'll ignore the other pieces for now. We'll come back to those later. With that traced out. I'm just going to sample the blue color. Then I'll apply it to the fill and I'll make sure that the stroke is removed. I'm just going to lower this layer, so it's underneath our reference photo. Now we can add a gradient, which is step number two. Now for this shape, I'm noticing that we have some shadowing going on down here. I think I'm going to add a gradient going in that direction, ending in a darker color. I'm just going to sample that darker color. All right. And then I'll turn off the reference photos that we can see as we're tracing out our gradient. I'll just click and drag and end it with this darker color that we sampled. I think that looks pretty good, bringing it over to the side like this because you can see this whole area or right down here is darker, which is similar to our reference photo. Now that I'm seeing our photo without the reference photo on top of it, I can see that we have a little bit of lumpiness right up here. I'm going to grab the node tool and I'm just going to make sure that these points are nice and smoothed out. I think maybe I need to bring this one down a little bit like that. That looks better to me. Now that we have steps one and two finished. I think now would be a good time to add a new artboard. I'm just going to grab the artboard tool, and then I'm going to click Insert Artboard. Now you can see both of those layers are included in this one artboard. With this entire artboard selected, I'm going to grab the move tool. Then while holding command or control and shift, I'm just going to duplicate the entire thing, bringing it over like that. Then I'm just going to rename this artboard. Let's just call this one artboard two. With that taken care of. Now we can move on to step number three, which is adding some shadows. I'll just zoom in, so we're only looking at this artboard two. I'll go ahead and turn on our reference photo. Looking at this reference, you can see we have quite a few different shadows on here. I think I'll start by tracing this shadow that's over here on the right side. I'll press P for the Pen tool, and then I can begin. I'll just trace right along that edge, bringing it around around the bend of the piece. I'll bring it down like that and then I'll just bring it around to the outside. I'll sample this dark shadow color and I'll apply it, and then I'll make it a child layer to our game piece. Let's turn off the reference image so we can see this better. I'm going to go to our quick effects so that I can add a gaussian blur to this just to soften it a little. Let's check in. It looks like our reference has a bit less of a shadow than that. I think I might have sampled a color that was a bit too dark. I'm just going to select that shadow and I'll just bring the color up to lighten it. Going back to our reference. Where else can we see a shadow? I think I can see another shadow right under here. I'm just going to trace that next. Bringing it around like that, and bringing it around like that. I'll sample that color, and I'll apply it, and I'll make it a child layer to our game piece. Then I'll turn off the reference photo and going back into quick effects. I'll just raise the radius so we can blur that a little. Now, in this project, I'm actually going to be taking this game piece and replicating it, and this will involve some re sizing. I actually think it's very important that we go to all of our layers that we have applied a quick effect to. Go into the layer effects down here. And make sure scale with object is turned on. That way, as I adjust the shape, things will just scale properly. Our shadows are looking very good so far. Turning back on the reference layer, I'm noticing we have a little bit of a shadow underneath our game piece right here. In fact, it might be just reflecting right on the game piece and beneath it. I want to replicate those shadows next. I'll zoom in so I can trace this better. Then I'll just trace right along this edge. And I'll bring it down like this. Then I'll make it this dark blue color that I sampled before. I'll make this a child layer, and I'll turn off the reference photo so that we can see this better. Now I think this color should be slightly darker so we can see it better. I'll just darken it with a luminosity slider. Then going into quick effects, I'll just turn on the gaussian blur. You can see how nice that looks just a le bit of gradual shading down there. I'll press A for the node tool because I think I want this midpoint to be a bit higher. But I think that looks really nice. I think I just want to add one more shadow. We'll go back and turn on scaling with object in a second. But the next shadow I want to trace is just a small shadow, contact shadow going right underneath our game piece. I'll grab the pen tool so that I can trace this out, starting in the piece like this. Then I'll bring it around. I'll bring it all around this bottom part and bring it into the piece again. I'll make this one a dark dark color like that. Then I'm going to make sure that this is actually down here like that. I still want it in the artboard group, so make sure that it's still in the group, mine isn't, so I'll just put that back. But I want it to be underneath this game piece. I don't want it as a child player. I'll position it just like that. I'll turn off the reference. Now we can go ahead and blur this with quick effects. I personally think this is looking a little bit strange, maybe less if a blur would do better. Then I'm going to grab the node tool and I'm just going to move these side points inward and bring this whole thing up more. I just want this to be a contact shadow, which means that the shadow is only right where the shape is making contact with the surface. It should be very subtle like that. I'll go into the layers, and I'm just going to reduce the opacity of this just to make it even more subtle. I think that looks a lot nicer. We've added this shadow as well as the shadow right here. I'll hold command so I can select both of those. I'll go into the layer effects, and I'll just turn on scale with object. I need to make sure I remember to do that all along the way. I don't think I've been doing that very well throughout this course, but it's very necessary in this project. I think our shadows are done. Our shape looks really nice. Step number four is adding highlights. Let's get started with that. There are a lot of highlights on the shape, but I want to start with the most subtle highlights and then work my way forward to these more harsh highlights. When I'm talking about subtle highlights, I'm talking about these very light stripes that we see, and you can see these in a few places on the shape. Grabbing the pental, I'm just going to start adding those. Also likeect the topmost layer and the child layers so that our layers go right on top of that. Then I'll begin to trace some of these more subtle highlights. As I go, I'm just going to sample the colors. Most of these are this light blue color, so I'll just sample that and apply it to all these different highlights. Similar to the ornament, I'm having trouble because I can't see what I've already traced. I'm going to select everything I just traced and I'm actually going to bring it on top of our reference layer. That way we can just keep track of it better. There we go. Now we'll be able to see it and we'll later come back and put it as a child layer to our layer. I'm just going to continue to add in all of these little highlights. Over here, I'm noticing we have a few donut shaped highlights. I'm actually going to cut out the center of a few of these highlights using the subtract operation. To do that, I'll just select both layers and then subtract. That will create that donut shape. Okay. I'm also noticing a few colored reflections right down here that are red and yellow. I'm going to trace those and I'm just going to sample their colors to make sure that I get them looking just right. Now for these ones, they're also donut shaped, but because there's multiple colors, I think I'm actually just going to trace each of them and just layer them on top of each other. We have this more reddish color in the center, and then I'll go around tracing the yellow area. I'll sample the yellow. I'll apply it, and then I'll drag it underneath the more purply one. I'm just going to continue to do that for all the rest of these. Okay. And later on, we're going to make all of these child layers to our shape. So it's okay if some of your layers go outside of the lines. That's totally fine. Once we make it a child layer, that'll all be taken care of. Okay. That just took me a long time. At this point, I suggest you press command or control S to save your work. The more of these highlights that you trace over, the more realistic your shape is going to look. So far, I've done quite a few of the highlights, but I left some of the harsher highlights, which you can actually see underneath these. We'll go back and do those. But before I get to that, I'm noticing we have some interesting highlights on the left side of the shape. We have this outer highlight, which is a rim light light that's bouncing from right behind the shape, and we have this more frontal highlight right here. This has a dark line going right in between both of them. So what I want to do first is I want to do this more internal one, and I'll just trace all along it. I think it goes to about there, and then I'll bring it back down. Trying to trace that line pretty close. I'll just close that up and I'll sample that color. I think I'll try that again. I want it to be a little bit of the lighter version of that color. There we go. Then I'm going to do this rim lighting. Now for the rim lighting, you can see this is on the very edge of the shape. It fades out toward the bottom here, but it goes all along the very edge. Now, because my tracing of the shape might not have been 100% perfect, I'm actually going to turn off our reference layer. Then I'm going to trace it all along where I saw it, so it's down here a little bit. Then I'll trace all the way up, just trying to stay on the very edge. Remember that as we add any blurring, this will spread a little bit. It's okay if it's very close to the edge, it might end up spreading a little more than that. I'm just going to trace it all the way up. Let me do that one over again. Stay very close to the edge all the way to the top area. Then I'll just bring it around like this so that we can close up the shape. I'm going to use the same blue that we sampled. Then I'll turn on our reference layer. I can see we have a little bit more highlighting right up here at the very top. I'll just trace over that now. It even carries over to over here, so I'll continue that and then end it over here. Then bring it in like that. I'll do that blue color as well. Very last, we have the brightest spots on our shape, which are these white areas. Now, so that I can see these better. I'm actually going to group all of these different highlights that we've already done. I'll hold shift to select them all. Then I'll press command or control G to group them, and I'll just quickly make them a child layer to our shape. That way we can have those tucked away, and now I can quickly trace over all of these very bright white spots which are just right here and here. I'll quickly trace over those and sample the white color to apply them. Okay. With that, I've now traced over all of the different highlight areas. I'll turn this layer off so that we can see them all. Now, right now, they're looking pretty extreme, but I think we can clean this up a little bit. Actually, turning the reference layer back on, I'm noticing I missed this entire area. Whoops. Let me see. There's some green spots over here that I need to make sure I quickly trace over, so I'm just going to do that before we move on. All right, that's better. I'm just going to select all of those layers that I just traced and I'm going to add them to our group. This is all of the highlight group. Then we can adjust how some of these are positioned. For example, I trace some of these areas on top of this blue highlight, but I think that blue highlight really should be on top of them. I'm just going to quickly go through and make some adjustments here. All right. I like the order of all of these highlights. Now it's time to make some adjustments to them to make them blend in a little bit better. With the entire group selected, I'm just going to go through a few blend modes to see which one looks best to blend these highlights into the dark blue shape. I actually think average looks really good for this one. I'm going to turn average on. What this is doing is it's pretty much just blending 50 50, the highlights with the background, and I think that looks really nice. Now that I've done that, I think I want to blur this entire group. With the group selected, I'll go into the quick effects, and I'll just bring up the radius, just a little bit to blur them. I definitely don't want to do too much, a bit. That looks pretty good. Then with the group selected, I'll go into layer effects and I'll just make sure scale with object is turned on for all of those. All right. We're looking pretty good, but I think I want to make a few more adjustments. For example, we have this really big highlight going along the entire side of our shape, and I can't really see it right now. I want this to be a little more prominent, so I'm going to brighten the color. Okay. I think because we're using the average blend mode, it's really making it hard to see this. I'm going to duplicate this layer with command or Control J to see if that helps. It doesn't really. I think I'm going to drag this duplicate copy so that it's no longer in the highlights group. Now you can see that a lot better. I don't want it pure white though, so I'm just going to lower this down a little bit more. That looks pretty good, and I'll add its own quick effect blur to it. Just very subtle and I'll make sure scale with object is turned on for that one. Okay. We're looking pretty good, but a few of these highlights, I don't want to stand out quite so much. I'm just going to quickly go through all of them, and I'm going to reduce the opacity of the ones that I don't want to stand out quite so much. Mainly, I want the main highlights to stand out, which are all of these white spots. Right now, they're not looking very bright, so I think I'll bring them outside of the highlight group so they can stand nicely on their own, looking very bright. I'll blur them all slightly. I'll make sure scale with object is turned on for those. That already looks a lot better. Now I'm just going to quickly go through this group and reduce the opacity of a few of these layers. All right. There we go. I think this looks a lot better. I just reduced the opacity of quite a few of those, and it's really helping these main highlights to stand out a lot more. Okay. I think this is a good place to p. We've done a lot of work so far. So go ahead and save your work and I'll meet you in the next video where we'll finish off this project. No. 43. Game Piece Project (Part 2): All right. Welcome back. We're going to finish off this project in this video. To make all of these different highlights look even more realistic. The next step I want to do with them is I want to add transparent gradients to them so that they blur out nicely. I'll grab the transparency tool, and then I'll go layer by layer, fading these out to make them look more realistic. Now, this is actually going to be pretty tricky because the outline highlighting which shape it is is blue on a blue background. I'm very sorry this is going to be a little bit hard to see. Maybe we can temporarily change the color of our shape. I'll grab the gradient tool, and I'm just going to temporarily make the shape a different color. Maybe let's make it red or something so that we can see the shape better. I don't know. Hopefully that will help. Let's see. Yes. Now I can see that. That's a little better. Oops. Using the transparency tool, now I can quickly go through and see what I'm selecting. Yeah, that does make a good difference. Okay. Okay. I just finished adding all of those transparent gradients. I think it's time to change the color of the piece pack. It looks pretty ridiculous right now. I'm just going to select that node there. With the reference photo turned back on, I'll just sample the blue color and apply it. Perfect. All back to normal. All right. The piece is really good. All of those transparent gradients made such a good difference. I think this looks really nice. To finish off this design, instead of tracing over all of these areas of the gameboard. Instead, I'm just going to duplicate this entire game piece and make it into a reflection underneath it. This is just a stylistic choice that will be a lot easier. To do that, I'll have the game piece selected and then I'll press command or control J to duplicate it. I'll select the lower layer. Then with the move tool, I'm just going to flip this vertically. I can select that right up here actually. There we go. Then I'll hold shift so that I can move it in a perfectly straight line and place it right underneath our piece like that. I don't want it to just be touching like that because then we have all those strange white areas on the sides. Instead, I'm going to make it so they're touching like this. All of the bottom edge is overlapping. I think that looks really good. Then I'm going to blur this piece slightly. To do that, I'll just use the layer effects panel. And I'll bring that up and turn on scale with object. Then I'm going to use a transparency gradient to fade this reflection out. Starting right up here, I'll just fade it. Okay. And then I think I'll lower the opacity of this entire layer. And I think I want to boost the blur a little bit more. We really don't want to see too much of the detail. Maybe that was too much of a blur. If I'm being honest, the highlights are looking really strange to me right now. I think I'm going to select all of the highlights in our shape. I'm just going to turn those layers off. That way we can only see the outline of the shape. I think that just looks a little bit better, so we don't see all that detail there. Okay. We have our shape and we have it reflecting down there. I think now is the time to duplicate this artboard again. With the artboard tool selected, I'll select the entire artboard two. Then I'll hold down command or control and shift. I'm just going to duplicate this over here to the side. I'll rename this artboard three. Using this last artboard. I'm going to duplicate this game piece over and over again to mimic the amount of pieces that are in the reference photo. Opening up this artboard. Let's turn back on the reference photo so we can see how many we have here. I can see we have one more blue one. I think I'm going to group this entire piece into one group. This includes the piece, it's reflection and the shadow. Then I'm just going to use the move tool to duplicate this with command or control, and I'll bring it over to the side like this. To make sure this is placed nicely, I'm going to decrease the opacity of the reference layer. That way we can make sure this lines up perfectly. I'm just shrinking in the sides a little bit. Okay. Making sure the edges line up nicely. I think that looks pretty good. Turning off the reference layer, we can see now we have two identical pieces side by side. But in the reference photo, you can see here, let's turn that opacity up again. You can see that this duplicated game piece is actually more fuzzy. As the pieces get farther and farther away from this main piece, they get less and less in focus. To mimic that effect, I'm going to apply a blur to this game piece. With the entire gamepie selected, I'm just going to go to our layer effects. And I'll bring up the radius to add that blurring and I'll put on scale with object. Now you can see this mimics the reference a little bit better. Let's do this again. I'll just press command or control J to duplicate this layer. Then I'll turn on the reference layer and I'll lower the opacity again using the move tool, I'm just going to bring this one back here and I'll make it a bit smaller. Okay. To make this piece look like this green color that we can see here. I need to make an adjustment to this group. Right now it's blue. I could just change the color of the piece. But then all of the different highlights that are blue are going to look really strange. Instead of just changing the pieces color, I'm going to change the color of the entire group by going to our adjustments. Then I'm going to apply a recolor adjustment. What this adjustment does is it recolors the entire piece, so everything becomes a shade in this case of red, but I could move the hue to make it that green color. Turning on our reference, this green color looks a little bit more blue toed, so I'll shift it a little bit more toward blue. I'll make it a little less saturated and a little darker. Let's see how that compares. I'd say that looks really nice. I'm just going to move this piece so that it's underneath all of our other layers. Then I'm going to take this layer effect right here and I'm going to blur it even more. With each piece that we duplicate, I'm just going to keep increasing this gaussian blur until it's very fuzzy for the back pieces. I'm going to continue to do this, duplicating pieces, recoloring them with a recolor adjustment and making them more fuzzy until we have all of our pieces added. To make it so these yellow pieces are all the same color, I'm actually going to delete this recolor adjustment. I'll go to the yellow piece that has a better recolor adjustment, and then I'll just duplicate it and drag it into that group. Now they have the exact same yellow adjustments. All right. I'm just going to save that because we are now done. Look at our beautiful game piece project. I think this turned out so good. All the highlighting looks really good. It looks like it's three D, and this reflection is a nice touch. You can see our journey here. Using art boards, we can see how far we've really come from tracing just the simple shape, adding all the details, and then duplicating it for our final project. I honestly think blurring the pieces as they get farther from the camera really helps to make this look more realistic. I really hope you enjoyed that project, and I hope that you're proud of yourself for recreating it. We're going to do one more project together to finish off this course and we'll start that in the next video. 44. Cake Project: We're going to recreate this beautiful, tasty looking cake in this video. This is the final project of the course, and we're going to bring all of our skills together to complete it. Just like with the last project we did, in the end, you'll be surprised that what you created isn't a photo. Let's get started with our first step, filling it in like a flat design. Now, there are a few different pieces to this picture. We're going to trace them all separately. First, I'll start in the far back and trace this little piece that's holding up the cakes stand. I'll press P for the Pen tool. I'll make sure we're in rubber band mode, and then we can get started with that. Now, just like with the last project, I'm going to keep our reference photo at full opacity so that we can see what we're doing, and we'll just turn it off as we go. I'm just going to sample the color. There are a few shades here. We're going to come back later and do a gradient. I'll just pick a color in the middle and I'll apply it and then I'll remove the stroke. I'm just going to bring this underneath our cake. Now it's tucked out of the way. Next, I'm going to trace the cake platter with huge smooth shapes like this. The less points you use, the more smooth and nicer shape is going to look. I suggest trying to use less points if you can. Then I think I'm just going to bring it around like this. I'll use that same color that we sampled before. Now I'm going to trace the actual cake. Now, I didn't cleanly trace this edge, so I'll need to make sure that I do that with this cake layer. I'll just start right down there, so I remember that. Then I'm going to bring it up nice and high, and I'll bring it around like that. Now, I'm just going to sample any of these colors here and I'll apply it. Last, we have the trickiest part, which is the frosting. Now, I'm actually not going to trace around all of these little crushed up chocolate bits on the top. This would be very difficult. This is the type of tricky texture I was talking about earlier. Instead, I'm just going to make this a smooth topped cake. I'll start with the chocolate drips and then I'll finish off the top, making it nice and smooth. This is pretty tricky to trace because there's no sharp edges. You really need to make your lines very smooth. Keep in mind the shortcuts command or control Z, that'll really come in handy, as well as the shortcut of holding down command or control to temporarily bring out the no tool and fix any mistakes that you've made. I know I'm going to use the shortcuts quite a bit while tracing this. I suggest you do the same if you do find yourself making little mistakes. With that all done, I'm just going to sample one of these brown colors and I'll apply it. Then we can turn off our reference and see what we have so far. I think before we finish, it's important to add a background color. I'll just grab the rectangle tool. I'll click and drag. Then I'll bring this to the very bottom. Turning the reference layer back on, I'll just sample this color and I'll apply it to that rectangle. Okay, so here's what we're working with. The next step is adding gradients. Now, I think I made this a step in this process specifically for this project and all of the other projects we've been doing, we've only had to focus on one shape. Adding a gradient probably was silly as a step on its own. But when you have so many pieces like this cake project, it really is important to one by one add gradients to make each part of your design just right. Let's go ahead and start with this little base piece down here. You can see it goes from dark to light. I'm just going to grab the gradient tool and I'll click and drag. Now, this is being applied to that piece because I have it selected, but we can't see it, which is actually perfect because I want to make sure I sample these more true colors. I just sampled that really light color and with this strange green color selected, I'll apply that. Then for this other side, I'm just going to sample the darkest color over here and I'll apply it. Now as I turn off the reference layer, you can see that that's translated very nicely onto that piece. We can make any adjustments we want from here. I think I'll move this over just a little bit more. All right. And that looks pretty good. Maybe a little bit more. All right. Next, we're going to do the platter, I'll turn the reference layer back on. Then I'm going to click and drag out a gradient like that. I'll sample the lightest color over here, which it seems like the lightest color stays for most of this. That's why I started the gradient a little further back. Okay. I'll go ahead and apply that and then I'll sample the darkest color. I'll select that color stop and I'll apply it. Now we can just check in. Here's what our flat design looks like. I know there's a lot of other details like this highlight up here that we'll take care of later. But just for this main shape. I think this looks pretty good. I might move this one back just a little bit more. But I think those colors look nice. Now we're going to do the cake. I'll just repeat these steps for the cake and the frosting. Okay. All right, and with that, I finished the gradient step. Our next step is to add shadows into our design. There are quite a few shadows in this design. We'll go through piece by piece and add shadows to each of the pieces. So I think I'll just start right down here with this little pedestal piece. Turning the reference layer on and off. I think we're actually doing pretty good on this with just the gradient. If we wanted to, we could add this little sliver right here. Oops, I'll undo that. With the pen tool, we can add this little sliver right here. Bring it around the outside like that. I'll just sample this darker color. I'll apply it to the shape, and then I'll make this a child layer to our pedestal piece. I think because our gradient was so dark, that isn't really showing up as a shadow. Let me just lighten our gradient a little bit. There we go. Then turning this back on, it doesn't look like it needs much of a blur. I think I'll just leave it as is. Next, let's do the plate of our platter. I mostly see highlighting going on on this platter, but I do want to cover the shadows that are over here. You can see in this area right here. We have a bit of a shadow going on. Using the pen tool, I'm just going to trace right around that. Okay. I'll make this a child layer to the platter, and then I'm going to make it the darkest color right here. Turning off for a reference, you can see what that's looking like. Maybe I'll choose a little bit more gray of a color. In this area, you can see that it's dark, but then it goes into light right here. I'm going to grab the gradient tool and making sure that layer is still selected. I'm just going to click and drag from up here, down here. Then I'm going to sample this light color that's close to the cake and I'll just apply that. Now you can see, we go from a darker color to a lighter color. I'm just going to adjust this a little bit. Not bad. That's a pretty good start. I'm going to bring the gradient down a little bit more. Very nice. Maybe I'll bring it over like that. Then you can see in the reference that we actually get a little bit lighter toward the top. I'm going to take this piece and I'm actually going to apply a transparency gradient to it, starting from here and then fading out. Now you can see it fades to white just like our reference does. We've applied multiple gradients to it, but I think this actually looks really nice for this area. Another shadow that I see on this part of the cake is actually right in here. I'm going to select that child layer. Then I'll select the pen tool. I'm just going to cut in here like this. Then holding Alt or option. I'm just going to turn my curve around like that. Then I'll bring it out like this. Now, this curve, I'm just going to make a darker color. Let me find that darker gray color. All right. Now we can see what that looks like. This is a bit harsher looking. I think what I need to do is either blur it or apply some gradient to make it less obvious. I think I'll just blur it a little bit. With that piece selected, I'll go to quick effects, and I'll add a little bit of a Gaussian blur. Now, I'm not planning on resizing this cake. I'm not going to worry about turning on scaling with object in this project, but feel free to do that if you'd like. With that little blur added, let's check in. Yeah, I think that looks really good. Last, we can see we have highlighting going on over here. I'm not going to worry about that. I think it's time to move on to the cake. Now, for our cake layer, we've already added this beautiful gradient to it. I think the only shadow that we really need to worry about is the shadow that the frosting is casting on the cake. With the reference layer turned on, I'm just going to go through here and I'm going to make sure that I trace over all of those cake shadow frosting areas overlapping into the frosting for anything that I don't want visible. Okay. Then I'll bring it around the outside like this. I'm just going to sample this shadow color, and I'll apply it to that layer. I'm going to make this layer a child layer to the cake. Now we can turn this off to see what that's looking like. I think I traced it pretty well. Now I just need to soften this so it looks more like a shadow. With that layer selected, I'll go into quick effects, and I'm just going to soften this. I think that looks good. Let's check in with our reference. Okay. I think in some parts of the cake, the shadow is even more subtle. Over here, it's blending in with the darkness of the cake a little bit more and over here, it seems to stand out more. How can we mimic that on our cake? Well, I think a good way to do this would be to select the layer, and then get out the transparency tool. With that shadow layer selected, I'm just going to click from somewhere over here, and then I'm going to fade it in this direction. Now you can see that that's subtly fading out and I think this matches our reference a bit better. Last, we need to add any shadows that we can see on our frosting layer. Now, this frosting actually has quite a bit of shadowing and highlighting going on. This is going to take a little bit of time. But I'm just going to grab the pen tool and I'm going to see if there's any obvious shadows that we should make sure that we cover. I think this shadow is pretty obvious, but here's something to think about. We also have highlighting going on right next to it. We could approach this one of two ways. We could try to trace over every single shadow and every single highlight, or we could just make the entire frosting a darker color and then mostly focus on the highlights, which I think is what I want to do in this case. But I do still think that there's a few areas that we could add some extra darkness to. I'm just going to quickly go through and add a little bit more darkness to a few of these curved areas right in here. So that they're emphasized nicely, and then later we'll go back and add those highlights in. But to start, I'm just going to go right in here. I'm going to sample this super dark color and I'll apply it and make it a child layer to our frosting. Let's see what that looks like. You can see it's a darker color than the frosting color. I'm just going to blur this out to make this look a little more subtle. But I think that'll look really nice in all the curves of the frosting. I'm just going to do this wherever I see it. Applying that super dark color, making sure it's still a child layer. Then I'm going to apply the same blur to it by clicking and dragging on the previous blur, and I'll just add it just like that. Other than those little shadows, the other main shadow I see on the frosting is where the frosting is creating a drip right over here. I'm just going to trace over this area really quick and add that extra darkness in. This is a bit of a lighter color though. I think I'm going to sample this color directly and then apply it. But I'll add the same blur. Let's check in to see how this looks. I think on a few of these later ones because the cake frosting is getting lighter over here. The color seems a little too harsh. I'm just going to select all of those layers, and then I'll make the color a little bit lighter. All right. There we go. With our shadows done, now it's time to add our highlights. At this time, it'd be a good idea to save our work, so press command or control S to save it. In fact, I think this would be a good time to take a break in the video because we've done a lot of work and the next step is actually going to take up so much time that I should probably give it its own video. In the next video, we're going to finish off this project by adding some beautiful highlights to this cake. 45. Cake Project (Part 2): Okay, welcome back to the video. In this one, we're going to finish off this cake by adding some highlights and some extra special details that we'll add at the very end. Let's get started with our highlight step. I actually went pretty quick through all of those other steps because the main challenge of this image is creating the highlights. As you can see in the reference image, the highlights are hyper detailed on this frosting because it's so reflective. Lucky for us, the rest of the cake, including the actual cake and the cake platter, are more of a mat finish. We don't have quite as many highlights to worry about with that. Let's start there where it's a little bit simpler, and then we'll work our way up to these harsher highlights. Let's go ahead and start right down here with this little pedestal thing. Turning this off. I actually think this looks really nice. I don't want to add anything here. Let's move on to the plate of the platter, where I do know that we want to add some special highlighting. I'm going to select the child layer that's right here. Then I'm going to add the highlights on top of that. We can see we have some beautiful highlighting going on right down here. I'm just going to trace over the area. I'm going to bring it all the way over and then I'll bring it around. I'm going to sample this lightest color. There we go, and I'll apply it. Let's check in. This looks a little strange because we have a gradient going on. It's funny because this layer is actually all one color. But because of the gradient and because of the way it's interacting with the background, it looks like it's going from white to brown. But that's just not the case. This is actually all one color. To make this look more like a reference photo though, I do think we need to make a few adjustments. First, I'm going to hold down command or control, and I'm just going to make this a bit closer to the edge. There we go. Checking in with our reference layer. You can see it's very light over here, and then it does get a little bit darker but not quite as dark as it's showing up here. To start with our adjustments, I'm just going to apply a bit of a blur to it, which I think helped quite a bit actually. It's blending a lot better over here. Checking in with our reference. I actually think this looks really nice. I think I'm just going to move it a bit closer to the edge. I'll do that. Okay. All right. There's that highlight taken care of. Let's do the next highlight. I'll just select that layer again. Then using the pen tool, I'm just going to trace right along the edge of this top piece here. Then I'll bring it around like this. I already have that very light color selected, so I'll just apply that. Then we can check in with our layer. Now, again, we have a light to dark situation going on. In addition to that, we've lost our shadow right here because this layer is placed on top of that. I think I'm just going to take that shadowy layer and I'll move it to the top so we can still see it. Good. That looks a lot better. Then I'm going to take this layer we just traced and I'm going to apply a blur to it to see if that helps. I think it does. Let's take a look. Here's what it should look like and here's what it's looking like. I think it's still a bit too dark over here. I think I'm going to apply a gradient to this layer. With that layer selected, I'll grab the gradient tool. In fact, let me just turn the reference on. We can sample the color directly from here. We're going from this lightest color, and then I'm going to sample this white color and I'll apply that. Let's check in. I think I'll move this over a little bit more. But I think this looks really good. Wow. I think we did a great job replicating this cake bladder. I think we need to add a little bit more darkness right here. Go to our main cake platter layer, I'm just going to move our gradient over, so more of that darkness shows up, and then we see it contrast with this light area right up here. Turning on our reference and then what we've created. I'd say this looks really good. It's not an exact match, but doesn't it look three D? I think that looks really nice. As one last step, I'm just going to grab the node tool, and I'm just going to push this a little closer to the edge. After we added a blur to it, I think it just became a little bit too spread out. Just going to move all of those in. Okay. All right. And there's our cake platter done. Next, we need to add a highlight to the cake. Let's select the cake and see what we need to do here. The gradient did a really good job adding highlighting to the right side of the cake, but I can see even more of a highlight scooping down right here. I think I'm going to grab the pen tool, and I'm just going to start right up high and then I'll bring it down like this and then bring it around. Then I'm going to sample a super light color and I'll just apply it and then make it a child layer to the cake. But I'm going to place it underneath our frosting shadow layer because I want to make sure that shows up on top of it. Turning off the reference, we can see that that is way too harsh. It looks really extreme. I'm going to do is let's go ahead and apply a blur to it, make it very blurred. I'll just bring it all the way up for that. Then I'm going to grab the transparent gradient tool and I'll just make it, that was a gradient tool, the transparent gradient tool. I'm just going to make this a little bit more subtle. That fading looks pretty good. Let's check in with our reference. I think this is making the color over here look a bit too bright. I'll select that layer and then I'll lower the opacity of it. I think that did the trick. You can see this highlight is just scooping right down here. It's very subtle. But I think that's really good. Now you might be noticing we have a bit of texture going on right here. We could add a highlight right here, but I'm actually going to save the texture of the cake to the very end because I have a super sneaky way to apply texture to it. Don't worry about that. I think we're done with the cake. Now we're going to move on to highlighting the frosting. To start as usual, I'm going to start with the highlights, the soft highlights, and then I'll move forward to the harsher highlights. Starting with the softer highlights, there are a few soft highlights on this side that I'm just going to trace with the pen tool. Let me just select one of the child layers to our frosting. Then I'm just going to trace over a few of these soft areas. I'll sample the color as I go. Similar to all of our other projects, I'm going to move the highlights on top of everything. That way, I can see my work as I go. For this first one, there's a few little holes in it that I'm going to cut out with the subtract operation. So I'll just quickly do that. All right. And now you can see my first soft highlight. It's super subtle. But as I turn on our reference layer, you can see what that looks like. Okay. I think the frosting underneath it actually needs to be a little bit darker for this to stand out more. I'm going to select the entire frosting layer. I'll select the gradients. With that gradient selected, I'm just going to make that side a little bit darker. Just a little bit. Our first soft highlight is down. I'm just going to make sure that's still on top of our reference. I'm going to go through and trace all of the soft highlights that I see, and I'm going to sample their colors and blur them all along the way. We'll come back to doing the harsh highlights after that, but I just want to get all the soft back most ones finished first. Then we can layer the harsh ones on top of that. At about this point, I'm realizing that blurring along the way is taking way too long, so I'm just going to continue to trace all of these and I'll blur after the fact, just to save a little bit of time. A lot of these will need the same amount of blurring, so I think it's fine just to wait a little bit. Okay. Okay. So I just finished doing this side of the cake. I just want to show you how this is going. I'm going to blur all of these layers that I was waiting on blurring. Then I'm going to select all of our layers that we've done so far. I'm just going to move them down here, so they're a child layer to our cake. Then we can turn off the reference to see what this looks like. Honestly, I think some of them I blurred a bit too much. I'm just going to go back and reduce the blur of a few of them. Okay. I think this one needs a bit more blurring. I'm just going to make a few adjustments here. I think this process is going pretty well. I'm just going to continue adding soft highlights to the rest of the cake. This probably won't take too much longer because we have the very detailed highlight on the other side of the cake. I don't really need to worry about adding soft highlights to that area. I'm just going to quickly go through and add soft highlights to the rest of these little cake drips and then we'll go back, make some adjustments, and then we'll tackle those harsh highlights. All right. With those layers done, I'm just going to select them all and I'll bring them down so that their child layers to our cake. Then I'll go ahead and blur them. All right, I think we're off to a really great start with all of these soft highlights done. Here's what this is looking like. To finish adding soft highlights. I think I actually want to add a soft highlight to this entire top portion of our cake here. I'm just going to trace along here, and then I'll bring it around the outside like this. I'm going to sample a lighter color, maybe this one. I'll apply that and make it a child to our cake. Then I'm going to add a transparent gradient to it. I'll start right down here, and then I'm going to fade out rather quickly like this. It's a little hard getting it nice and straight. There we go. Okay. And this looks a bit harsh, so I'm just going to blur the edges a little bit. Okay. I think I'll also lower the opacity just this blends a little better. That's all we're going to do for the top. I know this cake has a lot of detail, but we're not going to worry about that. I think this is looking really nice. Our next step is adding the harsh highlights. We'll start from right over here, and any of these bright white spots we see, I'm just going to trace over them. I'll do all of these lower ones and then we'll work our way to this massive highlight. Now the reason why I've been stalling getting to this point is because it is a little intimidating. This highlight has a lot of broken lines that you can see through here. To really make this look realistic. We want to mimic that and try to get that texture looking just right. This is going to take quite a bit to trace through all of these. I think we'll trace the main shape and then we'll go back and use the subtract operation to remove parts of it. But this is going to take quite some time. Let's start with all of these other little highlights and then we'll move on to that one. Again, I'm placing these highlights on top of everything. That way, I can make sure that I don't go over areas that I've already added highlights to. I'll go ahead and go through this and I'll meet you when we're at the complicated highlight. All right. Here we are at the scary highlight. To start, I'm just going to start with this little area over here and I'll show you how I'm going to do this. Let's go ahead and do this part. Then I'm going to sample this color. Now to create the texture, I'm going to start cutting parts out of it. I'll go ahead and go right in here and just cut it all the way across. Then I'll select both of those layers and use the subtract operation up here to remove that. I'll do that a few more times with some of the bigger chunks. I'm not going to go through in hyper detail and do every single crack IC, but some of these really do need to be cut out to make it look more real. I'm just going to do this with the main ones I see. Once we're zoomed out and we're pretty far away from the cake, you won't notice that we've missed a few of them, but the main ones really should be cut out. Okay. With that, you can now see we have this little piece with all of its cutouts. I'm going to repeat this process throughout this entire thing. Yes, this takes forever, but it really is worth it. The final result is going to be so beautiful. I'm just going to quickly speed doing all of these, using the subtract operation, tracing out all of these. I'll meet you when we're done with that. Part of me feels a little bit evil making you do this project because it really does take so long. But we're trying to go beyond the basics here. I want you to really get used to seeing what you can actually do in designer. Maybe this is something you didn't even think was possible. I know I didn't really think it was possible when I first opened up designer. But making threes is so cool. It's so rewarding to see what you've made in the end. I do apologize that this is going to take a long time. But at the same time, I think it's good. I think it's a really good project to learn all of these different skills. A great thing about cutting out all these little details is that they're going to be so far away from what your viewer can see that they don't really need to line up exactly perfectly, which definitely speeds up the process. If you feel free to take some of your own liberties here, adding lines where you think looks nice. I think that's a totally fine thing to do in this case. The more detailed something is, the less I feel the need to replicate it perfectly. I just finished with that. I'm sure you can hear my computer fan buzzing because it's very mad at me. All right. Now we're going to finish off all of these different layers that we just traced and we're going to blur them. So we'll start doing that. I think I started right over here. I'll just quickly go through and blur these. I think turning off our reference layer actually will help to make this a little bit more visible as I'm blurring. I'm just going to do that. I'll quickly go through and blur all of these. Okay. For the harsh highlights that we traced, I'm just going to blur them a little bit, and I want them all to be blurred about the same amount. I made sure to select all of their layers at the same time as I blurred them. Now, I'm just going to select all of those layers, and I'm going to make them a child layer to the frosting. Now they're all in one place. Who there are so many of them. This as really nice. I'm really excited about how this is turning out. To finish off these highlights, I'm going to go through layer by layer, and we're just going to add transparent gradients to make them blend a little bit better with their surroundings. Now, to start, I actually want to start with these more complicated highlights because I want to show you how I'll use the transparency gradient on these. I'll go ahead and have that layer selected. I'll grab the transparency gradients, and I'm just going to start in the center and drag outward like this. I want it to fade a little bit more on the edges, and by doing it at a diagonal, it'll be fading on all of these parts right here. Let's see how that looks. That's pretty good. I'm just going to do it on these ones next fading in that same direction. You don't want to fade too much or you'll lose all the detail. All right, with those main ones done, I think I'm just going to go through now and do all of the smaller ones that we've done. I'll quickly go ahead and do that and then we'll come back to make some refinements. All right, so I added transparent gradients to all of these different areas, and I think this looks really nice. Now, I'm just going to turn on our reference layer so we can see how this is looking. So here's what it and here's what it's like. I think this looks really nice. I'm really excited about it. I'm just going to go through and make a couple of adjustments. I see this area is so much brighter and wider than this area. I'm just going to select that layer and I'm going to lower its opacity so that it blends in better. That looks a little better. If we wanted to, we could also experiment with some lend modes. I could take this layer and see if any of these other blend modes would make it look even better. I'm actually interested in lighten or screen. Both of those are giving some nice warmth to our layer. Let's see, screen. I think screen looks pretty good. I think I'm going to apply that to the other harsh shadows that we traced. I'll just select the layers and then I'll change it to screen. That looks really good. Okay, at this point, we definitely could stop here. I think this looks really good. But I want to give you another option. Usually in designer, we're trying to create vectors, but you could add a photo texture to this image, if you're okay with introducing some raster elements. All this means is, once you've added a raster element, a photo texture. When you zoom in, you'll start to see pixels. But if we leave it as is, there will never be pixels no matter how far in you zoom into this image. But just to see what this looks like, I think it'd be pretty fun to add some texture to this cake. To start with our texture, I'm going to go to the place image tool. I'm going to first start by applying this very first image we have here. We actually have three different images that I'm going to incorporate to add texture to this cake. Starting with this first one, I'll open this up, and I'm just going to click and drag it right out here. You can see this image has some beautiful swirly texture in it. I'm going to use this to add texture to our cake. I'll just close up the frosting layer and I'm going to make this a child layer to our cake. I think I want this child layer to be the lowest child layer. That way we can still see all of the other shadows and highlight layers. Then to make this blend in with our image. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make this a black and white layer. Going into our adjustments, you could do this one of two ways. You could just add a black and white adjustment or you could go into the HSL adjustment and lower the saturation. Either way works just fine. Once you've done that, with your full layer selected here, I'm going to go into our blend modes, and I'm going to change the blend mode to soft light now you can see what that looks like. We have the beautiful colors of the cake shining through, but we also have the swirly texture of our image. I could move this image to change how the texture is affecting the cake. I'm just going to make sure that this image is fully covering the cake layer. You can see I missed a spot up there, so I'll need to move it up a little bit. Just to keep things consistent. I think this looks really pretty. Now that I've done that, I'm going to apply one more texture to this cake, and that's this texture right here. This texture is actually a concrete texture. I thought it'd be nice to add a little bit of graininess to this frosting, just to give it a little bit more of that texture that frosting has. I'm just going to shrink this down to make the graininess even smaller. Then we can go ahead and change the blend mode to soft light just like the last one. This just lets the colors. I think I'm also going to lower the opacity. Like that. Maybe I'll even blur it because this still looks a little harsh to me. I'll go into our quick effects, and I'll just raise this blur. You can still see the graininess, but now it's a lot less defined. With that, we've added some beautiful texture to our cake. Here's the before, and here's the after. Now that I've finished that, I think it'd be fun to add some texture to our frosting. I'll go into our place image tool and I'll select this last image here. I'll open it up and then I'll drag it on top of our frosting. This has some beautiful swirling textures. Similar to our other layer that had color in it. I'm just going to remove the color by going to the HSL adjustment and I'll just lower the saturation. I'm also going to make this a child layer to our frosting, but I'm going to make sure that it's placed underneath all of our other layers. That way, they still show up very nicely. It's on the very bottom of this layer stack. Now, I'm just going to change the n mode to soft light. Look how beautiful this is. It introduces some really pretty marbling texture. I really like how that details. I think I'm just going to lower the opacity a little bit to make it less intense. Maybe I'll also blur it slightly. At this point, feel free to move this around to get a different look. I can see there's a lot more stringiness up here for this top of the picture. As you bring it down, you can also get some more cloudy look. I think that looks pretty. I think I'll leave it like that. However, it's not covering the entire frosting, so I think I'm just going to make it a little bit larger. There we go. With this beautiful texture added, I just think this makes the whole cake look a lot more realistic. With that, I think we're done. Here's what our cake looked like and here's what our cake looks like. It's definitely a bit different. It has its own spin on it, but I think this turned out so beautifully. With that, we are done with this project and we are done with this chapter. Great work. I know that took a lot of effort and you really should be proud of yourself for following along and taking the time to create all of those very intricrate details of this project. I think this turned out so good. There are so many other possibilities of designs that you could create using these same techniques. I hope you get out there and try replicating your own three D design using these steps. I know it takes a lot of time, but I think the end result really makes this process all worth it. 46. Class Conclusion: What a journey we've been on. This has been such a wild ride, and I hope you've had fun with it. I'm so excited for you to get out there and create your own beautiful designs. Great work, and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial. Okay.