Affinity Designer Essentials: From Beginner to Advanced

1. Intro: Welcome to the Affinity Designer course. My name's David, I'm a YouTube are primarily in the finance and design world. And we're gonna be going through this course together, learning all the ends and outs of Affinity Designer and creating some great artwork along the way. During this course, we won't just focus on using tools. We'll go through for real-world projects together in various examples that you can follow along with, this course is primarily aimed at people who are completely new to Affinity Designer and maybe even design applications in general. But that doesn't mean we don't have anything in here for you intermediate users out there. We're also going to be focusing on some more advanced topics. All step-by-step will slowly start with the basics and increase the speed in which we learn as we build on prior knowledge throughout the course, we'll create complex shapes used that pesky Pen tool, explore repeating patterns, using and creating custom brushes, will talk about color resources. Icons will even create cartoon images and isometric designs from scratch and much, much more. So if you've never used Affinity Designer or you've struggled with it in the past. Follow me and we'll go step-by-step through all the skills and create some great artwork along the way. 2. The Basics: Our guys. So starting out in the first lesson, we're gonna be going over creating a document, customizing your toolbar tools, rearranging tools, your preferences, restoring certain windows in case you delete them. And of course, the color wheel in a basic sense, we will talk about that much more in depth later on. But I do wanna go ahead and get you guys equipped as to how the color wheel works is a little bit different than some other places go, but for the most part it's pretty simple and you can also change it in the future if you want. And I'll show you guys how to do that here real quick to, just because I'm personally not a fan of the color wheel. So I like the way most programs are with a block. So that's what we're going to be doing in this lesson. First off, when it comes down to opening up the program, this is what you're going to go ahead and get a menu that looks like you're gonna click new documents once this opens up, it's kind of going to depend on what you're doing. So there's pretty sets. They have all this kind of stuff set up. You can go to templates, stuff like that. But for the purpose of this, we're just gonna go ahead and go to web and we're going to pick a FH D will go with this one and their settings here that you can change. A lot of these for the most part, aren't going to be that important. You can go ahead and click create art board though we are going to go ahead and do that. When it comes down to actual zoom size, doesn't really matter. You can do that later. Everything else pretty much looks good. There are some cases where you may want to change this, but I personally don't do that. Transparent background. If you're doing something that you're going to need a transparent background than you would probably want to click that. But generally that's not going to be the case, so we're not gonna do that here. So once we open this up, we clicked create art board. So this is gonna give us kind of an art board. We could have not clicked art board and it wouldn't have given us an art board. It would have just had a preset kinda working space. But because we went ahead and set an art board, that's how that happens. And we go over here, close that out, go back up here, click new again, and we go back down here to FH D. And we don't click the our board and click create this as we're going to be presented at. And there won't be any layers over here if you notice that original art board layer. So right now we're going to be talking about customizing your tools and toolbar. So we're going to start off with customizing the toolbar. The easiest and quickest way to do that. It's just gonna go right here and click customize toolbox when he right-click. And unfortunately like a lot of programs, if you guys have any experience with some of the Adobe products, they actually don't have a reset button, but they do have the interact, the default settings in. So this is your default toolbar. So if we drag this up here, that's gonna give us what we currently have because we are set to the default. So if you ever find yourself wanting to go back to the default, you can always just drag this up here. That's how you do it. There's no quick way to reset to default, like there is in many other programs, but these are all the options that you guys can go ahead and add up here. I don't generally do a lot of this just because I find the default to be pretty useful, but depending on what kind of stuff you guys are creating, some of this may be more useful. Some of this stuff you may want to have up there. So if that is the case, you can just drag it. So if I want it to have a flip horizontal here, I already have the transform settings there, but if I wanted to put them in here yet again, we can put them right there. I don't need two of those, so I'm gonna drag them back down here to delete them. And that's pretty much how you go ahead and customize the toolbar. It's pretty self-explanatory and pretty simple. We'll give Affinity Designer that it's very simple. Some other programs are much more difficult when it comes down to maybe go into view and like having to click certain things and that's a little bit annoying in my opinion. Quick note, if you guys do want to customize your toolbar and you don't want to right-click and click that for some reason, you can always click View and customize toolbar there. So we're in close out of this. And if we go back to view, we can click customize tools and our tools are what you see over here. So if I wanted the text tool, for example, I can put that over here. If I didn't want it, I can just drag it back into the giant thing. Once you're done customizing your tools, I generally use the defaults, but if you guys ever do want to, and this is how you do that, you can just click Close and you're gonna go back to normal. Next we're gonna talk about preferences. So if you go up here to edit and click Preferences right here, this is where you guys can change a lot of your general settings so you can change your color, how it relates to your monitor. You can change your performance, you can change user interface tools. All this kind of stuff is in here. You're not going to want to do a lot of this and a lot of cases, but maybe you want a better keyboard combo. This is pretty useful for some people. That's the case. This is how you can change that. And then there's miscellaneous. This can definitely be important because this is going to allow you to actually reset stuff so you can reset fills brushes. I'm text object styles, and most importantly, user defaults. So if you wanna go back to a default that then you can just click this real quick. And I'm already on the default, so it didn't really do anything. And lastly, in this lesson, I do want to talk about the colour wheel. So this is the default setting on Affinity Designer. It's a little bit different than a lot of other programs in the fact that you kinda turn around like this. And then you can go lighter here, darker here you can go if you want, like kind of a pale or Bland, not so bright, for example, you can go right here, but me personally, I like to go up here and just go to boxes. And this gives me very similar to what most programs are when it comes down to their colors. So this is what I like to use, but that's up to you guys. We are going to talk more about this later on in the course, but it is a little bit far in the course. And I figured I would add this in the beginning just because I don't want you guys to have to be forced to use the wheel this whole time. We're learning when there is an easy way to just change it really quick to the actual box. And I will probably be using the bugs most of the time, but some people do prefer the wheels so you can kinda pick, there's also sliders and all this kinda stuff. I don't really like that. I've generally go with boxes, but we'll talk about that later on. So with that being said, that is the end of this lesson, I hope you guys did get some value from this, and I will see you guys in lesson number two. 3. Importing and Exporting: Welcome back to the Affinity Designer Essentials course. In this lesson, we're going to be talking about placing images, saving, exporting, and layers. So to start off, what I'm gonna do is go up here to place under File, click Place. And this works the same way as photoshops. If you guys have any experience there, it's gonna work pretty much the exact same. So say I wanted to import this file and place it. Do that. Now one thing that is a little bit different is instead of it automatically placing, it's just going to give you a pointer and now I can click Place. So once I do that, it's gonna show up. This is a thumbnail from one of my other courses. I'm just using this for an example, but that is pretty much how you're going to place an image. It's pretty much the exact same as any other program, except for the second click to place it in a specific place. Instead of it just automatically pop it up in the middle of your screen like it does in a lot of programs. So that's how you're going to place things. Now, let's say I went ahead and decrease the size of this. We put it over here And real quick, we're just gonna make a shape you as a learn all about shapes. But let's say we wanted to make a shape will make a new layer for this, and we'll make it this color. That looks good. Let's say I wanted to export all of these individually. So unlike Photoshop where you want to, you know, kind of exports your entire file and you're just going to save it with Affinity Designer, you're often going to be actually exporting individual things. So I might want to export this separately from this and this. So what you're gonna wanna do is actually just select whatever you want to export, then go to File Export. And now under area you want to click selection without background. That's going to be the case most of the time sometimes you're not going to want to do that. You might want the background for some reason, but for the most part, you're not going to want the background. You're just going to want the shape itself. So if I wanted to export this, I could go right here and I could save it to my desktop. And if we click Save, it's saved as untitled. And if I go over here to my desktop and click on it and let's see here. There it is. We're going to see that as just the shape itself. It's not any of this or this or the entire document. So that's how you're going to want to export. And a lot of cases, if you did want the whole document, then you can just always go to export and it's going to be stuck on the whole document and you can export that as that. And if I were to do the same thing, I'm just gonna replace that since I don't really need it. Go back down here to desktop and let's look at it now. It is the whole document, as you can see. So that's pretty much how exploiting works. It's a little bit different than other programs, but for the most part it's going to be pretty similar. If you guys have any experience with Photoshop or any other similar programs, this program is going to be far easier to learn than if you were walking in as a straight beginner. Just because a lot of things are universal. It's kinda like learning a second language file in place are pretty much the same, just the same way that maybe your consonants or something like that, are the same in French and Spanish. I'm not into foreign languages that much, but I would definitely say that learning spanish after you've learned French is much easier than going from English straight to Spanish. So that's going to be the same case here. Learning your first program is going to be much harder than your seconds. So if you guys have any experience before with other similar programs, this is going to be a breeze. So with that being said, thank you guys for checking out this lesson and I will catch you guys in the next one. 4. Tools: Ok guys, so in this lesson we're gonna be talking about the Move tool, the view tool, the art board tool, the node tool, and the corner tools. So before we get into it, if you guys could leave the course a review, that would be great. I know it's a little early to ask, but at some point during the course, if you guys could leave a review, that would be fantastic. It helps me out a ton. And with that being said, let's go ahead and get into the first tool, which is the Move tool. So that's what we're selected on right now. You can actually go to it by pressing V on your keyboard. It will automatically go there to it. And what this is essentially going to do if I draw a triangle here, this is just going to allow us to move it and selected, as you can see over here, it just selected, that's kind of all the Move Tool is. It's pretty self-explanatory and easy. Next I'm going to grab the art board tool, which is right here. And what this is gonna allow you to do is to have multiple items within one document. So if I were to drag here and hold shift, it's gonna give me a good square. And if I did it again, another square and yet again. And now if we grab our Move tool, we can actually adjust the size or you can go down here to height and width. So we can change this to five hundred and three hundred fifty. And that's gonna give us this. If we were to change this to six hundred and three hundred, That's going to give us more of like a business card look. So that's when this is really useful, is if, say this is your pamphlet, This is your instructions and this is your business card or something like that. You can work on all three within the same document and you can also basically steal logos. So if you had like a logo that you created right here, you can just copy it and drag it and put it into your business card and your instructions page, for example. So that's where the art board tool is gonna come in handy. Next, we've got the node tool, which is up here. And what we're gonna do for this is go ahead and draw yet another square. And if we grab the node tool, and what I like to do, and a lot of cases we'll talk about this more in depth later on. But if we click convert to curves up here, this is gonna give us the ability to adjust this. And we can also add more curves here. And we can kinda turn any shape into something else. So for example, we could actually create a quick diamond here real quick. If we were to do something like this, and then we were to delete this node. And we added this, had this like this and this. And move this one back out some, a little bit of a diamond right there. Obviously it's not perfect. You know, this can be moved in some and this could be moved downtown like that. That's a little bit better, but I mean, this is just to show you guys how it works, but that's what the node tool is generally used for. And there's more options up here. We'll talk about the node tool much more in depth later on, but that's the node tool. Next we've got the corner tool. So this becomes useful if we have say, a square and we wanted to use the corner tool, we can actually round off these edges. So if we were to round this one off down to there, around this one off up to here. And round this one off up to there and here. That's gonna give us like all of a sudden this kinda shape instead of our original square. So. That's what the corner tool is for. It's basically going to allow you to work on the corners of stuff and make them much more better. And he can bring it back to normal and then you can extend it a time. You can move this one all the way, way up here if we wanted and move this one way down. And if we grab right here, we could kind of adjust this like that. And all of a sudden we've got a little bit of a new shapes. So that's kinda with the corner tool is it's pretty self-explanatory, pretty easy to use, definitely much more easier than some of the stuff we'll be talking about in the next lesson. I'm gonna go ahead and delete this. And now we're gonna talk about the Pen tool. So the Pen tool is usually used to trace things or, you know, you can kind of draw designs and you can even use these nodes like this, kinda like what the node tool. And we can create some shapes. This takes a lot of getting used to, to learn how to use. But if we go back down here, well, we just messed up our thing. There we go. You know, this is pretty much what you're gonna use the pen tool for. We'll go in more depth later on. But you kinda gotta get used to using these actual focal points and being able to kind of draw something off of one of these like this. And maybe like that now we've got a, I believe that's a Mobius Rift right there. It's a geometric shape. But regardless, that's the Pen tool. You can use it to trace waves. For example, if we wanted to make some waves, we could drag this one down here, drag this one over here, and drag this one over here. So that's sort of, sort of a wave to an extent you have to get good at it and it's kind of difficult in my opinion. But over time you'll get much better with it and you'll really learn how to use it in a much better way, but it works really good. If you wanted to just trace things or draw a simple shape, then you can do that. So that is the Pen tool for you. We'll talk about it much more in depth later on. Next, we've got the pencil tool will talk about this later on too, but I'm gonna zoom in here. Look up here, I've got a stabilizer on and I've got a length of 100. We watch. That's gonna give us a little bit of a lasso coming off of it, that little pink line. And that's gonna be where we actually draw at. So if I were to click Undo and change the color to red, we're going to see that my line is now red, but this lasso is gonna make it much easier to really control what it is we're doing beforehand in a way that we can not do with just the Pen tool. So this is going to be really good when you're just like looking to make stuff. There's an eight. It helps a lot. This little stabilizer helps a ton when you're using a mouse instead of actually drawn. It's going to help you be much more smooth than if you were just straight drawing. So highly recommend the stabilizer, but we'll talk about that later on as well. So I'm gonna go ahead and delete these. And next we're gonna talk about the paintbrush tool, which kinda works the same way. I have a stabilizer put on this as well. But if we go over here to brushes and we pick this one for example, and we went down to a 70. And we think that this is going to give us more of a Paint Tool look. So. We wanted to make an eight, that's a really bad eight. Next up we've got the fill tool. So if we were to make ourselves a triangle and then we grab the fill tool, we're going to be able to make a tent on this. So I think this is really useful. And if you wanted to do just a little bit, you could do a slightly. And now we have much smaller amount, can also adjust these more so the longer we want. So if you wanted him very close, you can put them together. And now that gives us a very, very close line if we go down and look. But if we wanted them really wide, Good drag yet again, we could drag them out. It's going to give us more of a gradient. So pretty useful tool there. Next up we've got the transparency tool, which is going to work pretty much the same way except for it's gonna make whatever we want transparent. So on this side it is transparent now. And if we were to add a new layer and put it underneath here, and let's say we just make this black, for example. We're going to see that that's actually transparent rather than white before. So we deselect this, it looks white, but it's really transparent. So that is the transparent tool. We're gonna use that a good amount when it comes down to mask because that does do a lot with transparency and things like that. Next, we've got the place image tool. So this is pretty much the same thing as we've always been doing when we click a place up here. But there is a tool for it. I like just using place under file, but the tool is there for you if you did want to use that. Next up, we've got circles. So this is going to just give us a circle tool. If you want to make an actual circle, you can hold Shift. Otherwise, you're gonna be able to kind of make it however you want, like one of these where you can make it very long. So and then we got all these other ones. There's triangles under here. All of these are options within like a COG, hold shift. That's a really useful one. So that's shapes. Next we've got text. So if we go ahead and delete this and we put tags, we could say, let's change the font size to 200. And actually let's change it to 100. Press Enter, and we're just going to say rate this course. Grab our Move tool. We can now move this around. We should rate the course. What you've got and click the lead on that. Next, we've got our color picker tool. This is really useful in something that a lot of other programs don't have. But this is actually allows you to select colors from pretty much anything. So right now I have the Spotify logo pulled up on the bottom of my screen. And if I hold impress on this, it's going to allow me to go over here. I can go over here into this text, but more so I don't know if you guys can see this or not. You see a little bit of it. That's my Spotify logo at the bottom of my screen, completely outside of the software. If I select that now our color is the Spotify logo color. So we wanted to make a circle here and make it perfect. So if we go over here and swap the colors, and that's gonna give us the Spotify logo there. And then we could actually add some shapes. I think maybe we could actually, yes, we could probably make the Spotify logo if we did this in black, swamp this color. And if we were to grab our node tool real quick, we can add some nodes once we convert this, move this down. Yeah, and if we were to add three more of these, that's kinda the Spotify logo to an extent, obviously it's very early on, but that's a quick, easy way to make Spotify logo. Next we've got the Move tool that's pretty much just allows you to move in and around and stuff like that. Pretty self-explanatory. And these tool we're just gonna allow you up here to zoom in and out. I personally just use control minus uncontrolled plus control minus to go out, control plus to zoom in. So that's how I do that. But there is a zoom tool there for you and there's a lot of other tools that are available that we didn't talk about. If we go over here to customize tools, we can see all of these are available. Most of these will actually link from in here though. So if we were to click, we could customize some of these. We could throw some of these in here. We'd actually just fill the whole line up with all the tools if we wanted to have access to all of them. But I personally am not a huge fan of that. I don't find myself using a lot of these. Everything that I use is pretty much already over here. So these are all the extra available tools, but most of them are covered right in here. So that's going to be pretty much it for this lesson. I hope you guys did get some value from this. If you guys haven't already be sure to leave the course, a review at some point in the future. And with that being said, I will catch you guys in the next lesson. 5. Personas: Welcome back to lesson number five, where we're going to be talking about pixel art versus vector r. So if you guys look up here, we've got this thing that looks like the Affinity Designer logo and it's called designer persona. And then right beside it we've got pixel persona. And this is a major difference between kind of illustrator in Affinity Designer versus like Photoshop, because you could technically do a lot of the same things in the two. But when it comes down to the designer persona, That's actually going to base everything and everything is going to scale. So what I mean by that is if I were to go grab my paint brush here and I drew this nice little s Here. If I grab my view and I were to scale this up a ton, it's still gonna look pretty much the same. So if we were to grab our zoom into and we zoomed in, there is not any pixelation here, pretty much at all. So I mean, we've zoomed all the way in and I don't think you guys could notice any pixelation. The reason for that is the designer persona actually uses kinda math to figure out exactly where everything should be in. Constantly calculates that so that it looks very nice and clean and it scales a ton. So it'll pretty much scale to any size you could ask for. Whereas if we switch to our pixel persona, this is going to be based on pixel ng. And the real point here is that this is not going to scale. So if I were to want to increase this size, let's say I did this and we make it very small. Let's grab our brush here. If we turn our hardness all the way up to 100 and we make it very, very small. Let's go with a 30. And then we do this. And then we try to increase the size of this. If you look there some pixelation now this will actually kind of fix itself once we click Place a little bit. But for the most part, that's kinda the difference. If you guys look and see all of this pixelation here. This is the difference between the design persona and the pixel persona. The pixel persona is going to work like a lot of programs where it has each individual block and it is going to fill the color based on what it needs to make up the whole image. But when we go to actually increase the size of the image a ton, we have really bad pixelation and that looks very bad. Whereas if we switch back to the design persona and we were to draw pretty much the same thing. Obviously, we've got a different brush, but you don't really see any of that. So if we were to go over here to brushes, if we were to go over here and grab this brush, for example, you're not seeing any of that pixelation that we do on these two versus this one. So that's kind of the difference between the designer persona and the pixel persona. It is pretty unique to Affinity Designer, I don't believe Illustrator or a lot of other programs have the ability to switch between the two like this. We're not going to be talking about the pixel persona too much in this course just because it's not generally what you're going to use, but that is the difference between the two. And I figured it was just very useful for you guys to know the difference and know which one you probably are going to want to be on when it comes down to doing stuff within a designer. So with that being said, thank you guys for checking out this lesson on, I'll catch you guys in the next one, which is our first project. So if you guys haven't downloaded the lesson files, be sure to do so. There should be somewhere in the description. 6. Project #1 Creating a Banner: Are you guys? So in this lesson we're going to be doing the first project and that is creating this banner here. So I quickly made this up. This is going to be included in your course of files. So be sure to download those that way you have a reference image that you can pull in like this. But what I'm gonna do is go ahead and merge these two into a group. And now that I've got them grouped, I'm gonna put them down here while we work on the new version that I'm going to start from scratch. So hopefully you guys can pull this image up and go ahead and place it into your file that way you can kind of have it as a reference image. And to start off, what we're gonna do is go over here and grab the rectangle tool. You can press M on your keyboard. And then I'm going to do this one in a different color. I'm probably gonna do it in, say, this color. That looks pretty good to me. And I'm going to zoom in some. And then I'm going to draw it roughly what I want. So this color is actually kind of ugly. I'm going to change is something a little better that looks better to me. So that's the color we're going to use. Now what we're gonna do is click on this and we're gonna go over here to the triangle tool. And what I like to do is hold shift as I do this to create a new triangle. Then I'm going to grab the Move tool. I'm going to hold Shift right here as I turn this. So you have to make sure you grab like right here, you don't want this, you want to go outside of this and that's gonna give you this little turn image. I'm going to hold Shift. And then I'm going to turn it and that's going to kind of snap it into specific angles. Whereas if I don't hold Shift, I can just kinda turn it any way I want hold shift, it's going to snap into the perfect angle. And as you can see, this looks a little off. So what I'm gonna do, zoom in even more. We are going to move this over. And what I'm gonna do is go ahead and change the color of this to a green or any color really just so it's not the same color and I can see it better. And then we're gonna go ahead and move this down to roughly right here. We want to zoom in on these corners because we don't want to mess up on these corners. So I'm gonna zoom in very closely. And if you look over here to my left, right in this area, we want to make sure that this is just about perfect. So I'm gonna zoom out a little bit so I can grab the edge. And that looks good right there. And then we're going to scroll down to the bottom. And we're going to grab this one. And we're going to try and do this one. Perfect. So we don't want to hold shift all the way. We just want to kinda get it exact now, right now actually have this little pop-up in my way where I cannot see the exact. There we go. So that looks pretty good. Now let's go back up here and let's verify that this has stayed in place. And it has not. So we're going to go over here, grab the middle one. So that almost looks perfect. I'm gonna zoom up just a little bit more right there. That looks pretty good to me. And there's one more thing we need to do when you select it one more time. And if you look, if we were to imagine that as white, that's going to look kind of bad just because it goes so far in, it's way too close in. We're gonna grab right here, we're going to move it more subtle where we want it. That's probably pretty good. We're going to zoom in some more, readjust our corners. Looks good. And that looks good. Zoom out some. Now what we're gonna do is go ahead and grab up here, our ruler. So if you guys don't see these rulers up here, go ahead to view and click Show Rulers. So if I unclick that, you're not gonna see them. If I click them again you are, you can also press Control R. So if I press control, are, they're gone, press it again, they're back. What I'm gonna do is zoom all the way in on this peak. Probably a little bit more. I want to get it really perfect. And we're gonna move it right there. That looks pretty good. And then when we zoom back out, we are going to take this, we're going to click copy. We're going to come over here to this side, we're going to click paste. We're gonna right-click and we're gonna go to Transform. And then we're going to click flip horizontally. So that's going to move it to this side. And now I'm going to hold shift and move it this direction until it's perfect on there. So that looks like it's perfect. We're going to zoom in on these corners as well just to verify. So it looks like it could go back this way a little bit. So we've got that up there and that looks good. Looks like we knew a little bit more right there. That's probably good. So you guys didn't see that we actually made a second one so we can just go and delete this. I did that by pressing Shift. I didn't entirely mean to do it on purpose, but if that happens, a lot of times you are next, one's going to be your best bet, so you can just go ahead and delete the other one. Now we're gonna zoom all the way out. And we're going to watch the magic happens. So if I go over here to layers and I click the rectangle and I'm going to hold shift and click the top triangle. That's gonna select all three of these. I'm going to go up here to the top and I'm going to click subtract. It's right beside add. We're gonna click subtract and boom, that's going to be our layer. So if I go and remove these rulers, you can do that by just moving them up to the top. And we zoom all the way out, we're gonna see we pretty much have the same thing. Now, there's more advanced ones that you can make. I don't see the need and including those right now, we may do one later on in the course. But right now I figured this would be a great first project to kind of get you guys used to using some stuff and introducing the subtract 2l. So that's gonna be your banner. And then if you wanted to add text, you can go over here. You could click. And I put raid on mine eyes and rate the course. Think I just spelled that wrong. Let's put a t there. There we go. And we're gonna grab our Move tool and we move it down. And boom, our second version of this down here. Now what we can do is go ahead and click shift and click rate as well. That's gonna select both of these. And if we press control G, that's going to group those together. Or you can right-click and click group. And if you click this little thing and twirl it down, you're going to see both layers under here, but they're also all contained in this one layer makes it really simple and easy. Same thing here. We've got our two layers converted. So that's how you make a quick little simple banner. We're gonna go more in depth on some similar types of skills later on, in later on projects. But I figured this would be a great first project to kinda get you guys introduced to a few new things. So with that being said, thank you guys for checking out this lesson and I'll see you guys in the next one. 7. Project #2 Creating a Smiley Face: Welcome back to the Affinity Designer Essentials course where we're gonna be working on project number two. I know we just got done with project number one, but I think it's a great opportunity to go ahead and shift into project number two where we're going to pick up some lessons here in there. A highly recommend that you guys don't skip these projects just because they're probably going to be the best learning opportunity within the course. So with that being said, let's go ahead and get into it. So in this one we're going to be creating a smiley face at much like this one. This is in you guys project files. If you guys want to go ahead and open those up, you can go ahead and place it in your document like I've just done that way. We have it as a reference image. And if you guys noticed right there, I have a red line and if I move it to the center, I have a green lawn. That's because snapping up here is enabled. So if you want to disable that, you just unclick, enable it by clicking it. I'm going to have it on for this lesson as it's going to come in handy, but just keep that in mind. So we're going to start off by grabbing this and making it very small and putting it down here. And just go and snap it right there to the edge. That's going to be where we get some are our colors if you guys want to kinda copy this exactly, flash more. So just going to have in the bottom of our screen a reference as to what we're trying to make. And I think it's also important to mention that this smiley face is made entirely from shapes. There are two shades on it, but other than that, it's pretty much entirely shapes. And that goes to show the power of shapes within this program. And really leads up to our final project in the course, which is many lessons down the road. But when we do get there, we're going to be creating a pretty complex image just from shapes and some minor brushes, but that's pretty much it. So that just goes to show how many things you can make from just shapes. So to start off, we're going to grab our circle tool and we're gonna go up here to fill and we're going to grab a color now for this case, I'm gonna go ahead and grab this tool right here, move it over. I what I did to do that was I grabbed it and I held down and I moved it. So almost imagine dragging the pixel over here. That's gonna give us this. And we're going to double-click here. And that's going to move our color here. So we're gonna go and use this color. And now we're going to hold Shift and we're going to expand ourselves a smiley face. Now for the stroke, we're gonna go ahead and throw a stroke on here. We're probably going to change this to say eight or so. Go and change that to eight. That looks good. And now I'm going to zoom in a little bit, just so we're going to be focusing on the sum. Now we have to work on the eyes. So if I click here and we grab our shape yet again, only this time we're gonna go ahead and make these shapes. We're gonna make them about what we want our eyes to be that looks pretty good to me and I'm gonna change the color to bright white. Now we're gonna change our stroke probably down to six. I would say it's going to look better. I don't think actually did that on this one. I think it's going to look better with the stroke a little bit smaller. Now we're going to go ahead and right-click over here, click duplicate. And we're going to hold this, we're going to move it down some. And that looks pretty good. Maybe we make it a little smaller, almost good, right there. And what we're gonna do is go in and grab this. We can go and do that over here in this layer. We're going to change the fill to a blue unless you guys want to do a different color, I maybe want to do some red eyes. Let's go and do some red eyes. So we're gonna change that. I'm going to increase the size of this backup a little bit. That looks pretty good. And now I'm going to grab this yet again, and I'm gonna duplicate it one more time. Keep in mind we're just working on the right eye. And we're going to move it down to around about their looks good. And now we're gonna take the fill and we're gonna change it to black. As you can see, that's going to kind of give us a little bit of an eye. And what I'm gonna do is go ahead and take the stroke off of this black just because we don't need it. And I think it's gonna come out a little better without one because I think it was overlapping right in there. Now if we go over here and we look, I'm going to grab my zoom tool. We've got this little reflection look here. So if we want to create that reflection Look, we're going to have to go and create an effect. So we're going to zoom in sum and we're gonna grab yet another circle. This time we want it to be perfect. So we're gonna hold shift and we want to get it to about the size we'd want. That's probably good right there. We're going to take off our stroke. It looks like that's actually already done. We're gonna change this to not a bright white, but probably like just a little bit under. So if you look over here, we're not exactly on the white, but we're pretty close. And we're going to move that to where we want it. So if we scroll down and zoom out some, we're gonna see that it's overlapping our eye just a little bit. And that looks pretty good right there I think. Because what we're gonna do next is select it over here too, affects and you guys don't have that showing. You can go up here to view and go to Studio. And then make sure that your effects are selected here and have a check mark beside them. We're gonna go over here and we're going to select the Gaussian blurred. Yours will look like this. You don't want to put this down. Quick select and then I think say ten might look good. And it looks a little too, too much. This maybe five. Let's go three. Looks decent. I think we want to change our color a little bit. Let's Psalm who? Maybe we make it a bright white. I think that does look better. So that's going to be our reflection. So right now we're gonna go back and we're going to rename these. So reflexion. And then we're going to name this the black eye. And we'll name this color i, and we'll name this outer I. But I'm, so if you've got all of these colored, now what we're gonna do is go ahead and select all of these by using our shift like we did in the last lesson. To remember, we're going to select the bottom one or the top one, doesn't matter. We're going to hold shift and we're gonna select the opposite one and it's gonna select everything in between. And in this case, we can either press Control G to group, or you can right-click and click Group. So now if you look, everything is held underneath this. There's going to be a really easy trick to kinda duplicate what we're doing here. So we're just going to right-click duplicate. And remember since we have snapping on up here, this is going to quickly and easily moved right to where we want it. So that's probably good right there. Let's zoom out a little bit and take a look. I like how it's looking. So that's our eyes done. We just duplicated it. You only have to make one. I now if we look down here, we've got ourselves a mouth. So how are we going to make a mouth? We need kinda this shape right here. Go back over here and we go to our shapes. We're going to click here and we're gonna go and get the crescent tool. And we're going to grow, draw something that looks about right. And we're going to hold shift and turn it like we did in the last lesson. Go back to our Move tool. And now let's zoom out some. And what I'm gonna do here is actually grabbed this and increase the size some to so we can see it a little better. So if we look, we need a little bit more of a depth here. And the way we're going to create that as one by just making it bigger. That's probably good. Let's move it over a little bit just so it's aligned with our eyes. That looks good. Now if we want to make this better, we're gonna go over here to our right curve and we're going to say maybe we want to get negative 50. Ok, we don't want a negative 50. Maybe we want it positive. Actually, probably do. And then we want to change our left curve and make it deeper. So if we change our fill here and we move this up, Psalm, looks pretty good. And what we can actually do is move this over here and see how it's kinda lining up with that one. I'm personally not a fan right now. It just doesn't have the right look to me, I think we need to do something with our curves here, maybe something right about there and then extend the height of it. Probably went a little too high there. That looks pretty good to me. Right there. That looks pretty good. And now as you can see, we need to change the color to black because our background here is black. So we're gonna go to fill, changed color it black. But now we're missing our tongue and our teeth. So in order to go ahead and create those, what we're gonna do is go ahead and select it. And we're gonna go grab our tools yet again in our shapes. And we're going to grab a heart to start out with the tongue. And we're probably gonna select right on the screen I roughly, at least to start and we can kind of create a heart right here. Now what we're gonna wanna do is ness this underneath our crescent and we're gonna wanna change the color to something that looks good. So maybe we want to go with a light pink and this one that could be an option. I went with dark red or kind of a light tone red in there. If you wanted to have them a purple Hong, You could do that. But I think we're gonna go with something around here. I think that looks pretty good. We're going to move this and we're going to center it up. And that looks mostly good. I think we want to move it up just slightly out. Looks good, right there. So now as you can see, it's coming along. We're getting pretty close to what we have over here, only with red eyes this time, but we are missing our teeth here. So in order to put some teeth in, we're gonna go right here, select our heart. And then we're gonna go over here to our shapes. And we're going to grab our segment tool. And we're going to draw something out. Obviously right now we're filling it with a red, but we're gonna go and grab our Move Tool, turn it around. It's gonna give us some teeth and will increase the size just a little bit. It looks pretty good right there. And then we're going to change them to bright white. Maybe, maybe you won't like some yellow teeth. You could give them some yellow teeth if we went all the way on here. And we like right in here, you know, you could have some ugly teeth. That is an option. I wouldn't do that, but that's an option. So now he's got his teeth. If you look looking pretty similar, I will say I think our entire crescent needs to be a little I don't know. It just it looks somewhat stronger on our other one. But I think it's going to come out. Okay. Felt the whole thing needs to be a little bigger and we turn this right curve down even more. But I think that looks pretty good like right about there. So we're going to grab our crescent and we're going to make sure we move all of this so it's somewhat centered. I guess that's good right there roughly. You can always move it later on. I feel like that looks better. And that actually was centered, so that's looking pretty good. Now if you look, we've got two little things here that are not made from shapes and that is this little kind of intentions on the tongue and this little shadow on his teeth. Now in order to make those, we're gonna go over here and we talked about the pixel persona earlier. We're going to click and switch to the pixel persona. And now, in order to add these, we're gonna grab our paintbrush. And I'm gonna go over here to brushes. It'll probably start you out on color. You're gonna go over here to brushes, basic, and 16 is probably pretty good. Maybe 30 to 16, it looks good. And what I'd like to do is just test real quick, make sure it's all working kinda good. And we're going to change our colored something kinda close. We'll grab our color picker tool, pick this, and we'll click on it. And we want something a little darker, something this direction. Probably that right there is going to look good. Yeah, I think that's going to look good. We're going to zoom in. And as you can see, we are still nested onto our heart shape here. And we're going to add just carnival, look like that. Look like that. Maybe. Actually let's redo that and let's redo the original one. And I'm going to change our flow to life. We change our hardness down to maybe 75. See how that looks. Looks better. Do it one more time. Let's actually change our width to 25. And we're just gonna give it one good boom. And it doesn't look incredibly good. Let's do it one more. Tom could kind of give me a thing. Let's put our flow back to 100. And I'm going to change our size bag to 20. A little more time. There we go. I think that looks pretty good. Sometimes you gotta redo some of your strokes. And then what we're gonna do though, is go over here, duplicate this, grab our Move Tool, right-click transform. And we're going to flip horizontally. And we're gonna move it just off screen like this over to this side. And if we move down, that's going to give him his little tongue effect. He's got going on, on this one. And then lastly, we've gotta put this little shade on our teeth. We're gonna go up here to segment on our shape. Zoom in some more. We're gonna grab our paintbrush tool yet again, this kind of an introduction to the paintbrush tool. And we're going to grab our dropper. And we're going to select this white and we're gonna pull it up and wanna go a little darker, maybe something right about layer. We're going to drive our paint brush tool yet again. And I think honestly those settings will probably work pretty good. We might want to change our hardness down to say 25. And we're gonna change our size up to 25. And what we're gonna do is just kinda drawn here. Little bitty, little itty bitty shadow right there. But there we are. Now I will say we do have a little gray line in our actual ARE. This could be a little better. We can actually just change this post, move it down some, maybe, some, that looks good. I will say we have this little line here and I'm not entirely sure where that came from. So we're gonna go back through our groups and we're going to see what happened. Didn't look like it happen there. Did it happen with our heart? No. It may be a So this little line here is a stroke that we messed up right here. So we want to take the stroke off. Now let's go back and make sure everything looks good. That looks pretty good to me. I think this one is slightly better, I will say, But I would say overall, this looks pretty good, especially for how fast we did that. So that's kind of how you make a smiley face emoji. Obviously, you guys can do different expressions. You can look up different reference images like this one and kinda redo it on your own with, you know, maybe you want them to look mean, maybe you want them to look sad. Any kinda those things. You know, you can do a lot of those, but this is a basic smiley face made almost entirely from shapes. The only non shapes are our segments here where we did a brush and our segments here where we did brush. But if we were to take all of that off real quick, obviously it doesn't look as good, but that's pretty much entirely shapes. So that's the power of shapes. By the end of the course, we're going to become incredibly good with shapes and we're going to be able to really make almost any image you could want when it comes to shapes. So I figured this would be a great way to go in and get started with shapes since we're going to become very good with those over time to where we can pretty much make almost any kind of cartoon image you'd want with shapes. So I really hope you guys did participate and go along with us the entire time we were doing this, and hopefully we got a lot of value out of this. So with that being said, thank you guys for checking this lesson out and I'll see you guys in the next one. 8. Introduction to Nodes: Welcome back to the Affinity Designer course. So in this lesson we're gonna be going over the node tool, all the ins and outs of it and where it's going to be useful. It is by far one of the most useful tools in the entire program, especially for doing anything where you're trying to create something kinda like that smiley face we did in the glass class project. But say you wanted to make an apple, you wanted to make a cartoon version of a person. You wanted to make a cartoon version of a car or anything like that. The node tool is gonna come in handy so much and it's almost impossible to do those things without the node tool. So with that being said, let's go ahead and grab the node tool. I already have it selected over here. Remember it's just under the Move tool, and you can also go to it by pressing a key on your keyboard. And first what we're gonna do is go ahead and grab the Rectangle tool right here. We're going to select a color. I've got this kinda oblique red going on here. I'm going to drag it on the hold shift so we get a perfect square. I'm gonna grab our Move tool and move it a little bit more Center in the screen, and it's probably good. There we go. That's centre. Then we're gonna go back to our node tool, grab that. And if you look when you go in between the node tool on the Move tool, all the options up here are pretty much the same, but some of the things within the shape he can't do without the node tool on this section. But convert to curves, what we're really going to be talking about. But first I want to go through here and go through some of these things. So if we were to grab this corner, we've got some options here. Rounded stray, concave cutout. If we were to go to a rounded for example. And if we grab this little circuit right here and move it in and out, we can adjust it, and we can also do it up here with this. So 50% is going to be the most weekend around the curves off and that's gonna give you an actual circle. Kind of useless. But that's how you can create a circle for my square if you wanted to do that for some reason. If we go to the straight curve and we go here, and we click here and we zoom in. This is gonna give us kind of a diamond Look. We can also create one of those from shapes. So a little useless as well unless you wanted this, for example, can exactly do that. That's kind of a stop sign or an octagon who would go to concave. It's gonna give us this look so you can kind of create a little bit of a gear shaft here if you were to do it a little complex, I think it's much easier to just use the gear shaft tool we have over here, right here COG tool. But regardless, if we wanted to make a flag, we can use the cut out. So this is gonna give us like the First Aid look right here. And if we were to increase it more and more and more of this going to give us like I believe this is the Finland logo. This is just because I'm using red, but you can kind of create a cross out of this and this is pretty useful, I would say. And you can go all the way down to pretty much nothing. And when you go in and click on it, There's going to be nothing showing at 50%, but if you go to like 49, something's showing. So that's those options there with the corner. But now we want to get into converting the curves. So if we go and click convert to curves, now you're gonna see those options go away. And if we want those back, we can always grab our Move tool and we can get them back. But if we condense it back down to a perfect square, and I go back to the node tool. We've got these notes. And what we can do with these is kind of move them pretty much anywhere we want. If we hold shift, we can get more snapping options. So if you wanted them to be exactly like that, you could do that if you want them to go all the way back and move them over here. If you want, say this weird looking shape, you could do that. That's what you can do with that. But what you can also do is go ahead and add a node. So right here we can add one. All of a sudden we've got a new thing. And when you just click right here and add one, This is all you're gonna get. But if we undo that and undo the other one completely, if we were to click here and drag, we're going to be able to convert it like this. And now this is gonna give us some node options, kinda like the pen tool. We can kind of do whatever we want with these little handles. So if I click on due on that move back, if we were to move this in tighter and move this one n tighter, it's gonna give us much more of a peak on this shape. And if we were to grab this and move it out some like so, we could get some weird looking shape. And if we move this back, move this back. It's gonna give us a rounded off edge. There's a lot of things you can do with these. I'm going to draw a new rectangle and we're going to restart and do something else. If we grab our moved tools, Leonard up, grab a node tool, and we click convert to curves again. If you guys grab this with your right-click as we've been doing, and then hold your left-click as well. This is going to give you the ability to do this. So if you're holding both clickers down, you're gonna be able to kinda zoom all the way in and pull the whole thing in like this. And if we were to go way out, you could create something like this. So that's going to come in handy here and there. You can make like an arrowhead out of this almost are some kind of shaped like that. This would be really useful for making fancy flags on different stuff like that. Lastly, we're gonna go over these options. So if we go to comfort to sharp, that's kinda what we're defaulted on. Set back to 0 and we convert to this. It's going to give us a rounded edge, which we can use. We could create a graph out of this. We could extended all the way out here for some reason. That's a rounded edge. And then finally we have the smart edge that isn't really do a ton. It's just gonna make it a little easier to work with. It changes the way the circle works. So if we were to pull this out and then click this, it's going to kind of move back for us. Transform isn't really that useful. It's not going to help you in a lot of ways. And in my opinion, it slows you down a lot, so we're not going to cover that. But when it comes to Snapping, These are just gonna be snapping in the way that it snaps in some places versus others. So if we have this one selected, it'll snap down to here and give us that perfect curve. We would undo that. It's not going to snap down here. As you can see, we have no kind of snapping going on. But if we click Snap and move it down, it's going to snap into that. And pretty much be perfect. If we were to do this one, it's kinda gonna do a similar thing, but it's going to be a little bit more based on this. And you can snap it to the lines, which because our shape is really weird, it's given us a really we're looking shape. But that's that. And if we were to take this one off and that went off, we're pretty much going to have no snapping at all unless we hold shift at which point it will still have some snapping. So that's pretty much snapping. Not incredibly useful, but it's up to you. Some people like using snapping, some people don't. And then of course this is the master snapping. This works when you are moving stuff. So if I have this on, we're going to be centered this right there on that green line that's gonna show up right there. If I undo this, there is no green line showing up. So that's the master snap. We covered that already, but I just wanted to highlight that for you guys. But my whole point is that you can make some very complex shapes from the node tool. So if I were to grab a shape and I made a circle, and I grabbed the node tool and we can write it curves. I could very quickly turn this into an apple almost so phi, two nodes here. And we moved one here, moved it in. Some of this one end, some not a real good artists. So these might not be the greatest apples you've ever seen. And then we need to take this fill handle and move this up. We want these down. And if we move this out here, obviously that's not Eight fantastic one, but enough, we could add yet another here. Okay, if we move this up and add another one here and move this up. We've kind of got a little bit of an apple going on here. And then we can add our little stalk in the leaf. And that's sort of an apple, obviously not a great one. I just did that in a matter of seconds. But if we were to put a little bit more time and it tries to get it perfect and actually had a reference file to work with. Really easy to make an apple out of a circle using the Note tool. So That's the no tool. Ok, you guys did get some value from this, and I will catch you guys in the next lesson. 9. Sketching With The Pencil Tool: Welcome back to the Affinity Designer Essentials course. In this lesson, we're gonna be going over sketching things with the pencil tool which is up here. Or you can press enter on your keyboard. As you can see, I've already kind of sketched both of these out for the most part in black. If I were to just group all of these together and I went ahead and made them on visible. You guys can see this is the original file we are working with. It's called Pencil tool practice and you're gonna be able to find it right here in your course documents under sketch practice, right here's the image. I highly recommend that you guys go ahead and download that and put it into your file. So we're going to be sketching out this image on the right and then we're going to talk about the one on the left, but I want you guys to do that one on your own for the most part, there is a few things we're going to talk about because some parts of it are a little different than what we had to do in this one. For example, if you look at this tail down here, we had to make some setting adjustments down here. And we didn't sketch all the way just because of time sake. So right here, we didn't finish that just for the purpose of time, but at any rate, you know, you do have to adjust this tail. So we'll talk about how you're gonna do that towards the end of the lesson. But to start off, I'm gonna go and delete both of these. And I'm gonna go over here, I'm gonna grab the place. I'm gonna go to course documents, which is where you guys are going to find your practice files right here. Pencil tool practice. We're gonna go ahead and place this in here. We zoom out, we can see it's a little too big, so we're going to shrink it down some. And we're gonna make it pretty Center and good. That looks pretty good to me. And to start off with this one on the right. And we're going to come over here. And we're gonna create a new layer. We'll grab our pencil tool. These are the settings I had it set on in order to sketch this out. So for this size image, I did a width of 15 points. So if we were to change this to five, you're going to see that it's too small. So if we press on, do change it to 15. I'm going to cut the sculpt mode off. As you can see, it's an toggled off right now. And what that essentially is going to do if we have it on and we do this and then say I wanted to continue this, I could do this and drag it onward. And now it's going to fill. Whereas if I were to delete both of these, take sculpt off, do this, and then drag from here. It's not going to give me that option and this is actually going to be a second path. So if we were to grab our Move tool, we're going to see that this is actually a separate path. Even though we started off, we were to start back here, put our sculpt mode on and start back from here. Do this. It's all still contained within one image. So that's what the sculpt mode is going to do. So we're going to have that off because that is not going to be beneficial for us right now. And this is really important. I have the stabilizer on and I usually like to have it on rope mode. And that's essentially going to get this little toggle. I've got the length set to 25 right now I'm going to turn that up to 50. Usually the bigger your points are, the more you're going to want your link to B. So if I were to zoom in really, really close here, if you look at this little purple law, yes, should be able to see it, but that's kinda what that is the length and the stabilizer. By the way, make sure you click stabilizer on. But that is kind of what that length is going to be. So if I were to put this to like 150, you'll see that this is much longer, much longer of a purple. Only problem with 150 is it's just so long that it's hard to work with, in my opinion, especially when you're talking about say ina, three points. 150 is way too long to work with. So you kind of want it to be somewhat closed. So I'm gonna change the link back to 50 and our width bag to 15. And I think this is a pretty good amount. Obviously, if we don't have a stabilizer on, we're just going to be drawing straight. And if you make any little mistake, it's all gonna kinda mess it up. So I really liked the stabilizer. You always want to have the stabilizer. It helps you not make such drastic moves like Bump so easily. And what you're trying to sketch things you really need the stabilizer on. So we're gonna turn that on and 50 is probably going to be good. In fact, you know what, I'm probably going to go ahead and change it to 75. I think that might turn out better. And we're going to zoom out and we're going to start focusing on where we're going to start at. And I'm going to start up here. And we're just going to grab it and we're going to pull it and we're going to trace stabilizer makes it much easier to do than you would think. So this is part of the way that you're able to kinda trace things and affinity and make them pretty good without messing up a lot is the stabilizer. So next we're going to start here and we're going to drag this up. Our size may be a little too big, but I don't think it really changes the idea of this. And we're going to start here and we're gonna go down. Move this over. I have to say I'm really liking the added stabilizer length compared to what I did when I originally drew this a few minutes ago. And then start here, we're gonna have to go back and change some of this with the node tool later. And we'll go over that, but that's looking pretty good obviously right in here we've got some errors. So well at the change that with a node tool, but we'll worry about that later once we've got the whole thing sketched out. And I'm gonna start right here again. And once you get good, you're gonna be able to do this a little quick and you want to be able to do it quick because it's going to get rid of a lot of these little ADB nodes that kind of getting your way in our little annoying. So ideally you're able to do it in one full motion without spending a lot of time doing it. So if we go on down, that's a pretty good mess a little right there. So let's go back with a node tool and change that as well. But then we grab this and will go out. And we're gonna come straight through here all the way around. And there we go. That was a really nice one right there. Now I'm going to start right here, fill this one in. Boom, there we go. That was really nice as well. Go and fill this little part right here. Looks pretty good. So as you can see, if we zoom out some, she's really starting to come along. Definitely got some errors right in here. But other than that, I think we're doing pretty good, not seeing a ton of errors. So we zoom back in and go out and do from here on down. Whoops, there we go. I made a mistake. There. Go on, do right here. It's got a little bit of a mistake there, but we can always fix that later. And a little bit of one right there. So we'll just extend this out when we use our node tool to fix this up. And I'm going to stop right there because we are a little off, so I'm gonna actually going to redo this. We have to be able to see where we're going. Because unlike in Photoshop or some other programs, depending on the tool you're using, Affinity Designer will not actually kind of follow your image. So we do kind of have to have the whole image in sight. You can't zoom em, but so much. So I'm gonna restart and try to come all the way down and take a little break. It looks pretty good. I'm gonna stop right there. And hopefully we can start back at this top part and it fills in pretty nice. So if we move, that was bad. Start back again. I'm gonna try and do it quickly. And yes, so we got a little bit of an error right there. We'll fix that up later. And we'll start down here. This all the way up. And we'll start right here. Go quick. Hopefully we can do it with no errors. Angle right here kinda quick. But there we go. So that's almost the whole thing done. We've got the AI to do and then we have to make adjustments. So we will zoom in on this. I am going to start up here and I'm actually just going to fill the whole thing and with this, do that and then do this. And then I'm just gonna pull it this way and fill the rest in. Quick and easy way to do it. Sometimes you don't wanna do it that way, but in this case that's pretty good. So we have a little bit of an error there. So we're gonna move that back in with the Note tool. And we're going to look around for some more errors. It looks like we might a little bit of one here. Yeah, easy fix. And we've definitely got one right here. Easy fix. And got a little bit of one right here. We just need to extend this sum, so that's a straight line. And let's go down here. We definitely got a big error here. So if we grab this and center it up more, that looks good right there. Now if we look, we have a little bit of an error here though. That was good. But I'm so we just fix those errors. I don't see any more right in here. We've got a lot of errors up here. These are kinda hard to not have, but luckily the node tool makes it pretty easy to fix these. So if we just do that, and we were to grab this one. And this one. Oops. Okay. And we grabbed this one. That's going to fix a lot of our errors. As you can see, we actually do have a little bit of gray showing right in here. But quite frankly, I think this is actually better than the original image. So we're just going to leave that like that kind of have to have an eye to see, you know, when you're actual drawing is going to be better. And if we go right here, we look, we've got an error. I think we can just grab this and move it up. And if we change this handle a little bit, and we change this handle a little bit right there. That looks good. I'll get there. And this is where our real, real big problems for. So we're going to look at the original. And we'll move this up and we'll change our fill handle. And see. I'm already good. That's looking pretty good. I think probably about as good as we're going to be able to get it within a reasonable amount of time. And lastly, you've got a little bit of errors going on here. I think we can just move these n and put all of them right here. But now that's looking pretty good. If we were to go down here and we unselect this, we're still gonna have the image that we just created, even though if we were to take this off and put this one on them. So that's kind of how you sketch the stabilizer, makes it very, very easy. Lastly, I want you guys to do this one on your own, but I want you guys to take a second and go through these brushes with me. So if we go over here to the pencil tool and we go over here to stroke, it should be over here. Remember if it's not, you can go to View studio and look for your stroke settings. So they should be right here, make sure they're checked. Most of this should be pretty self-explanatory except this little bottom part where we're actually going to have our kind of end fizzle out. So if we do this, you can see we're not on the point. Because if we zoom in more, we're gonna see that. Sure, while we're here, we're good. But then all of a sudden, this fizzles out into very, very, very small amount of pixels. So in order to do this, what we're gonna do is go over here to our brush. And we're gonna change our settings to roughly around a width of ten and a length of 25. It's going to depend on whatever you're working on. But I found that this works pretty decently for this. We're going to change our controller to pressure. And then we're gonna go over here to stroke. And under here we're gonna change our properties to roughly this. I think we could actually change this to 80. I think that's gonna come out better. And then pressure, if we look here, I've mindset to this kind of band here. So you have to do that on your own. Just take a quick glance at this. You will get an idea of what you're going to want to change it to. And you can change it by just moving these ends. And what that's gonna do is give us this kind of brush where it fizzles off towards the tail. And just looking at that, I think we should actually change this to maybe 75. I think that's gonna come out a little better. So that looks pretty good to me. And what we're gonna do is start off here and we're going to push all the way down. And then we're going to grab our node tool to fix it up and clean it sum. So we'll move this node down here, will move to this node over here. With this node. Let me like that. And that's looking pretty good. But we want to move this like this, like that. And boom, that's looking pretty good. It's actually much better than what we have in the gray it underneath since this is a pixel project and we're working in designer where it's going to be much more exact, but that's how you're gonna go ahead and do these little tails and stuff like that. And then everything else is pretty much the exact same as what we did over here to our right. So should be pretty self-explanatory. So with that being said, I hope you guys did get some value from this and I will catch you guys in the next lesson. 10. Project #3 Creating a Plaid Pattern: Welcome back to project number three, where we're going to be learning a few new things, but these are kinda hard to learn without something to work with. So I highly recommend that you guys follow along and kinda copy what I'm doing that way you guys can learn how to do these things. So in this project, we're gonna be learning how to create a plaid pattern with the seamless function. So to go ahead and get started, let's pull up the symbols function. And to do that, we're gonna go to view and we're gonna go over to the studio and we're gonna go down here and right here it's called symbols. And when you click that, it's probably going to show up right here. It may show up under one of these sections, but probably not. And then I'm actually gonna go down here to the transformed section. And I'm going to pull this out and away. And we're gonna snap at rotten under there while we're working. And I think it's important to mention that I do have a 1080 by ten EDI document here. So you guys can kind of do any kind of square documents you want, but it needs to be squared to make it easy on ourselves. Teenagers would I use, but you could also use a 1000 or 2 thousand or whatever it may be. So once we've got this pulled up, we're gonna go over to our square and we're going to start here up at the top. Make sure you have snapping on. And we're gonna go right here and we're going to click, we're gonna hold shift and we're going to drag. And we're just going to drag something kind of like that. I'm gonna go and change the filled, something, maybe like this. It's gonna give us a little bit of a better view. And then I'm gonna get a transformed down here. And because I have a 1080 by 1080, I need to put in to 70 by 270 on this. Or it could also technically do like 27, but that would make a whole bunch of these. So to 70 is going to be what I am going to use. If you guys had a 1000 by 1000 document and then you would want to use say 250. That way you have a perfect square that's going to fit all the way across. And then what we're gonna do is go ahead and click Create. And then what I'm gonna do is go over here and right-click, and I'm gonna click duplicate. And then I'm gonna go and move it without stopping or anything like that. I'm gonna move it straight across where we want it so I don't want to unselect it. And the reason for that is we're going to use the power duplicated. So I've got it right here positioned correctly. I'm going to release. Now if I stay selected on this without doing anything else, if I press control, Jay, it's gonna give me another one all the way to our right. So it's going to automatically know it's gonna duplicate the move and adjustments that we make. So if I do it one more time, it's going to make another one. And then we can hold, Shift, select all of these right-click, duplicate. And now doing the exact same thing, we're going to move all these down perfectly without messing up. And right there looks good. Now if we press control DJ, yet again, control j one more time. It's going to give us all of our boxes completely filled in. And which point we wanna go down here and make sure this the top right one. And what we're gonna do is select the one above that and then go all the way up, hold Shift, select everything. But this one says you can see the bottom one is not selected. I'm going to press Control G. And we're gonna make this the copies group. And we're gonna rename this one or original. And once we've got this, you guys can pull up your reference image, which is going to be found under project three in your course documents. So if we go in and place this in here, we're going to put it above the copies. That's why it's not showing right now. And we go and zoom in on this top corner. Move over n. If we move this like right to wherever the start is. So it looks like it's over here. Right there. Now we're going to zoom in and we can select the original, which is right here. And what we're gonna wanna do is shrink this down to the same size as the original. So we will grab this corner and moved in till we get roughly write their programs lagging a little bit. But I think that's pretty good right there. And then what we're gonna do, select this. And we're going to select underneath here, click on the rectangle that we originally created. We're gonna go into our Phil and we're gonna change the color to this red. So if we pull this over here, grab that. Whoops. And we'll swap it. Click OK. And then we're going to swap these. And what we're gonna do is go ahead and Untied this that we don't want to work with everything at one given time. And then we're going to go up here and we're gonna take our stroke off. So now we've got something that's about the right size. And we're gonna move this over here. I guess. We'll move this over. And now what we're gonna wanna do is create yet another rectangle. But this time we're going to want to make it roughly the correct size. So we'll just draw something that looks roughly correct. And we'll go Remove tool and we'll try to place it in the right spots. So if we move this over, and now we need to zoom in, we can change our fill to a black. And we're going to want to grab it and just move it down some. So if we were to move this out of our way a little bit, we're gonna be able to see exactly where it goes. Looks like an easy go up just a little bit, like right there. So this looks pretty good. Now what we're gonna do is go ahead and click on it and we're going to click Control J. And that's gonna give us a new one. But it did not do the automatic copy and move because we haven't moved it yet. So now that we moved it, I think that's going to turn out good right there. That looks pretty good to me. Now we can grab it and press control j. Do it one more time since we had to make sure make sure it's perfect. Those probably good. And now we can press control j, control j. Control j, control j, control j. And finally control j. Now, one thing is when we go to do our repeating, this is not going to turn out entirely correct if we do this like this. So what we're gonna do is actually take this and we're just going to delete this. And we want to take all three of these. We zoom out, not all three, but roughly all of these and we want to get these kind of even and equal. So what we're going to first do is move this over a little bit just so we can see a little better. And we're going to grab all of our rectangles. And we're just going to try and move these down to where they're pretty much even so, that's probably about as good as we're gonna get right there. Obviously, it's not exactly lined up with our original document, but it's gonna turn out much better this way. Now what we're gonna do is go ahead and copy all of these. And we're going to group them. And we're going to call these the light, because these are going to make up these lighter shades right here. So if we go ahead and duplicate these now, and now we've got a second one. We're going to call these the dark. Since they're the ones coming down, they're going to be darker. And we're gonna take these and flip it. And if we do that, that's probably gonna give us roughly, correct. Obviously, you can spend more time and getting it perfect, but that's not a great use of our time here in the course. So we're gonna go ahead and take this and we're going to make the light. Probably 40% is probably to turn out pretty decent. And we're gonna make the dark probably 60%. And boom. So now if we move these up here, get them out of our way a little bit, unhide the reference file. And if we make our copies available, we're going to see that this looks pretty good. And now if you look, we do see a little bit of an error in the fact that some of these and here are a little long, but that's really not that big of an issue. In fact, sometimes you could actually, if you were working on a full image, you could then go and put in, say, some black lines across all lobbies or more. So if we stuck a stroke on here, if we unhide these again and this time let's say we put a small stroke of, Let's go with one click Enter. And now if we make them all available, now it's gonna look a little bit even better. So if we were to grab this again and maybe increase the size of that stroke to, to click Enter. And now let's take a look when we zoom out. I think that looks even better. So that's how we're gonna make a plaid pattern with the repeating symbols, as well as how we're going to use the automatic duplicate or so. That pretty much concludes this lesson. If you guys have any problems, be sure to go back and rewatch this, make sure you don't mess up with some small issues or anything like that. And he has won and making a really great design, you're going to be a little bit more tedious and take a little bit more time. But pretty much everything we needed to cover in here has been covered. So if you guys have any questions, leave them in the discussion part of the course and I will try to get back to you guys as soon as possible. With that being said, I will catch you guys in the next lesson. 11. Applications of The Pen Tool: Welcome back to the affinity design our course where in this lesson we're going to be going over the pen tool. And I want to tell you guys to go head and brace yourself. This is going to be one of the hardest things in the program. I know it doesn't seem hard, but it definitely is. A lot of things are a little complex. But at the end of the day, once you just watch the video, you'll have it. When it comes to the pen tool, it's really just going to come down to experience in order to get good with it. But luckily, the node tool helps out a ton, especially when you don't have a lot of experience and you can't get everything exactly right on the first try. I can't even do that most of the time. It's quite difficult and in most cases, but this is our practice sheet. So if you guys go over to your place button and go to Course Documents and good at Pen tool practice. It's going to be right here. Once you open that up and put it in here, we're going to zoom in. Obviously the first one is pretty self-explanatory. If we go grab our pen tool, I'm going to put a stroke on this of four. And if we grab right here and go across here, looks good, right? That's pretty self-explanatory, but if we do this one, it's going to get a little bit harder, but not really. I mean, it's still just zigzagging so you don't really have to work with the handles at all. So if I press Control D on that one, that'll de-select the other one so that we start a new path. And this is pretty self-explanatory. You know, this one pretty quick. It doesn't really take any kind of skill at all. But this one, this is what I really want to work on. So this is where it's gonna get a little bit more complicated. I'm gonna zoom in here. And we're going to start right here. Oops. Let's go and press Control D yet again, it's going to be selecting, give us another layer, start right here. And we select somewhere around the peak. That's what we're going to want to do. And we can drag this handle out and that's gonna give us our first curve. Next I'm gonna go down here and I'm gonna select somewhere near this little valley right here. Looks pretty good. And we're just going to drag this out. We can probably make it pretty close. Obviously it's not perfect. So if we were to grab our node tool, we can fix this up a little bit to that. And then we move this one just down some. And we take this and move it out. Sum. That looks pretty good. I mean, it's definitely not perfect. We can add a new node here. And we can move this one down. And we can move this out, like so, get it closer. But for the most part, that's going to be fun if we scroll over. So now we're gonna go ahead and grab right here and see that's not working well. So what we're gonna do, press Control Z this time. Before we draw this one, we are going to draw it correctly. Before we release. We're going to hold Alt and we're going to swing this up. So now when we select our new path, if we do that again, we move it down. We're gonna make this path pretty good. Then we're going to hold Alt. And I'm going to move this one up the right about here. It takes experience to really know where you should put it. So that's not really working incredibly well. So what I'm gonna do is swing it out. So we're going to redo that yet again. And now I'm going to swing it out here, right here. And if I go up here, then that's going to work pretty well. This one should be kind of easy. Yep. This one should be somewhat easy. Yep. And if we look, this one will probably not be so easy. So there's kind of a hidden curve here where we're gonna wanna do is press Control Z, Control Z. And we're gonna go up here, do the same thing. We're going to draw a new one. Now we're going to hold Alt and we're gonna extend this down here. Wrong direction. Much press Control X on accident. So we'll go up here, try yourself some new one. And we'll pull this out with the alt button. So it's a little too far. So we'll draw ourselves yet another one. Oops, the selected. We will draw ourselves a new one. Hold Alt. And I'm gonna put it like right about there. And if we do this, that looks pretty good. Now if we go up here, looks pretty and be a little better. It looks good. And right here C, we've got yet another problem. Can't really make that any better. So we're gonna press Control Z. We'll redo this. Hold off, switching it out here. Started there. Still looks a little off. I think we swung that out a little too far, so we'll redo that. Pull it out. They're still a little too far. Oops, we switch tools as it looks good right there. And we will go and swing this one up. It should be pretty easily. Swing this one down. Perceived. We've got yet another hidden curve. Press Control Z, Control Z. Redo this one. This Tom will swing this out. And I think it's a little too far out, so we'll do that one more time. Press here, swing out, swing out. Pull this in. It's looking beautiful right there. And we'll go down here. This one is definitely gonna have a little bit of a hidden curve. That's one I would fix with the node tool later on, it's very unlikely that we're going to be able to get that perfect just by eyeballing it. So now we're going to look and see how this looks. So obviously that needs to swing out more. So we'll redo that. And we'll hold Alt, swinging out here. So we swing it a little too far. Redo this one. Hold Alt. Looks good. So we get here. Alex, good, beautiful. And see how this looks. Looks good. And obviously we've got yet another hidden curve here. So we'll press control zed, and we'll redo this one. Once we get there, we will hold Alt, swinging out, pull it in too far, redo that one. Control all types filling up their start here. The beautiful, beautiful little bit of an error there. We can fix that with a node tool later. And we'll start here. On fixed that one with a node tool. Here we're definitely gonna have a problem that needs to be swung out some looks decent, that could be a little better, but nothing is going to be OK. And that looks at k, but we're doing too much with the top. So what we'll do on this one is go ahead and redo it, will swing it down, then will swing it up, sum, then will swing it this way. That looks OK. And we'll do that. Obviously this node is pulled out too far. So what we'll do is control zed. Pull this one out. Now we'll compress Control Alt, move it down some. And that looks decent. Obviously we had a little tail right there, but for the most part, that looks pretty good. So if you look, we have some errors, but we can always fix these with the node tool. So if I grab the node tool, we can move this when some of this node down SOM, this one ends on this one up some. Move, this one down some. And this one down Psalm. There, it looks decent. This one down some. Probably wanna grab the handle on this one and move it up some more stuff in there, I guess looks good. And we got a little bit of a problem here. We will just move this down. Some will add a new node over here to correct that. And will move this one over sum. And we'll add a new node here. Alex decent right there. And we're starting to look pretty good. I think we're going to need to change this one a little bit. We'll add a note here. Looks decent. Living here we got a sharp turn. So we'll just add a node. And we'll go ahead and add a node here, I think do right here. That looks pretty good. And move this down just a little bit. I think, right there. And we'll take this handle and we'll just move it up a little bit. So that looks pretty decent. Obviously it's not perfect. It's never going to be perfect, but that looks pretty decent. And keep in mind, this is a practice. It's kind of designed to be a little hard. Whereas when you guys are actually working on a real document, it's going to be a little easier. You can also keep in mind your options up here you've got different curve types. Cs, smart, smooth, and sharp, like we talked about at the beginning of the course. But I really just wanted to go over this practice document just so you know, it's really easy to go over these options and act like it's really easy. But at the end of the day, the Pen tool actually is pretty difficult to use. And once you get good at that, you're probably gonna be able to do pretty much anything in this program that you want. So with that being said, I hope you guys did get some value out of this and I will catch you guys in the next lesson. 12. Vector Brushes: Welcome back to the Affinity Designer courseware. In this lesson, we're gonna be talking about vector brushes. So if you guys go up here and click right here, you see this called a vector brush or B on your keyboard. And if we click that and we go over here to brushes, you're gonna have these options. These are the default options. So we've got pencils, we got pens, inks, dry media. So these are your brushes. And then if we go up here, we can see our basic settings for each one of these. So just like with the pen tool, we technically do have a stabilizer. So if I were to put a length of say, 100 on this, you would see the stabilizer. Generally, I'm not going to use a stabilizer upon a brush. That's a little ridiculous and not needed in most cases. And it's also important to mention that you guys can actually use a brush on pretty much any other tools. So if you wanted to use the pen tool, for example, and draw a sharp curve like this. You can then go to your Move Tool and click Apply a brush right here. And now you're gonna have a brush applied to that stroke. So if I go ahead and get rid of that, we're going to keep on going through these settings at the top, obviously you've got with a PE city. But then right here, the main and most important thing we are going to be talking about is more. So if we click under here, this is going to show you a lot of the settings that you can do with each one of these brushes. But before we get into this and we'll go and close out of here. And we're gonna go up here and we're gonna start with just the acrylics. That'll work fine. So if you look over here, these brushes pretty much all have an opacity section here, which means they're going to by default have an opacity on them. So once were selected on it, if we go over here to more, we're gonna see that there's an opacity variants already selected and put onto this brush, close out of that and we go in and delete this right here. If we were to go over to say this one, I don't think this one has any kind of fade here. I can't really tell because it gets small, but we're going to more, we'll see that the opacity variance is 0. So if we were to increase this, we would see that our preview would fade off in the back. But by default this is going to be at 0. And I want to mention this really quickly because if you change any of the settings for any of these brushes, so if I were to go grab this one for example. And if we look, the opacity variants by default is 80%. If I were to change this to 0, if you look down here, there is a reset button and if I were to click that right now, it would reset to 80. But if I change that to 0 and I click Close, and I go and open it back up. We're gonna see that it's still on 0. And if I click Reset, it is not going to reset. So we're gonna change this back to 80 like it was. And just keep in mind that once you change something there is no factory reset. You actually have to factory reset the whole thing. So I highly recommend duplicating or brushes. You can do that pretty quickly by just pressing duplicate and you can rename it. I think we just lost that one button. So if we look that one, duplicate it down here. So and if we look up here, we're gonna see brush copy its window and click delete on that point being once you basically change something, you cannot change it back. So if you are going to change something, I recommend duplicating it, changing there and then you can delete it later if you want, or you can reset it or you can keep using it. But once you change these factory defaults. You can no longer reset it without resetting the whole program. So now that we've got all of that out of the way, let's talk about this brush setting panel here and what we're going to be doing, and how you kind of use this. So if we look, we're going to see down here, if I move this over, we look, if I draw this out, we're going to see that this looks pretty similar right there, right there. And if you look at the tail, tail looks pretty similar. Vector brushes work in this way. So if we look down here at this preview, this isn't really a preview, this is actually a setting. So if we look here, we're going to see that these little red lines, this is the default image. So every vector brushes made up by an image somewhere out in the world. Somebody made this image. I imagined it was somebody on the infinity team considering this as a default brush. But regardless of that, somewhere out in the world somebody made this brush. And what these two lines basically mean is that when you have this on stretch, if you look up here under the body setting there stretch and there's repeat. When you have this on stretch, generally it is going to basically stamp this. So that's going to be stuck. So every brush stroke is going to start with that. As you can see right here, every brush stroke starts. And then everything usually to the right in between is just going to be copied and extended and more so stretched as it says. So if we were to move this over, we'll see that it changes up a little bit. And that's because now everything outside on this side has been stamped as well. So if we were to extend that really far, we're gonna say our brush is a little bit different because now only this tiny little part is being stretched and the tail part here is being stamps. So I'm gonna go ahead and reset that while I have it still here. But that's basically what this is used for. So that's an option. If I were to go and delete all of these, get them out of our way. If we go ahead and click repeat, We're going to see that this image is just going to repeat. So I'm curving it so you can't tell as easy. And repeat usually uses a whole lot, so it's actually being kinda slow. But this little image, this whole image here is just going to repeat itself. When you put it on stretch, It's going to stretch and work like a normal brush. Next, we've got our pressure velocity inverse. This all works pretty much the same as we talked about in, I believe, the smiley face lesson when we talked about brushes slightly. So this is going to be your curve that you figure out who's your standard profiles that you could use or you could set up your own curve. So we could extend this like that. And it's gonna change things a little bit. I don't really want to do that. I'm gonna click it back to the standard linear, but that is an option. Next, if you've got bandwidth, so this is pretty much size. So if I do that, it's going to be huge. I'm going to size variance. This is going to essentially make it got big at first and small later. So we redo that and change our bandwidth to something smaller again so we can see it. We see that it kind of tails off more than it did originally. Next, we're gonna talk about our corners. So I'm going to go grab our pen tool yet again. And I'm going to draw something out like this. And we see that it's switched over. But if we click back on, this is gonna give us our corners. I'm gonna change our bandwidth down so we can see a little better. If we look, we can use overlap, we can use fold and that kind of adjust how this works. So if I were to switch to the Move tool and we select it off of this. And we're going to select on its own, but it will get overlap. It's going to do that. Poll is gonna do that. So it's going to pull it as normal. And if we go to fold, it's going to fold it directly. So there's a little bit of a difference there. A huge difference between folder and pull, but that is the slight difference. So generally it's going to be on pulled by default. There's not a lot of use cases for these other two, but they are options if you find some way to use that or some way in which you need to use that, then those options are there. And that is pretty much vector brushes for you guys. If you want to play around with this more, if I go ahead and click Delete on this, you can look and see. If you click right here under here, you'll see there's way more options to play with. Play with this brush. We could use this one. We could go to pins. Whoops, we're still in the same one. You know, there's this, there's this there's this one. Yeah, there's tons of brushes just in the default setting. And you can also add your own brushes by going up here and clicking right here and just putting import brushes in and you just select the file, you would get that from online somewhere, potentially purchase it, or there's some great free ones out there. But that is pretty much a vector brushes for you guys. So I hope you did get some value out of this and I'll catch you guys in the next lesson. 13. Image Brushes: Ok guys, so in this lesson we're gonna be talking about textured intensity brushes and textured image brushes, as well as regular brushes in case you guys wanted to make your own brushes. That's really simple though, it only takes a few seconds. So to start off, we're gonna go over to our brush tab. I already have it pulled up and we're gonna go up here. And if you look right here, you can click and I'm gonna go and create a new category. Now, default, it's just going to show up as brushes. I'm gonna click there again and I'm gonna click rename category. This time I'm going to name it test brushes. Once we do that, it's gonna rename to test brushes, at which point to make a regular news solid brush, I'm gonna go click over here yet again, and I'm gonna click a new solid brush, and it's gonna give me a default one. And if we go over to our brush tool, we can then click More on this and we can kinda change the settings to whatever we want. So we could make this 800 pixel brush. Obviously that's huge. I've got my settings on transparent right now, so that just drew a stroke. But if we were to change it to red, for example, huge brush, but we can kinda change this however we want. So we could make the size variants very small, Put it on the pressure setting and this time we can setup our normal one, but I'm gonna go like this and then I add a new one, and then I'm gonna move these down, this. And let's say I want a slight opacity on that as well. Go up here, change to pressure or to change our size back down to say 50, for example, it's gonna give us a cool effect here. We can do real quick if we swipe real fast across the screen, obviously we can go back to settings and we could say change the pressure curve to something. Maybe like this. Put this all the way up and we'll move this down. I'm not a huge fan of that. Let's get back to linear and you know it, let's just leave it like it is on linear. And if we were to go and change this back to 50, we have a nice little swipe. So this could be useful. Obviously, you could take the opacity off and make it say 12% ish, kind of slight. And it's probably going to be useful to change our bandwidth down to something more reasonable. So that's going to be a pretty cool way to make a new brush. And we could do like some swipes. I don't know what you'd necessarily uses for probably, you know, if you were drawing like some claw marks or something, you know, this brush would probably work pretty well for that. But you can kind of do whatever you want with this brush given the pressure settings in these basic settings. So that's your new solid brush. Next we're gonna go and we're gonna go back up here. And this time we're going to click New textured intensity brush. And when we do that, we're going to need an image. So I'm gonna go ahead and select the regular smiley face that we used in project two. You guys have this file already under project to just go and click that. And this will make it pretty simple. And we're going to right-click, click, Edit, brush. And as you can see, this is stretching it. So if we look down here and we remember based on stretch right now, and we have our setting to red. So it's going to give us a long weird-looking brush. I'm gonna go and delete those two. And I'm going to swap this to transparent, at which point it's going to give it to us in this color. However, I don't really want this on stretch because that obviously look weird. So we use case for this would be more so repeat. So if we were to turn our bandwidth up and I'm gonna change the controller up here to brush defaults. If we just swipe, this is gonna give us a line of smiley faces. Other than that, there's not a lot of use cases. Obviously, we're just using a smiley face. You could use a different image and it will work out much better. But for the purpose of this is quick and easy to show you guys how it works and you guys already have this file in your documents. So we're new and close out of that. That is the textured intensity brush. And then lastly, we're gonna go up here yet again. And this time we're going to click New textured image brush. Now in order to do this, this has to be a transparent PNG file. So this is already a transparent PNG file, but if you were using something else and make sure it's a transparent PNG file. So if we go and click that, that's gonna give us a new brush. And as you can see, our main color set the transparent. So if we do this, it's just going to draw out our smiley face in the color that it came in. However, it stretched it. And we probably are going to want to do that. We're probably going to want this and we're probably don't want to change this to say 150. And if we go and do this, boom, we've got a lot of smiley faces. Obviously they look a little weird. But if we were to go ahead and change our width up to say 300, you know, you can click one time, drag a little bit. That's going to give you a regular smiley face, another smiling face. But the more you kinda drag it out, the more it's gonna look a little weird. But that's gonna give us a line of smiley faces for this example. It also does mess it up here and there in the beginning. But that is your textured image brush. So you can use almost anything you want in terms of the image. So it's definitely going to be useful in a lot of cases. But for the purposes of this, I figured the smiley face would be the easiest thing to use. Show you guys how these work. So make sure you do have your settings on transparent over here whenever you are working with this that way it shows your default image because if I were trained just to read, for example, it's going to show them in red. If I were to change this to blue, for example, it's going to show them in blue. That's not exactly blue. It's kind of a bluish purplish, but point being, it's going to change the color unless you have it set on transparent, like we did in the first ones. So, so with that being said, that's your textured intensity brushes, textured image brushes, as well as these new solid brush that we made in the beginning of the lesson. So with that being said, thank you guys for checking out this lesson. I hope you guys did get some value from it, and I will see you guys in the next one. 14. Brush Packs: Welcome back to the Affinity Designer Essentials course, where in today's lesson we're going to be going over the best places to find brush backs. So I've got to brush packs here that I've just recently installed. These are actually from Jeremy Hazel over its seventh season studios. So be sure to check that out, but I've also included these in the files for the course. So I'm just gonna click the plus button so we can go to the files real quick. And if we go right here to project two, I'm going to go over course documents. And if we look at the free brushes, all you have to do to open those is just open them up and click on them. And they'll automatically import into here and they'll give you a new section with new brushes. So right now I've got this one selected. I changed it around a little bit, but this is more of a smoke brush. But next up, if you want to find some other brushes, a lot of these costs money. But if you guys go over to involve elements is going to be a great place to look. And you just type in brushed under graphics. And then you want to go to the Affinity Designer application support. And these are all the brushes that are gonna be available here. So as we can see, there's a 189 brushes that are compatible and a lot of these are pretty cool. So we can go look at these two, for example, these do cost money in the fact that I guess on these you have to get a subscription which is $16.50 a month. Generally though a lot of in-vivo based products are just going to cause a flat rate of, you know, 789, $10, something like that. But these are pretty good and pretty useful. I imagined this image was made with a lot of these brushes. I can't really tell. They don't really have a lot of promotional material here, but I imagine a lot of this effects and stuff like this on this text and all this is all part of this brush pack. And if we look, we can see what's going to be included. 35 individual PNG text files. That's going to be able to make it where you can kind of create brushes from those 100 ADR, which will work in Photoshop and JPEG which has the preview, which honestly this might just be the preview. Next up, I wanted to show you guys the Frankenstein studio. So this is going to have some brushes of its own. Not a lot of these are the only three available in terms of vector brushes, but they are pretty cheap. And then sometimes free, this one is free. This one's six bucks, this one's a $1.90-nine, so not a lot. And you're going to be able to create some cool stuff with these. So I guess it comes with nine drawing tools. So it looks like we've got some pixel brushes here and then we've got some vector brushes here. So that's pretty much what's going to be included here. Not bad for a bug. 99. We look over here, this one's 599, so I kind of expect much more out of this. Yes. So these are some pretty cool brushes, as you can tell, these are actually really cool. I might actually want UP grabbing these, just sitting here looking at these. I actually kinda like these particular look. And so these are going to be very useful. These are a little bit more expensive at 599. But then today that's kinda chump change. But overall, I just wanted to show you guys where you guys can find your own brushes online because these are going to be really useful when it comes down to creating some good art. I mean, if we look right here, some of these brushes are used here. And I mean these, these look fantastic. So with that being said, thank you guys for checking out this lesson. I hope it was useful. And with all that being said, I will catch you guys in the next one. 15. Color Picker: Are you guys so early on in the course, I told you guys we were going to be talking about the color picker later on in the course. And that is what we're doing here today. So by default, Affinity Designer works on the color wheel, which works like this. So basically this is your main triangle. That's where you're going to pick a color from the surrounding circle. And then you can go lighter if you want it to go over here, for example, more planned, you could go a Darker blend and go all the way to black and Goldwater white. So that's how the color wheel works. I don't personally love the color wheel. So what I generally will use is the boxes. So this is going to be like this, kinda much similar to Photoshop and the fact that you kind of have your top bar that's going to be able to slide all your colors over. And then you can pick your, you know, your glands up here, impish cure, dark blends down here. Your brides over here. And then you're white and you're black. But there's actually a lot of options so we can put Q saturation and lightness under this tab. But if we want it to go and use the slider, for example, this is going to have a bunch of stuff. So obviously you could use anything within this box. You could pick pretty much every color on the entire spectrum can also change all of these settings up here. As you can see, these were all changing as I was picking those. And that's because as you change, some of these more are going to show up. So this is the hue, saturation and lightness selector, and this is based on RGB. So if we went to RGB hex, this is going to give us our hex code right here for that. And we can actually take this and copy and paste this into pretty much anything. So if we were to copy this and put it into Photoshop, we could pull up this exact color right here in Photoshop. So the hex code is universal. It'll pretty much every color, as long as there's a hex code option, you're going to be able to copy and paste that color and pull up the exact color that you were using before. Next up, we've got HSL, which stands for hue saturation and lightness, pretty similar to what we were just working with. Next, we've got CMYK. This stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. So these are all your colors here. And if you were to copy and paste all these numbers in a row, these are going to give you the exact color were selected on right now, not a lot of programs use CMYK, but if you do find one that does or you want to use that for an example, then these are the numbers you would select to get that same color out somewhere else. Next, we've got lab. This is going to be pretty similar to the slider in the fact that you can kind of choose whatever color you want really easily. Personally, I still like the regular bar. I don't like going really in depth with colors, but it is an option. And lastly, we've got the grayscale, which is just gonna be graze, but she can pick almost any color of grey you could possibly want. And you can pretty much start down here and get black. And as you scale up, you can get all the way to white in here. If you want to say this exact gray right there, you could select that. But this is pretty much going to give you every single grey that is on the visible spectrum. Lastly, we've got the tent bar. So this is going to be kind of similar to the grayscale, but this time it's actually just gonna kinda tend to whatever you're working with. So if we were to draw ourselves a shape here, we could kind of tent it down some, all the way down to a partial grey. So that is the ten to bar, not incredibly useful, but not a bad thing to know about. So that is pretty much your colors. These are your options. You can start off with a wheel, you sliders, boxes. And so long as we leave this on Whew, it's gonna give us our regular colours settings right here. I generally like using the box, but you can kinda use any of these that you want to find out and figure out whatever that perfect color is that you want to use. So with that being said, thank you guys for checking out this lesson and I will catch you guys in the next one. 16. Color Resources: Our guests, and now that we've talked about color a little bit, I figured I would give you guys a good lesson on how you guys can find some good colors to use, as well as learn a little bit more in depth about colors in which colors she may or may not want to use for whatever reason. So starting off, we're gonna be looking at color matters.com. This is very much so just an information sheet. So this is going to have a lot of information about colors. So, you know, if you're really interested in being like a graphics designer or something like that, this can definitely be useful. It's going to teach you a lot about the psychology around colors, what colors you may or may not want to use in certain places and kinda explain a lot of top brands. I mean, if you look here, you have Google and Yahoo. You gotta see, you know, which one of these are people looking at first. So if you're looking to do this as a career, this, it can be a great website to kinda look through and just read about. I mean, it's not really incredibly useful, but if you are looking to do this professionally, I would highly recommend just taking a read on this site. But now that we've got this side out of the way, let's go ahead and look at the three other sites that are going to kind of help us out with picking colors. So if we look first, we are going to design seeds. This is just gonna give you a lot of ideas. So look, these are a lot of cool colors, pretty much. I mean, there's nothing crazy on here, but it's going to give you a lot of different color palettes for whatever you're looking for. So I wanna go with something like this. I can click here. And it's going to load up some images, as well as some color palettes that come with it. So here are the color codes for this one. And here's another image. Here are the color codes for this one. So you can always put these into your hex. So if we look, this is a very light blue. Pay attention to this color. If we go over here and I go to my hex code right here, we've got our hex. If I press control V to paste that in there, we're gonna get that very light blue right there. And if I draw out here, you can see this blue and this blue are pretty much the exact same. So this is a pretty good resource. You can look through these images, kinda look to see what you may or may not be looking. To base your video or project or image or whatever it is that you're working on. And kind of pick a color scheme from one of these and it'll give you all the color palettes that you want. Next, we've got Adobe color. This is color dot adobe.com slash k slash color wheel. But this is really going to give you what you're kinda looking for so we can kind of do whatever we want with this. So if we want to take it really broad, it's going to automatically adjust all of these like so and give us some strong colors in all directions. We can take them all close together. And it's going to give you a lot of options here as well as the hex code under each one of these. Obviously this is under this setting. We could switch this to something like this. We could do a square and it's gonna give us stuff like this. We can click compound and it's gonna give us these automatically. But generally speaking, it's gonna give you a different kind of vibe every time. So if you just want shades of something, then you can just click shades over here and say you want a shade, a blue. Right here. It's gonna give you a bunch of shades of this blue, along with all of the hex codes. So these are going to help you come up with colors to figure out what exactly it is you want to do. Obviously, you could pull this out more. You go double spirit. You know, these are gonna pull up some interesting colors and this is the master. So this is gonna help you out a lot with colors. If you're working on some kind of infographic project, it's really gonna help you get a very good color scheme going on. And lastly, we've got color hunter.com. So this is pretty cool. I've already uploaded it. We go ahead and click choose file here, and we click the Affinity Designer logo that I have here in the course, RAW files. And we upload that. Once we click upload, it's gonna spit out this custom color palette based on that image. So if I were to click Upload Image again, choose file. And this time I'm actually going to go and grab something from our course documents. So if we go look at product too, our smiley face reference, I'm gonna upload that and I'll click upload. And boom, it's gonna give us the colors from our smiley face. So this is an absolutely phenomenal resource for you photographers out there that kinda want to figure out what's, what colors are in your palate like you could do on the site. You can go ahead and use this and it's going to tell you what colors are used and that image predominantly. So that's all the color resources I've got for you guys. I hope you guys did enjoy this and get some value out of this. And with that being said, I will catch you guys in the next lesson. 17. Pallets: Welcome back to the Affinity Designer courseware. In this lesson, we're gonna be talking about pallets. So if we go up here and we look at squashes, we're gonna go ahead and drag this down here. And if we go grab color, I'm going to drag this down here as well. So these right here, all your pallets. So we have all these by default. And if you look up here, these are application pallets. So these are going to be uniform across the entire application no matter what document you are working on. Whereas document pallets are only going to be applicable to the document that you are working on. So if we go up here to the trial that I've made before and we wanted to add, say, a green, we could select a green. And if I click this button right here, it's going to add current fill two pallets. If I click that, boom, we've got our green. Add it to this palette. I wanted a blue. We could click that yet again, it's gonna give us a blue. However, say I wanted some colors that looks similar to this, but we're a little different. I can right-click on this and I could click, Add court to swash and I could click complimentary is gonna give us some similar-looking colors. If I wanted, say, analagous, you'd get these. It's gonna give us some more similar colors. If I wanted something like tenths, this is gonna give us a bunch of tents that are very similar to the original color that we were working with. So it's pretty unique. It's a cool way to get some new colors. But if you wanted to make your own palette like I have right here, you would go up here and you would click Add New Document palette or application palette, whichever one you want. I'm gonna do a document. And right now it's going to be called unnamed. Go up here and we click rename palette. We can name this two trial to. And we click enter. All of a sudden, this is trial to. Lastly, I know this has been a short lesson, but I'm gonna show you guys a cool way to add some new pallets from a picture. So this is very useful if you go up here and you click Create palette from image, you can do that. And it's gonna pop up this. And then you can click Select Image. And I'm gonna go to my desktop and I'm going to grab the raw files for this course. And if you guys noticed that this image and some of the intro videos, I'm gonna go and click this one, for example. It's going to take a second and foam, it's going to give me five palettes that are from this image. Now, that's by default, if you wanted to, you could actually increase and say you want a 24. I just turned it up to, this is going to take a second. And if we click preview, boom, it's gonna give us all these different colors. So this is a pretty cool way if you're working within a documented into working primarily on one image, this is gonna be a really quick and easy way to pull out a bunch of colors that you may or may not want to use. And then you can click right here on your location, whether you want it to be an application, a document, or you just want to add it to your currently selected, which in this case would be our trial two. So we could click, Add to currently selected palette, click Create, and boom, all of those are going to show up in trial two. And I can quickly, easily do this if I wanted to read square, maybe I don't want this blue. Maybe I want yet another one, and this time I want it to be that red and then we want another one. I wanted to be orange. Quick and easy way to work with a lot of colors across one image. Highly recommend using it. I've found it to be one of the most useful things in the program. So with that being said, that is the end of this lesson. I hope you guys did get some value from this. And I will catch you guys in the next lesson. 18. Mask Layers: Our guys, welcome back to the Affinity Designer course, where in this lesson we're going to be talking about mask layers. So we're gonna be doing a pretty basic example of this. So to start out, what I'm gonna do is go over here and I'm gonna grab this and I'm gonna make a blue triangle because that's the color I have up. And now I'm gonna go and draw yet another one. Only this time I'm going to fill and I'm gonna make this pink. That sounds good. Now we've got two layers, blue underneath, pink on top. What we're gonna do is go down here and this is a new button. We haven't talked about this at all, but this is called a mask layer. So while were selected on the pink or whatever is on top, I'm going to click the mask layer button. And that's gonna give us this. Now if we zoom down here, you can see that we're selected on this mask. Now what I want you guys to remember, black conceals, white reveals. So if I go and switch over to our pixel persona and I grab a paint brush and I'm gonna go find a somewhat cool, let's go that texture. And this would be cool. And I'm going to change the size of this up to 200, and I'm gonna make this completely black. Now, you're going to wonder in a second why the colors showing up like it is. But if we do this, you can see blue is starting to show through. Now. We're not actually painting in black per se. We're actually revealing what is under Neith. So what I mean by that is we're actually telling this mask layer to basically kind of get rid of that pink spot right there. And when you do that, it's gonna reveal what is underneath, but you are concealing the top layer in order to reveal. So black conceals the top layer to reveal the bottom layer. Now if we go back and this time say we want to show it again. We can grab our white and we can do this. And all of a sudden it's going to start to disappear because of the type of brush I have, it's not really going to completely disappear, incredibly easy. So I'm going to grab a different brush. I'm just gonna basic and we'll wrap up big brush. And all of a sudden it all goes away, like so. Now before this lesson's over, I want to kind of take you guys on a little bit of a idea here. So I'm gonna go back to our texture brushes and I'm going to grab something like this maybe. And this time I'm going to grab the black yet again because I want to conceal the top. Only this time. Instead of grabbing completely black, I know I just messed up, but instead of grabbing completely black, I'm gonna go somewhere in the middle. But the goal here is to actually do some concealing of the pink in order to reveal the rectangle underneath, which is blue. So if I take this now and do this, you're gonna have a very small amount showing through much less than if we were completely on the black, if we go all the way down and now do it, you're gonna have so much more showing through over here. They need to over here. So if we control z that you can kind of see just how useful this is. If I were to take this brush up to 500 and our control Z, all of this to get us back to normal. Now if we do this, we can really take this really far and create a pretty cool pink and blue image here. So that is pretty much a mask layer for you. Remember, black conceals, white reveals, its a little confusing in the fact that black is actually revealing what is underneath by concealing what is on top and white is revealing what is on top, therefore, concealing what is on bottom. But when you actually do click black, it does conceal what is on top. When you use white, it reveals what is on top, in this case being pink. So with that being said, I hope you guys did get some value out of this. I hope you guys did learn something and I will catch you guys in the next lesson. Before I go though, I do want to remind you guys, it would help me out a ton if you guys could lead a review on the course. So we're getting pretty far into the course at this point. I figured I would remind you guys one more time. So with that being said, I'll get you guys in the next lesson. 19. Clipping Mask, Transparent Tool, and Gradient Tool: Our guys. So in this lesson we're gonna be talking about clipping, mask and nesting, as well as the transparent tool in the gradient tool. Since you guys already kind of know what a clipping mask is, but we're going to show you how it relates to the gradient tool in the transparent tool. So to start off, I'm going to be working in the pixel persona. And I'm gonna go over here to where my heart is and I'm gonna change this to say diamond for example. And I'm just going to draw myself a nice pink diamond. And I'm not exactly going to try to make any kind of shapes here, but what I'm gonna do now is grabbed my square tool and I'm going to make this a slightly darker version, I guess something, something like right about there maybe. And what I'm gonna do is draw a square. Something may be this size. And now I'm going to grab my move tool and I'm going to move this down to where it's roughly right here. And now watch this instead of keeping it here, we don't really have any kind of design we're trying to do here. I'm just trying to show you this. We're going to drag this down. And if you look right here, if I drag it way down and it'll just be under in the back. But if I drag it up or if I were to drag it down and I have it right here, it's going to nest underneath this. And all of a sudden it is going to be a different color on that side because the diamond is acting as a clipping mask for the rectangle. And you'll be surprised how much you can do with this. But we're going to be showing off a lot of that in one of our last projects, but that is pretty much what a clipping mask is. We've been doing this throughout the course here in there, it's pretty simple. However, this time I'm gonna do something different. So what I'm gonna do is go ahead and duplicate this rectangle. And I'm going to grab this and move it down to, I guess right here. And I'm gonna move this over here and I'm gonna make it blue. Now what I'm gonna do is go and grab our transparent Tool. And I'm just going to drag this way. You know what, I don't love that. I'm going to drag this way up through here. And then what I'm gonna do is basically take this again, but I'm going to select on the top triangle which should kind of be able to top. Let's get some good management skills going on here. And I'm going to start right here in the middle, and I'm gonna move this down. And all of a sudden we've got kind of this cool looking shape here. Because what it's doing is making part of this transparent where it wasn't before. So we have some of that pink that the original Diamond was colored, as well as the purple and the blue. And the pink is kind of in the middle with the purple moral in the top and the blue More on the bottom. Obviously, we could have done a little better if we took this and bring it down more. Maybe we move this out some like so that might be a little bit better. Gets rid of some of that line in the middle, makes it a little bit more even between the purple and the blue on each side. But all of a sudden we've got a pretty cool looking color here in the gradient tool works pretty much the same way. So I'm going to grab a white, I guess, and I'm gonna select the top. And this time we're going to drag this way. And if you look, we can kind of see how that turn that color. We're going to add like a tent on this from this direction if we wanted, we could kind of take this however we wanted, but it's going to be able to give us a cool color. So if I de-select off this, and let's just go ahead and grab a whole new triangle. Boom, our gradients who was actually automatically applied. So we can take this and we can move this kinda however we want. I'm going to make this student read. And if we drag this like so, and go up here and select a nice read, all of a sudden we're going to have a cool looking color that was not a nice red. I'm going to grab something a little brighter. Now we've got kinda be Instagram logo looking shades here. So if I grab this one more time and we were to drag this out SOM, and I'm gonna move this over here. Boom, we've got this kinda split in half to an extent. And as you can see, you can actually kind of change some of these settings here. So I've got it on linear right now, but we could do elliptical, that's going to base it off. I circle almost over here. You could do radial and it's going to be pretty similar. You do conical. That's going to be quite weird and strange, but you can take it however you want it at this point, you could do something like this. Keep it on one side, keeping on another side. What I've are, I'm gonna Control Z that one more time. I'm gonna go back to how we originally had it. You can select your midpoints. So if you want it to be farther over, you want more purple show and you can move it up to a 100%. You want at the other direction, you can move it down to 0%. You want a part of the way you could do that. But 50% is what it's going to be on by default. And we can even change the opacity on this. So we could change this weight down. At which point this side, since we are selected on the left side, is going to start to be kind of transparent. Or we can select the other side and kind of change this one and make it more transparent. So that is pretty much the gradient tool, the transparent tool and how a clipping mask works, and how you can use all of them together. So with that being said, I hope you guys did get some value out of this and I will catch you guys in the next lesson. 20. Styles: Our guys. So in this lesson we're going to be talking about styles. Now, I have to say this is a huge time saver when it comes down to using Affinity Designer. So first off, we're gonna go over here. This is where the styles are at. By default you're going to have these, these are presets that were already included in the program. So what I'm gonna do is go ahead and grab a square, and I'm going to just do it like this. And that looks pretty good. And if I go over to layers, I'm gonna grab my move tool now it's going to be easier to work with. Back to styles. I'm actually going to disconnect this and extended down so that we can stay on the layers tab over here. And if we look, I can just click metal sharp for example. And it's going to apply this style. So this kinda looks like a silver bar or I could apply the aluminum one. This is going to have an aluminum looking finish or we could even apply strange and strange to. So as you can see, this actually kind of looks like the Stranger Things title. So that actually might be what this is. They might have done some kind of partnership, but it does kind of look like the background for the Stranger Things text. If you guys ever watched that Netflix show. And I would call it a little weird for them to have just this outline called Strange and strange to, that looks kind of strange to me. So I would imagine that this is some kind of partnership and this is the effect to go with the Stranger Things title. I'm just guessing on that, but regardless of that, I'm gonna go and delete this and I'm gonna read, make my square available. And if we look, we want to put eighties gel, shine on here, eighties disco. These are all things that are given to you by default can do all of these. However, it's really important that we realize that these are just affects. So if I go over here and select the effects tab, we're gonna see that outline 3D and Bevel emboss and gradient overlay or all applaud our to unselect all of these. And if you look, we have a fill, which is a pretty complex fill here, but we could change this to this color and it's kind of back to normal. I mean, I guess our original color was something like this, but that's all these are. So they're not anything special than on anything hard. They're pretty much at just a bunch of effects, as well as a color gradient or color overlay all pre saved by default. So that's all this is in with that. That means you can actually make your own. So right now we're on the default. But if I wanted to make my own section just the same way that we did in the pilot video. If we click up here, we can click Add styles category. We could then go and rename this and call it a trial. And now it's going to be blank. And what we can do is go ahead and start applying our own effects. So I'm just gonna do something quick and random here. We'll apply a bunch of these alto Gaussian blur on there. Let's increase this a lot. Ok, that doesn't look where we'll actually so I don't know if you see this at all, but I think that actually kind of looks like an older retro TV. I don't know what our original style was that we had selected, but that does kind of look like a retro TV to me. And if we wanted to save this, all we do is go up here and click Add style from selection. And this is going to be called style one by default, when we could rename this to retro TV if that's what I want it to name it as. And now we've got our own style that we just kinda created called retro TV. Now if I want it to go back to layers, we can unhide this. And Let's, let's grab some text, for example. I'm gonna go over here and do something like that. I'm going to call this Tv. And we're just gonna click retro TV. Boom. It's got that same style that we just set up. Obviously, this is a pretty ugly looking style, so I'm not going to keep it on my God and click delete style. And I'm gonna go ahead and actually delete this whole category so we can click Remove category, but that is pretty much what styles are. They're just effects that are saved in conjunction with a color scheme. So you can make a million of these if you find yourself doing something a lot or if in one project you're really working on something and you've got a lot of different items that all need the same style or same effects. All you gotta do is click Save into a new category or you can even save it into your default category, and then you can automatically apply that to whatever you want it. So if I wanted to grab the diamond tool, we could get eighties disco on here or we get metal or whatever it may be. We can put metal shine on there. We could do another one with gold. A lot of stuff like this. So that is what styles are. They're very useful if you're doing a lot of complex art or you're doing stuff where you kinda have to duplicate a lot of effects and styles and stuff like that across a bunch of different layers. They're going to be incredibly useful. So with all that being said, thank you guys for checking out this lesson and I will catch you guys in the next one. 21. Selection : All right guys, so in this lesson we're gonna be talking about selection. So what I'm gonna do to start off as go in, grab our paintbrush tool here in the pixel persona. And I'm gonna go and grab something at the top, and I'm going to increase the size to probably something around 300. That looks good. We'll just do that next. What I'm gonna do is go and grab yet another brush. I'm gonna grab something like this and change the size to 80. That's probably good. Let's do something like that. And I think I want something that's kinda kinda splattered or something like that. Someone got a sprays and splattered and I'm going to grab I guess this one will be good. And this time let me change the color to blue because that's what I have. And we're just gonna do that. Look, all of this is on the same layer because that's how the pixel persona works. Everything is going to go on to the same layer unless you create a new one down here. So you kinda have to decide that beforehand. So now let's get into some selection. So I'm gonna go over here and grab our selection brush tool. And if you look, we've got some options up here. We've got add, subtract with snap the edges, all layer soft edges and refine. I'm going to start off on add and I'm just gonna start around here. And it's going to kind of select that edge for me by default. So if I keep on moving it around, and we keep on moving this around like so you can see when we start getting into this paint splatter, it's having a hard time. It's not staying with our original shape. Sometimes it's selecting around the pain as you can see there. So we're going to have a pretty good way of fixing that here in a second as soon as we finish up all of this. And if we move this over up here, now we've got the whole outside selected. We can kinda move in on the inside and we can increase the width to around 50. And if we just keep on doing that, boom, it's all of a sudden going to snap and it's pretty much going to select our whole image that we have here, except we've messed up over here on the blue as it's not really selecting exactly where we wanted selecting off onto the edge of that blue. So one way to fix that is going to be to use Subtract. And we can actually get really surgical and really close on this if we move way down in size. And I also just noticed real quick, we do have a little bit of I mess up here where it did not select everything. So I'm gonna click Add and just click that once, and it's added in. Now, if you look, we kind of need to get rid of this. And it's not really letting us do it because it's such a hard line right across that blue. So what we can do here is add a little bit right here. Boom. Now it's working pretty well at splitted about where we wanted to go. And let's say we wanted to get rid of everything outside of this selection. If we were to press Delete inside of this, it's going to delete everything inside of our selection. However, if we wanted to get rid of all the stuff on the outside of this image, we can press Control Z to redo that. And what we're gonna do is go up to select and we're gonna click invert pixel selection. So once we click that, it looks pretty much the same. But if you look really close, we've gotten the selector going around the entire edge of the software all the way around here. And I can't really see it on the top and bottom, but I'm sure it's there. And the reason for that is now everything outside of this as our selection. Now if we were to press Delete on our keyboard, it's gonna delete everything outside. Now, if we were to click select and click de-select, we can see that we've got a little bit more of some issues over here. We didn't get this one entirely perfect. So what we can do is go ahead and use some other tools. So if we click the free-hand selection tool, this is gonna allow us to kind of free-hand this exactly how we want it. So if we pull this exactly how we wanted, we could do something like that. And that's going to select all of this. We can click on that. I'm gonna Control Z that to show you a different way, if we look up here we were on the magnetic tool, we can move over to the polygon. And what that'll do is basically give us an exact line, some clicking a bunch, but it's just going to give us a line straight. And if I were to go back and select, oh, it's good. But there's also the standard which is just going to freehand based on whatever we do. So we could freehand it and just kinda try to trace at our best and hold it down the whole time. And then the select, and it's gonna give us a selection. And then we can move this over like so. That's okay. But I think the best way to go about it is with the magnetic tool in this case. So I'm gonna click de-select on this. And if we grab our magnetic tool, it's going to do a pretty good job of selecting pretty much exactly what we wanted. So if I go ahead and click that, we messed up a little bit there by dragging it down more, but that looks pretty good if we recollect allele on that. Now we're starting to look particularly at, so if I go over here and clicked de-select, that is not bad of a selection there. Now, what if we wanted some colors? Let's go back and grab our selection tool here. And I'm going to increase the size to probably something around 29. And I'm just gonna go real quick on this so we can get a good selection. Let's say we wanted some colors from this. We can go up here, color range. And we could select reds, select grains like blues. And it's going to select all of these individual colors that it sees. I don't find myself using this a lot, but if you are working a lot with photography or images or something like that, definitely can be useful. I'm gonna Control Z that obviously you could select a green or a red. You could select the total range in terms of midtone shadows and highlights. We could refine our edges here. So if we look, this is going to pull up this section and it's the same thing as that refined tool that we were going to talk about. And if we zoom in here, we can see everything in the red is going to be refined out of our selection. And you can play with these, but I'm not going to play with them a lot. I find it pretty difficult to use these, but it will kind of help adjust our setting some, but as you can see, this slowly starts to eat in onto our image. And I don't like these sections because there most of the time going to be auto-generated and generally don't find that to work incredibly well, but we can smooth that out more. This is going to smooth it out and give us more of an anti aliasing edge. Don't really like doing that either. We could feather it out. That's going to extend that edge even more and kinda give it very, very, very broad. I don't really like doing that either. It's not really what we want. The ramp is really what we're probably going to play with the most, but the program is just not excellent at figuring out exactly what we want to do. So I'm not a huge fan of it, but in some cases you could actually do this. And once you click this, you could click apply. And it's going to output a selection. But you could also outputted as a mask new layer, new layer with mask. Now put it as a selection and it's going to eat in on our image some. But at this point, depending on the type of image you're working with, you could always go to select and click the invert pixel selection and then just click Delete and it's going to delete everything outside of that. And if we go up to select and click, de-select, it's going to kind of give us that anti earliest edge that we want it. But at the same time it's going to pretty much cleaner image up a lot more. Lastly, I wanna go over some of the other selection tools. These are pretty self-explanatory. So if we were to grab this ellipse tool here, we can draw out a big circle. Everything in this is selected. So if I were to grab our paint brush tool yet again, I can paint all inside of here. But as soon as I start painting outside, it's not going to come outside. So I can draw this as hard as I want and it's not gonna go outside of that selection. We can control Z, that outside of that, we can click a de-select on that and we can grab our square tool. This is going to give us a square or a rectangle, whatever you draw, it's going to be pretty much the same deal there. So if I were to grab a paintbrush, it's not going to let me leave that square. Lastly, we have what's called the column marquee tool. And that is just over here in this is going to essentially give us a whole column. So we have to pick how wide we want it. So let's say we wanted it to be 40 pixels. It's going to give us 40 pixels worth of a column that we can utilize like so. And when you click Control Z on that. And then lastly, we have the row marquee tool, which is pretty much gonna do the exact same thing. It's set on one pixel right now. So we can increase that more and more and more. And once we do that, it's going to give us a 40 pixel row, at which point it works pretty much the same way we could paint inside of this all day long. And it's not going to do anything outside of it. We could add a filter to it. We can make it black with this, fill in a lot of things you can do. We can blur this out more, create something cool. So that is pretty much the basics of selecting. That's everything you're probably going to need to know unless you're doing some really complex things. Personally, I find selection to be a little hard. I like to freehand with an eraser a lot to be honest. Especially when it Photoshop. A lot of people when it comes down to cutting out bodies or cutting out here, they'll try to use a selector. Personally. I don't love doing stuff like that. I can't stand trying to use a selector on Photoshop to cut out someone's hair or my hair or anything like that. I find it much easier to literally just grabbing eraser and just do it exactly how you want it, especially when it comes down to hair because, I mean, you've got tons of options. You can change your opacity or hardness, that's going to be really good for hair. I have a guy's hair cut obviously. So if I were to put my hardness down to somewhere around 20% and increase my size. I can go outside of my hairline and if I have a good shooting background already, I can do this kind of number on my hair and it makes it much, much better. And honestly I see much better results than when people try to use a selector tool on hair. That being said, I will say with a girl's hair cut that's kinda long and can definitely be very, very, very risky. This technique would not really work incredibly well. And selecting is probably what you'd want to do. But when it comes down to a guy's hair cut, a lot of times you can just take this with a low hardness and do that around the hairline and it's going to work out very well. So that's a little bit of added bonus for, I guess, Photoshop knowledge, but it also applies to Affinity Designer. All the tools are pretty much the same and you're just gonna have to decide where exactly it is. You'd want to use the selector tool, which one you'd want to use, and so on, depending on whatever project you are working on. So with that being said, thank you guys for checking out this lesson and I will catch you guys in the next one. 22. Pixel Brushes Part 1: Our guys. So in this lesson we're gonna be talking about pixel brushes. So to start off, we're obviously going to be under the pixel persona, and then we're going to be under the paintbrush tool. And then under the brush tab over here I'm going to pencils and I'm going to be working with the last one just to show you guys these settings. It's going to be one of the easier ones to kinda show the settings and explain what they are and what they do. So obviously we have all our settings up here, but I'm not going to be going through too many of those since we've covered a lot of these and a lot of the other sections and they're all pretty much the same. But we are going to be looking under the more tapped kind of explain how these brushes work and what kind of adjustments we can make to each one. So I'm going to be resetting all of this at the end before I close because like I said before when we were working with brushes, once you change something and you click Close, it will not reset. Even if you use the Reset button, it is not going to reset. It's pretty much stuck the way that you set it. So to start off, we're gonna be working with size. Obviously, if you move the sides up and down, it works pretty much the same way we've talked about this a million times. So I'm gonna go ahead and reset that real quick just so we get back to something usable. And I think when I increase the size just a little bit so that we can see this preview a little better. Accumulation is pretty much the same thing as opacity. So if we turn this down, you're going to see that it puts out less at a given time. And if we turn it all laid on 0, it's pretty much none. So, so a lot of times we're gonna wanna leave that on the default setting unless you want to work your way up more from the bottom and do a lot of different layers, then sometimes it could be good to kinda keep that lower or make an adjustment to it. Next we're going to have hardness is, is pretty much how rough it's going to be around the edges and how exactly it's going to be. So if we turn this all the way down to 0, this is generally what an airbrushed is going to be. It's going to be pretty much to 0. It's going to be straight, almost like spray paint. If you were to use that in the real world view of ever used spray paint than it probably has a hardness of pretty much 0 under most circumstances. Now of course, you could put the bottle really, really, really close to whatever you are working with. And hardness would theoretically be higher, but that's pretty much what hardness is going to be. Now spacing gets a little interesting. So spacing is basically this image. So like I said, all brushes are made up by an image and spacing is going to decide how much space is put in between each image. So if you turn it all the way up, you're gonna have tons of space. Whereas if we were to reset this back to where it was ad and we turn our size backups, something we can see. You're going to see that they're all put together to make this cool looking brush shape. We're not really going to use a lot. And then rotation, if we were to turn the spacing way up here and we look, and let's adjust the rotation. We can turn it down and they will rotate and we can turn it farther and they'll rotate even more. So that is pretty much rotation, nothing crazy. So we can click Reset on that blend mode. I pretty much never changed to this and don't find it to be useful in any way, shape, form, or fashion. And lastly, we've got wet edges. I don't change any of this either. Whoever it is there, it's fairly self-explanatory slash she can play with it and stuff like that. If you want to see maybe when you may or may not want to use that, but I personally never make that adjustment. Next up, we've got dynamics. So we're not going to talk about any of this either Just because we will kind of cover some of it later. And a lot of this has affects on to what we do here. So you're not gonna be able to change a lot of stuff here and it makes sense without potentially changing things here. It's a little bit more advanced slash a case-by-case basis. So there's not a lot I can tell you about this other than if you wanna play with it. Some, you can play with it, see if it might be useful in whatever art you are working on. Next, we've got texture. So this is the nozzle, this is pretty much what the shapes look like. So if you remember the shape from the beginning, this is what the individual shapes look like. So if we turn our spacing way up, and let's start our size up so we can see some of these better. And we go to textures. We're gonna see that like if you watch this right here, that's pretty much the same as that. And then this is pretty much the same as that. So this is kind of ease, all repeating in a certain way. But these are essentially the images that you are going to be working with. But these are pretty much the images that make up the brush. So you can actually make your own brushes the same way we talked about before, but with some new images, except for this TOM, These are pixel brushes and they're usually going to be a whole lot more useful than at something in the designer persona. I would really, in a lot of cases called this the fundamental aspect of the software. This is where you're gonna be able to create some phenomenal work. So that's pretty much it brushes for you guys. So I'm going to go ahead and click Reset on this so we get back to our original brush and let's do a quick little thing. We'll grab something like that. I guess. If we do that, we're gonna see it looks kind of cool. We control Z that and we could turn our size up to something cooler. And you look, that's a pretty cool-looking brush. So with all that being said, I hope you guys did get some value from this and I will catch you guys in part two. 23. Pixel Brush Part 2: Welcome back to part two where this time we're going to be making our own brush. So we're gonna go ahead and jump on into this. So to start off, I'm going to go out and grab the brush tool, and I'm going to grab number four out of the textures section. So you guys should have pretty much all of these by default. And what I'm gonna do is go over to color and I'm gonna change the color down to something probably right about here, something like this. And what we're basically going to be trying to do is create a little bit of a smoke brush. A brush that we can create a smoke affect width. So the Brush itself is not automatically going to be smoke, but it will be pretty close and we can add some adjustments after the fact to really turn it into some nice-looking smoke. So what I'm gonna do is go ahead and cut the size up to probably around 400, maybe, maybe three, and change somewhere around here. That's probably good. Maybe a little smaller. So let's do 280. That's probably going to be a pretty good right there. And what I'm gonna do is go ahead and just the flow 25 and the opacity to 25. And I'm going to create a zigzag pattern on exactly, but imagine a Z going like this and then ASI going like this. That's what I'm going to be trying to do. So let's go ahead and get started. We'll do kind of this number and we'll do that. You know what, I think we should turn the size of the brush down a little bit. I think I'm gonna do 200. That's probably gonna come out pretty good. So what I'm gonna do is go ahead and kind of create a Z pattern like this. And we'll go back across, it, will go back across this way, but back cross this way, like so. And then I'm going to create yet another one going this way, like so. So we just want to write almost a zig-zag to z like this. And we kinda wanna leave some white here in there. But, so now we're gonna go ahead and cut the color down even more probably to about 50%. And I'm gonna change the opacity up to 50%. And we're just going to redo those strokes yet again. Like so. Probably do it about three times. And I'm going to grab this one and do this three times. So I'm starting to think this is not going to come out incredibly well. This brush is just not working out great. But we will continue it and push on and see how it turns out. So that's probably going to be pretty good. There will turn the opacity up yet again to 75. And we'll cut the color down some more and we'll do it again each time we're gonna be doing less. So this time I'm only going to do two strokes each way. And lastly, what I'm gonna do is cut the brush all the way to black. And I'm gonna turn the opacity up to a 100. And if we look, we can kinda see where we've got a lot of strokes going. It's more so right in here and in here we have a lot of stuff overflowing in there. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn that really black, really black. Add some black in there. And I guess I'll just go ahead and add some here and there, like so now what we're gonna do is grab our smudge tool. So we haven't talked about this a lot, but the smudge tool pretty much works just like if you were to smudge some ink on your paper back in middle school or high school or whatever last time you used a pencil. If you were to smudge that if you had like some sweat on your hand or something like that, that is what the smudge tool is going to do. So I'm going to grab this and I'm gonna turn the strength down some probably 230. And I'm going to turn these sides up quite a bit. That's probably pretty good. And what I'm gonna do is just kinda try to work these black parts out that I added like so. And we'll turn this one over. Sum will just try to kind of disperse these black parts because we don't really want them, but we kind of need to be able to disperse them. So we're gonna try and do that while still maintaining some of the white spots. So I think this looks pretty good. I think we need to split is there and they're probably pretty good. Let's do one there. That looks pretty good, about as good as we're gonna get it. So what we're gonna do is go up to file and export, and we're gonna say this as a PNG Holt document. The whole works. And we're gonna go and click export, and we're gonna put it in the smoke brush section within the course documents. Suddenly go and save it as that. Now we're gonna switch over to the designer persona real quick. And I grab ourselves a black square and we'll just do that over top. Then we'll switch back over to pixel, and we'll go and add a new intensity brush will grab the file. And if you look, it's going to be down here since I imported it into the textured brushes. I guess that's fine. It kinda goes well here, so we'll go and grab our tool, and now we're going to click more. And when we deal with this, what we're gonna do is we're going to turn the size up a decent amount. Probably to somewhere around there. We'll see how that looks. But then we're gonna turn our hardness down to pretty much nothing. We don't want any count hardness on this. And we're going to turn our opacity down to roughly 75. Remember, it's called accumulation in here, but it pretty much means the same thing. And I'm going to change our flow down just a little bit, probably to 80, put a little bit of a rotation on this, something like that. That looks pretty good. And now let's go over to dynamic. I'm gonna change the size, jitter up so you guys can see what this does. I'm probably going to put this on 80 for right now and we will decide if we want to change it later. And I'm gonna change this to velocity. And then I'm going to change the flow jitter to something probably around 40 is going to be good. And we're gonna make this random and wouldn't change the rotation jitter to probably something, maybe around 40 as well. And let's go ahead and save this. And we will grab our moved to a real quick because I want to move this triangle or the square so that it looks perfect. We have a little bit of a white line down there, so we'll get rid of that and we'll go back to our paintbrush tool. And let's change the size up quite a bit. And we're going to want to go over to color. And we're going to make this something along this size. And we'll change our opacity down to maybe 60% here. And if we try that and see how that looks. So our size is definitely a little too big here. Let's turn it down to 500, maybe. Still too big. Let's do 250. Might be kind of good. So it's starting to come together. I will say I think we do need to change some settings, mainly when it comes to the jitter, as well as the shape. We got. We have a little bit too much of a square look going on. So what I'm gonna do is change the blend mode to screen. And then I'm going to go to dynamics and see if we can't work with these settings. Get rid of some of these squares a little bit. That was probably our fault a little bit, considering the edges of the poster, we're still going to have some stuff on them. And we didn't do that exactly right. So, so I'm going to change our jitter up to about 60%. And I'm gonna change our articulation a little bit probably to somewhere in the neighborhood of 25%. And we're going to give this a whirl looks. So it could definitely be better. But I think this looks pretty good. So what we're gonna do is try to create a little bit of a smoke look here. So I'm just gonna do this like so. Probably a little too big there. Let's change the size down to 150. That way we can work with something a little smaller. And we'll zoom in some to work with this. And we'll just draw some smoke here. And we want to get some doubled over sections like this where you see a lot of this wide at. And we can also change the color down a little bit. And we could change the color ups, SOM, so we get a little bit of these here. And now lastly, I'm going to grab this and move it some. And we're going to grab the smudge tool. In fact, I'm actually going to decrease the size of this. I could just keep working a little too big. I probably should have made this whole document a little bigger, but it's okay. So I'm going to grab the smudge tool and we can just count, waft some of this out and I get a little bit more blurry. We might even grab the blur tool here in a few minutes and see how that affects it. But we're just gonna wanna try and waft a bunch of this out. So I'm going to try and hold this much longer. And I'm going to increase the strength to about 50%, increased the flow to about 25%. And I want to decrease the size to about 300. And see how that does. Oh, yeah, that's looking good. So this is looking pretty good in my opinion. Trying to some of these edges out. Try and get some of these hard spots out because we've got a little bit of some hot spots coming in. So lastly, what I'm gonna do is grab our blur tool just a little bit. I'm going to increase the size to probably to 50. And I'm just going to try and hit all of it one good time. Like so. And boom, you've got some smoke. So obviously you could do it a little different. You can make it a little better. The shapes can be a little different, especially when it came down to the document size, I should have made the original one a little bit bigger just so we could ideally not have so many squares, but overall, I think that turned out pretty good. And we've got a nice looking smoked effect here. So that's how you're gonna make a smoke brush. I hope you guys did get some value out of this. We did focus on some new things like the smudge tool, a little bit about the blur tool. We haven't talked much about that. We've also got the sharpened tool here. We haven't talked about this at all, but I will say it right here. It does the opposite of the blur tool. Kind of obvious, I think, but that's how you guys are gonna be able to make your own brushes and utilize them in some unique ways. And I figured smoke effect would be one of the better ways to kind of exemplify that for a beginner. So OBS did get some value from this, and I will catch you guys in the next lesson. 24. Symmetry: Welcome back, where we're finally getting into arguably the hardest slash, arguably the most useful aspect of the program, at least in my opinion, if you guys are big pixel artist or big into that kind of world, then this is not really going to apply to you nearly as much. But when it comes down to the things that I use Affinity Designer for, this is really my sweet spot. This is what I love. This is what I do. None on a regular basis, but probably at least once or twice a month, sometimes as many as a few times a week. So in this lesson we're gonna be talking about symmetry. So we're gonna go ahead and just create a new document. It really doesn't matter. I'll click the first one, for example. And we're going to pull up our symbols tab. So yours may be down here from earlier in the course. Or if it's not, you can always go to view studio and click on symbols and it should pop up. So we're just gonna put this right here for right now. And what I'm gonna do is go and grab our art board Tool and I'm just gonna draw something like this. Let's do something right about there. That looks good. Now I'm going to click Create. Now I'm going to grab our Move tool. And what we're really going to be trying to do is kinda mirrored this. So I'm going to drag this right here where it's pretty much perfect. And if we try to get the exact location, we can put 0.3. And I should put it in the exact right spot down there. Now what I'm gonna do is rename this to mirror. And that's essentially going to mirror what we do on this side. So if I grab a pen tool and I go to this one, you can see that it's going to duplicate what we do. This is pretty similar to what we did back in the plaid pattern project. However, as you can see, this is not very useful. It doesn't help us a lot when it comes down to symmetry and trying to create two sides of something. So we're going to use a quick little trick. There might be a better way to do this, but I've always done it like this. Just click Transform and flip horizontally. You're not going to notice anything. But now when we grab our pen tool, if I were to draw it right here and say I'm trying to draw a heart. Now its going to duplicate like that. Obviously we could probably do a better heart. So I'm going to do something like this. I'm not the greatest hard to draw r in the world, but now we're going to have one side over here, one side over here, and they are exactly perfect. So there's a lot of use cases with this. You can let your imagination run with you and kinda do a lot of things with this. You could add shapes to it. If we were to go and draw this shape here, it's gonna show up there. If we were to go and put some texts on this side of the screen, we could write mirror, turn size down some. Let's do 50, for example, meter. Or as you can see, this is the mirrored version, so you can't really read the text because it's in the wrong location. But point being, there's a ton of things you could possibly do with this. So that's pretty much how you can create some exactly symmetrical shapes. It's a neat little trick, but I don't really find myself using it that often. There's not really that many cases in which are really going to want something to be exactly symmetrical. But if there is, this is a great way to do it. So with that being said, I hope you guys did get some value out of this lesson and I will catch you guys in the next one. 25. Complex Shapes: Welcome back. Where in this lesson we're gonna be working with complex shapes and essentially trying to create our own shapes that are not available by default. So we did a little bit of this in the smiley face project, but we're gonna take it a little bit farther and go through some of the more advanced options. So to start out, I'm going to do something like a tear drop. So in order to create a teardrop, we can just use the teardrop tool. So if we were to do this and I'm gonna change the color to something, maybe a yellow, that looks pretty good. And I'm going to take the stroke off of this since I don't really want one. So let's say we'd like this, but we want the inside to be transparent. There's kind of two ways we could do this. So technically we could change the color itself to this background color, or just a plain white and then put a stroke on it of what we just used and increase the size of that stroke up. And now we've got this, but if you look, we've got some rounding on the edges. And that's because strokes pretty much always are just going to add a filter to it. And it's always going to create some rounding. Let's say we wanted that to be sharp. You could technically cheating in this example, you could just put a triangle up here. But generally that's not going to be the best way to do this. Especially when it comes to more complex things that's not gonna work. So in order to do this, what we're gonna do is turn this back to transparent on that and we'll change the color back. And what we're gonna do is go ahead and click Duplicate over here, and we'll click paste. Now we've got another one. We'll get rid of the stroke and we will change the color to maybe blue for example, it will probably work on a good lets do a purple. Looks good. And what I'm gonna do is go ahead and hold Shift and kinda downsizes sum. So let's say that's how big we want it to be. I think that looks pretty nice and centered. What we're gonna do is click both of these. And if we go up here, we're going to see this button called X4, XOR. And if we click this, we're going to see that it takes away that inner part and now we have ourselves a transparent shape. And more importantly, if we look up here at the top, we're going to see that we have a straight edge at the top. So little bit better job than what the outside stroke and enter transparent would've done. Now for the next shape, let's say we want it to circles, but we wanted them to kind of be very similar where we can actually do. I'm gonna go and duplicate these instead. And I'm gonna move this over. Let's say we wanted this to be our shape, but we wanted these to be kind of together and almost merged as one where we can do select both of them, go up here, click Add, and now they're going to be added together as one shape. Pretty simple and easy, but just going to teach us what a lot of these buttons up here do. So that's the add button. Let's go and delete that. And now let's say we want a circle. So, but we want, for example, maybe an x cut out or maybe we want a t cut out, whatever may be. We could actually even do say, a square and we could do an X. I think that actually might turn out to be even better. So what we'll do is go up there. And one thing we can do is grab the Rectangle tool yet again and create two rectangles. We could also draw an X with our text. I'm not gonna do that because I think all fonts are different and usually it doesn't turn out great when you do that. But, and I'm gonna make our original shapes. That purple that we just had. Somewhere around there is going to look out pretty good. And let's say we want this much. And Let's say that looks pretty good. And now let's go over here and let's duplicate this yet again. So we get another one of these. And I'm going to hold shift as I turn this so we get a perfect turn. And I'm going to enable snapping that we, we hopefully get an exact that looks pretty good. Let's make sure this is perfect as well. I think that right there is perfect. Now what we're gonna do is hold all of these. And we're gonna go up here and we're gonna click divide. So when we do that, you're gonna see a lot of different shapes show up. And what divide essentially does is cuts the whole image up into every little intersecting piece. So I unselect now we can see that this is a separate piece. We can see that as I separate piece, we can see that this little square in the middle of the day, separate piece, separate piece, separate piece, separate piece, separate piece, separate piece. So pretty much everything is now a separate piece. So let's say we wanted to get rid of just these. Let's say we have a weird-looking logo and this is our logo that we needed to design. All of a sudden you can cut out those inner parts and now you've got a cool logo. Maybe you wanna take the inner part out, or maybe you just wanted to get rid of that X in the middle in the first place. Now you've got your Foursquare's. Obviously with the Foursquare's, you could have just drawn out four squares, but there's also another way to do that. It just kinda depends on what you wanna do, what your goal is. If you wanted to recreate this write here exact, we can actually go ahead and delete that and we'll draw another square. And like we talked about in the Banner Project, we could actually take these. Let's make sure these are snapped into place. We'll duplicate this and we will hold Shift, turn this around. Perfect. Make sure it's all centered up. That's probably pretty good. And now what we can do is just hold all of these. And we can go up here and click subtract. And it's gonna take all of those out of this. And now these are all going to be part of one, but it's going to subtract those purple ones from the orange. But we've pretty much already covered subtract within the banner one. But just a quick little recap on that. Next up we can use the intersect button. And what that's essentially going to do is cut everything out that isn't part of the intersect. So if we click that, we're going to see that the only thing left in this particular image is the square in the middle. If we were to hold all of them, impress, intersect, it's going to be the same way. So that's pretty much all of these buttons up here. We've got add, subtract, intersect at x4 and divide. They're all pretty useful and come in handy, especially when you're doing a lot of cartoon based art, like you might for YouTube videos or animated videos or anything like that. These are gonna come in handy quite a bit. So I hope you guys did get some value out of this, and I'll catch you guys in the next lesson. 26. Creating Icons: Our guys. So in this lesson we're gonna be making some icons. So to start out, we're gonna make a little heart icons. And I think it's important to mention that there are a lot of icons over here included in the software in terms of assets of your iOS, icons are gonna be here. So if we look, I've got I phone x tabs. This is all provided because a lot of work like that. It's going to be used for Instagram things that go on a phone. So a lot of this will help out with some of that. But in terms of making our own icons, they're actually pretty easy to do and I have a lot of cases. So we're gonna start off by making a heart icon. So I'm gonna go ahead and put a stroke of nothing on this. And I'm going to fill it with something along the lines of this color. I think that looks pretty good. Let's go little dark right there. That looks pretty good. And I'm going to hold shift on the circle tool will pull this out. And you know what, I'll make this a little bigger just so we could see it. There's no point in not. So we'll just make this huge. Next we can go over here to our tools and we can find the heart creator. And we can pull out a heart by default, it's gonna be kind of a wide hard. I'm gonna make this a little bit more right about there. And I'm gonna grab this and we'll turn this enzyme probably about this size is what I'm thinking. And we gotta make sure this is centered up. Right there looks to be centered. Will fill this with a white. Or you could go slightly underway at something like right there. I think I'm gonna extend it just a little bit this way. It looks pretty good. And we'll do that. Now. Obviously this is kind of done. You could use this, but I like to add a little shadow on these. And the way I generally do that is to grab the rectangle tool. We'll just draw out some random rectangle. It doesn't really matter. And I'm gonna put a fill on this and we're gonna put a gradient, but we're going to put one side being pretty much transparent. So on this side we're going to put it at right at 0. And then on this side we're going to put kind of a darker color, still kind of transparent. So we'll go about midway and we will change the opacity to pretty low. So probably in the 45 range. And now we've got a little bit of our shadow and we can adjust this later, but I'm gonna go ahead and produce the size. We'll turn it some. And we'll do this extended down to here. And we'll increase it up to here. And now, if we pull this behind our heart, we're gonna see that we have a little bit of a shadow coming off this. Now obviously this isn't the greatest shadow in the world. And I think it's because we should go a little bit darker on this side. In fact, maybe all the way dark. Yeah, I think that looks better. Lastly, I think we need to go over here and we will change the opacity up SOM, and we'll change the color. Pretty much completely dark. Now will change the opacity down to 0. So there isn't much of a colour effect all the way on this side, but it will change some of our midpoint areas. But now if you look, we have a little bit of an issue with the corners. So what I like to do here is usually zoom in quite a bit. And we will go ahead and convert this to curves. Grab our node tool. And we can just add a node right here. Pull this up there. Pull this up to here. And same thing on this side. You can add a note about where it's going to turn and where we want it to be. And we pull this one in. And that looks to be pretty good right there. Last order of business is to go ahead and pull this underneath here so that it's going to stop right there and create pretty much I clipping mask and there is your heart to logo. I think that turned out pretty well. We could actually turn the fill on this side it down some, maybe go with a pasty of 35%. I might make it look a little better. And I mean, you can play around with this however much you want, but I think that looks pretty good and you can take this even further. So let's do say, let's go ahead and pull this outside of here and we'll redo this will change the color to say a gray. Something maybe about there. And then we'll go ahead and delete our heart and we'll grab our gear tools. So let's say we wanted to make a gear logo. It's actually called the COG tool, but I would personally call it a gear. And we can go ahead and fill this with something pretty dark, not incredibly dark though something around there. It looks pretty good. Go and move it, center it up. I want to reduce the size just a little bit, centered it up there. And now we're going to want to go ahead and adjust our curves yet again here, so we kinda decide where we want it. We're going to want it somewhere in the middle right here. So what we're probably going to want to do is leave it right about there and we'll grab a node tool. And what I'm gonna do is go ahead and pull this up here. And we want to straighten this out right about there. And we want to straighten this out. And we'll go ahead and pull this node all the way up to this next part. And as you can see, that looks pretty decent. You could obviously spend more time on it like normal. And one thing I would do is actually take this and go ahead and add a node here and pull this up under there. So the center is still the same color as the outside over here. And then if we go ahead and pull this under the ellipse, it'll give us that clipping mass so it doesn't overflow like we just add. And boom, you've got yourself a COG or gear logo. Lastly, and this is going to be one of the more advanced ones, but we're gonna make a pencil tool logos. So I'm gonna go ahead and just go ahead and delete this clips here. We'll keep our original eclipse, but this time I'm gonna make it probably a yellow or so somewhere right in there. And this is gonna take a little bit more work. So we're gonna go and grab this tool and we'll make it white. And we will draw part of our body out. And then we will duplicate this. And we will duplicate this one more time. Make sure they are pretty much equal. So if we look at the distance between these two, it's going to tell us that right, there is 20. We want the difference on this side to be 20 as well. So I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of snapping on the top. We'll zoom in and we want this difference to be right at 20. So I'm actually gonna enable snapping yet again. So I'm gonna go down here to the transformer and I'm gonna change this to 50 to one. And that should be good right there, that if I did the math right, that should be an executive 20 in-between each one. Now we can grab all of these together, but I'm up here. Rotate them, hold, shift, rotate. Do that. Now we've got a little bit of this going on, but now we need the end of the pencil, so this is kind of our handle. And for the end of the pencil we need a triangle. So we'll go and grab our triangle tool. And I'll just draw out a random triangle grabber Move tool. And we will turn this around while holding shift. Hopefully got should be right at perfect. And we'll go ahead and zoom in on this. And what I'm actually gonna do is go ahead and turn all of this back. That way we have horizontal as our viewpoint. So I'm going to turn all this back like so. And now we can see just how perfect or imperfect This is. So if I go ahead and turn this up here, see that snaps right there. Make sure this is snapped on there. And I think what I'm actually gonna do is go ahead and increase or decrease the distance between these two, about ten. So that's ten on that side and ten on that side. And we want the distance here to be ten as well. Ideally. That's pretty close, close enough for horse shoes and whatever the other term is, I guess it's horseshoes and grenades. Close enough, horseshoes and grenades. So now we've got a little bit of a pencil, but we gotta make our lead. So we're going to do something that we just learned. We're going to duplicate this yet again. Turn down the size, a ton, somethin party about. They're decreasing even more. Right there looks pretty good. And what we'll do is select both of these and then we will click subtract. And that's going to pull out that from there. And as we can see, this is looking pretty good. So this is our lead at the bottom, and this is the rest of our pencil body. Now we're gonna go ahead and grab all of this. We will hold shift and turn it hopefully to probably right there. And then we will extend the size. We zoom out. That's our pencil logo, but now we need our drop shadow that we had previously. So we're gonna grab all of this yet again, I'm going to move it a little bit more Center are not there. Now I'm going to grab the Rectangle tool yet again, I'm going to draw a random rectangle. We will change the fill to a gradient and we'll put black on this odd transparent on this side. It's to 0. Change a color up some, just so we have a little bit more of that going on there. And now let's go over here and we'll change our transparency down to say 35 or so. Might be good. Let's do 30. And if we grab our Move Tool, hold shift, and let's take a look. So I think what we wanna do is put it all the way up here. So I'm going to disable snapping and zoom in on these edges. That looks good right there. We could probably zoom in a little bit more and get it perfect if we want to spend more time on, it. Looks good right there, that's perfect. And let's zoom out on this side. And we will go over here. And we're going to go ahead and extend this all the way over here. Now what we're gonna do is go and grab our node tool, convert to curves. And what we wanna do is ideally get this all the way included. For this all the way up size we can. And then we will turn this node down to about there. And let's zoom up here some more. Make sure this is pretty much perfect. So we're going to want this to be a little bit lower. This is the one spot that you kinda have to worry about and put a lot of detail into just because it does end up making a difference. So that looks pretty good, close enough. You're not gonna be able to notice it when you're looking really, really far away if it's not exactly perfect. And now all we have to do is go ahead and move this up under here. So a, so that we create a clipping mask on this right there. And that is our pencil logo. So I will say I do notice when I just said we probably wouldn't notice. I didn't notice it a little bit right in here. So we're gonna go ahead and change this around just a little bit. And we'll grab this curve. I'm going to zoom in quite a bit, right there. And right here. And I'm gonna zoom in some more. Hopefully, we can get this right about perfect. Let's still awesome. That looks to be about as close as we're going to be able to get this one. And we'll zoom in up here. Make sure this is perfect right in there. Yep. So we do need to do a little bit of work here. Make sure it's perfect. I did say this one was going to be a little bit more complex. I think that might be about as good as we're gonna get it. I'm gonna move the node a little closer. Hopefully we can get an, a slightly better, right? They're still not still, isn't it? I think that looks pretty good about as good as we're going to be able to get it here, especially with a time constraint. And lastly, one more thing. We need to check all the way down here in this corner. We kind of need this to be exact on this corner as well. So I want to enable snapping for this one, it might work out well force. Yes, sir. Right there. Perfect. Now if we zoom out, we have ourselves a pencil logo. So I hope you guys did get some value out of this lesson to show you guys how you can make some basic look and logos at some backdrops to and make them look a little nicer. Obviously, this can be a little better. In fact, I think if we cut the opacity down just a little bit, maybe 50% total in the whole layer. We're going to look better. Yeah, having that looks better, honest, we could probably do 30% of the whole thing and would probably still look better. Yeah, that looks pretty good to me. So that's how you guys can make some basic logos. So with all that being said, I will catch you guys in the next lesson where we're going to be creating a cartoon image. So with that being said, thank you guys for checking this lesson out, I'll see you there. 27. Creating a Cartoon Helicopter: Welcome back. We're in this lesson we are going to be creating a cartoon, helicopters. So I've provided a reference file here in the reference file section of the course documents. So if you go and click that and add it into your file, we can go ahead and shrink this down. So I've shrunk this down some so that we can look at it, but it's also not going to be in our way. And you might be thinking, how are we going to create this helicopter in Affinity Designer? I actually just got done creating it in Affinity Designer. So it's a 100% possible, a 100% doable didn't take me incredibly long. We will probably do a little bit more of a botched aversion in this because I don't want to spend too much time working on it, but if you guys want to spend more time on it, making it better, making it perfect, then you are at 100% Welcome and recommended to do so. So to start out, we're going to create just a rectangle. So I'm gonna go ahead and change it the filled to the same color we have down here. And I'm gonna go and create a rectangle. So now that we've got the rectangle, we're gonna need to kind of convert it into this whole shape we have going on here. So in order to do that, I'm going to shrink this down some we're going to start at the bottom. And I'm gonna go and click convert to curves. We're gonna grab our node tool first. What I'm gonna do is go ahead and add a node here, and we're going to extend this up here. Then I add yet another node. We'll extend this up to here. I'm not another node really close. I get just a little bit tighter and higher up. Then we'll add yet another node. We're going to pull this one all the way back. And then I'm actually going to go ahead and delete this node and we're going to pull this one in. So now we kinda got the front, but we need to use the corner tool, kind of smooth out a lot of this stuff so we can go and actually delete this node that way we can extend this. So we're actually gonna grab our node tool and extend this one out because we're going to need to use the corner tool to shrink it n sum, so that's a little flat on the top like this. Then we're gonna grab our node tool and we're going to pull this part up like so. And we're going to pull this up some, a little bit as well. Move this note out. Looks decent, but I think we need to shrink in on this and get rid of this little rift here. So we'll know, focus it more in the center and we'll shrink it out some like so. That looks pretty good. And if you look, we have a little bit more of a gap there. So we're going to add a node here. So once we add this up sum, we are going to pull this up SOM, and we're going to pull this up psalm. Then we're going to grab our corner tool to use on this. Were we willing to flatten this out? So now we have a little bit of a problem. We need this extended part right here. So what we're gonna do, go out and create yet another rectangle like so. And we're gonna pull this out, SOM this direction. That looks pretty good. And we'll grab our node tool. And now we need to kind of extend this back farther from the front. So we'll extend this out. It looks like we need to create yet another node here. So we'll do that. Creates set node will move that node back SOM. And we'll move this in some like so. Now we can. Pull this n sum. So now we kind of got this going. Like I said, we're going to be doing a fast version of this. Just so we save some time. So it's not going to be the best helicopter in the world. Definitely not as good as my original one, but we'll extend this out some, some more. So now the body is kinda coming along, but we need a little curve here. So we're going to create a triangle over here so that we can create this back part. And we are going to grab our moved tool. We'll extend it to roughly right about here. And now we are going to convert this to curves as well. Click our node tool, pull this up. And now we're gonna grab our corner tool. Corner this out. Looking pretty good. It doesn't really matter what we do up top cause we are going to cover it up with the propeller. And it's looking like for the most part, we pretty much have our body done. It's definitely more narrow than our original. So we may need to do something there. I think we can grab our Move tool and just kind of extended out. Some might work pretty well. That looks to be pretty good. Yeah, I think that looks good. So now we're gonna go and start working on this propeller. So if we grab our original helicopter image, I'm gonna move it up here closer so we can look at this propeller. And what I did here was basically if we take this original curve back here, once we put this above here, what we can do is grab our square tool. And we can just draw something like this and will change the fill to, I guess we'll just copy the colors we used in the original one. So once we've copied that, we can do that. Then we're going to nest this underneath the curve that gives us our shadow. But we still need the Note tool so that we can convert this and nodes and go ahead and add something like this. And we'll grab our Move tool to this. That looks pretty decent. I think we need something like that and that looks pretty good. I think we could make it a little better. I'm going to grab this, and we're going to grab this node out here and pull it in sum. That looks pretty good. Next up we need to make the propeller. So obviously the centerpiece is pretty easy. Should be a solid black. And we'll just draw out a circle hold shift. A little too big right there. That should be pretty good right there. Now we need to create these propellers. So in order to do that, we're just going to grab a rectangle. We converted the curves, grab our node tool. And we're going to add a block and layer and add a block here. And we will increase this like so. And that's pretty much our propeller. Very quick version, really simple and easy to make. So we should probably make it a little smaller before we go ahead and duplicate it. And that looks good right there. And now we'll just go ahead and duplicate this yet again. Hold Shift, turned it up. That looks good. Duplicate it yet again. Hold Shift, turn it this way and grab it yet again. Duplicate hold, Shift. And boom, that looks pretty good. I will say this needs to be moved over a little bit. I think that looks pretty good, especially for how quickly did it. Now what we can do is hold, Shift, grab all these layers, turn them a little bit so they're not like looking so straight and perfect. We don't really want that. And it actually looks like our direction in terms of our propellers are different from the original one. Not a big deal. We'd actually grab all of these and right click and hit Transform right here. And I think if we flip them horizontally, they will flip the correct direction. Yep, they did so well, shift in terms of this way. And button that looks like our original perturb right there. Looks all good to go. You could have add more effects. You could add like a reflection right here, make it look better, but we're not going to waste some time on that right now. I'm gonna go on hold Shift group. All of these really want to make sure you are practicing very good house-keeping in terms of a lot of these things because they're not going to work out well and they're going to be difficult to work with if you do it in any other way. Now in terms of this knows we gotta kinda shadow on this nose as well as a lot of the chopper. So what we're gonna do is go ahead and grab something like a round corner here. And we will move this up like so. And we're going to nest this under here, and we're going to change the fill to something along these lines. But looks pretty good. Now we need to grab another rectangle. Do the same thing all the way back to here. We will throw it under here. It's going to nest under there, give us a clipping mask. And lastly, we need to do it yet again. This time though we have a different shape in here. So we're going to have to do it on both of these. So we're gonna take yet another rectangle and we will just turn it like so. And we'll turn it up here like this. But it needs to be nested under here. And if we do that, that looks pretty good. On thing we may want to do though, is go ahead and grab it, converted the curves. Grab our node tool. And we will just take this node tool and kinda turn it in like so. And then we'll grab my move tool. Do this. Looks pretty good, but now we kind of needed to go across this whole thing. So what we'll do is just go ahead and grab yet another rectangle. But this time we need the nested under here. So we'll just draw out a big old rectangle. And we will turn it with the move tool to match this. So it looks pretty good. And we will nested underneath here. And then we still need this little piece right here. So we'll honestly just duplicate this rectangle. And we will nested underneath the triangle. And if you look at nested underneath there, coloring that. So the helicopter is starting to come together. I'm gonna move this down here. And now we need to do our landing gear. So this is going to be pretty simple. All we need to do is create yet another layer right here. We'll put it underneath here. And we'll draw a small little triangle with a black Phil. And something like this, not triangle, a rectangle. And we'll turn it just a little bit like that. Do that. And let's grab a circle. And we put that right there. I'm going to disable snapping on this just because I don't want to be able to be a little bit free-flowing and how I do it. Now we've got our landing gear on layer one will just duplicate this right-click transform. We will flip horizontally and move it under here. Like so will enable snapping. Make sure it's pretty much good to go. I looks good right there. Always move it up just a little bit for effect. That looks good in terms of the landing gear. What we will do though if you look our on our original, our wheel is back some more. So we'll move the back wheel back some like so. Now we've got the top of the helicopter up here. So we're gonna go up here and we'll grab yet another rectangle. Go and twirl this back up. And we wanna create a new layer up under here. So we want it to be like so. And we kind of wanted to go kinda high. And then we'll grab a rounded one that we can put like this. That looks pretty good. And we need yet another one to go with. The propellers are going to attach to it. So we'll just do that like that. Now we need the propeller, so we'll grab another one of these lots of shapes being used in here. And originally in order to get the curve, what I did was basically take the node tool and just kind of converted the curves and just move this enzyme like so, and move this up some like so. So that looks pretty good. And we need to grab this will skim it up some just so it's a little smaller. And we will rotate it a little bit to where we can really use it. That looks pretty good right there. And now we will transform, Flip Horizontally. And it looks like it's a little too long. So what we're gonna do is make this one shorter. And we will duplicate this. Yet again. We'll delete this one and we'll go grab the original one and we will duplicate this. Now if we bring it over here, click a transform, and I click Horizontally. That looks pretty good. It could definitely be better, but I think it looks pretty good for right now. And now the last thing we have to do is just add some windows and add this little exhaust vent. So exhaust vent is going to be pretty simple. All we're gonna do is go and grab this and we're gonna make it the color that it's already at down there. And that way, we don't really have to focus on colors right now. So we'll make it about this big. And we'll move this down. If we look at gotten nested under here, we can just throw it all the way to the top. It doesn't really matter. And then we need yet another one. This time it needs to be darker. We just draw that however we want and we'll make this, I have something around this level and we will nest it under here. Looks pretty good. And I'm going to grab that yet again. Move back some. So that looks pretty good. We got our exhaust. And lastly, all we need are our windows. So we need to go and find the body image, which is right here. And we will go ahead and grab yet another rounded rectangle tool. And this time we will just kinda draw it out like this. And we don't really want it to be that black will make it somewhere in this range. Now looks pretty good. And we can grab it yet again. Turn it up, turn it up. And we'll extend it out some like so. I think that looks pretty decent, especially for our quick we're doing this will go up again. We will just copy this, paste it. And we'll grab, this, will make this one a little bit smaller. And obviously our bodies a little bit more narrow. So we might just do one window on this one. So we'll copy this and add one window in the back. I guess this is only a two or three seater helicopter, so we'll shrink this down and boom, that is pretty much a helicopter. Obviously, it's not the same as the original one. I think the original and looks a little better. But I did spend more time on it than I did on this one. And we're actually missing one more color at the back here. We're not actually missing it, but we made a mistake. We put that rectangle above it. So if we move this up, now we've got our color Schon and through right there, much better. So that's how you're going to create a cartoon based looking images. It's not that hard, but as you can tell, it does take a little bit of time and it's a tedious process. So I hope you guys did learn something from this. If you guys did follow along in this section, feel free to post them in the discussion part of the class. I would love to see what you guys got done. And I will catch you guys in the next lesson. 28. Creating Isometric Designs: Are you guys? So in this lesson we are going to be creating an isometric design. So as you can see, I have a cube here made up by these three rectangles. And in order to do that, we're going to have to use the isometric tools. So I'm just gonna go ahead and delete this. We don't really need it. And what we're gonna do is go up here to view studio, and we're gonna go and grab the isometric and it's gonna show up like this. First we're gonna start off by clicking the grid section. And we want to click show grid. And it really doesn't matter for the most part, spacing. If you wanted to be more detailed, you could zoom out. If you want to be less detail, you could zoom in. For this. We don't really need it to be detailed, so we're going to be on the middle section right in here. And we're gonna go and click close. And that should pretty much be fine for what we're doing in this lesson. So as you can see, we have these three planes and if you look, these grids are going to change based on each one. So what we're gonna do is go ahead and draw a regular square, just about like that should be fun. And what we're gonna do is click Fit to plane. So it's going to fit to being the top. And we can click the side and we can draw another one. We can click Fit to plain. And it's going to flip it that way. And then we can draw another one and click it into the front end. Click Fit to plane. At which point now we just need our Move tool and we just need to put these all together. It's pretty simple, quick, and easy. In fact, what I'm actually gonna do is kinda put it about right, there should be pretty good. And we'll move this one up to where it fits. Roughly perfect. Aim, this one end. And boom, that is R cube, pretty simple. Now lastly, what we need to do is add a little bit of color. So I'm kind of imagining the top would be a little light. The front would be a little darker, but still kind of light. And the back is going to be much darker, something like this, maybe kinda how I imagined it. And if you want to get rid of the isometric grid, all you have to do is go up here and it makes sure you don't have grid showing. Not too difficult, not a big deal. Just make sure isometric is selected here before you try to do anything, it should pop up by default. But if it's not working for some reason, make sure isometric is popped up there. So with that being said, that's how you guys can create a 3D cube in Affinity Designer. So in the next section we're going to do a little bit of a project with the isometric and that is pretty much going to be the end of the course. So if you guys could leave a review, that would be fantastic. I just want to remind you guys one more time. Helps me out a ton and I'll catch you guys in the project. 29. Creating A 3D Computer: So in this lesson, I highly recommend that you guys follow along and do it on your own that way you guys can learn it. But at the end of the day there is no project files to follow along with. We're gonna be doing this completely from scratch. So what we're gonna be doing is creating a laptop. So what we need to do in order to create a 3D laptop, while the top is the top, it's actually really going to be the bottom of the laptop. In the side is going to be the screen. We'd always use the front if we were trying to put the screen in the opposite direction. But what we're gonna do is go ahead and draw top. And I'm going to make just a rectangle that I like. And I'm gonna make this gray or maybe we'll make it a slight black, something along these lines, I guess. Probably OK, let's do it a little wider so that in this range looks decent. Then what we're gonna do is click Fit to plane like before. Next we're gonna go to side and we are going to draw yet another one. It doesn't really matter, will adjust it once we've got everything fit two plane. So we're gonna go ahead and click Fit the plane. Now what we need to do, since we are working in this plane, is kinda set the laptop up so we need to make it look right. Let me go ahead and reduce this all the way down. And we are going to make the screen a little smaller, a little bit more reasonably sized. And we will extend this out. Make sure you have snapping on. It's a lifesaver when it comes down to doing isometric things. So if we look that didn't exactly snap, right? That looks good right there. And we'll bring this keyboard and where it makes sense. So roughly should be about the same size, but not all laptops are exact equal. That should be pretty good. But now what I'm gonna do is go ahead and color the background. So I'm going to take a square and we're going to color the whole background. And we're gonna make this guess. We'll make it something pink, I guess works honestly. And we'll make it a little bit more of a dull pink, something, something here looks good. We'll go ahead and bring this down below this. Oops. So I, once it's down here, this is going to be our background. I'm gonna change the color a little bit. It's a little hard to work with that. Let's do, let's do something like purple. That looks good. So as you can see, now, we just need to create this. But I will say, I think we made a mistake when it comes down to the keyboard. I don't think it's the same size. It definitely doesn't look entirely right. So what I'm actually gonna do is go ahead and click the lead on this. And I'm gonna go over here, click Duplicate. And we can bring this out. And if we look, we can just convert this to top and click Fit to plane. Remember the top is really our bottom. And as you can see, it's still not lining up perfectly, but we'll do that and I think that's going to turn out better now we need to change the color. So I think I'm gonna go for a MacBook designed just for the purpose of teaching this, just because it's going to be white and we knew black keys and I think it's just going to look better. So we're gonna change the filled something. Maybe right in there. I think we should change this and do something running that color that looks pretty good. And we'll change the other one. Just by grabbing our fill tool, will grab this and click right here. And now the whole keyboard is this direction. And to start off, we're gonna be working in the sides. We're going to click current, plain clicks side. And what I'm gonna do is go ahead and duplicate this. And I'm gonna change the color to roughly a black because this is going to turn out to be our screen. So we are going to hold shift and decrease the size of this. Since we're working in the same plane, it should stay roughly the Same shape, like so, but this is a cartoon, laptops. I think we should make it a little bit bigger. Something in this neighborhood. Center it up right there. And now we need to grab our corner tools. So this is going to be a great reminder of a lot of the different tools that are available. And this is just a corner tool. So what I'm gonna do, which move out these corners a little bit. That looks kind of good. If you paid attention, I reduced at this corner less than some of the corners that are in your face just because those are going to be more so what you're really seeing, where's the other ones? If you look for my FAR and at the angle that we're looking at it, they're not gonna have that kind of look. Next, what we need to do is actually turn the corners on the top of the laptop as well because they don't exactly look right. So these over here are going to be done much more than the one on this side, right? This should probably be done. Even more. Probably something like right there looks okay. Something about it just doesn't look entirely right. But I think it looks fine for right now we're not trying to do anything crazy good. So that looks pretty decent. Now we need to do the keyboard and the mouse pad. So we're gonna zoom in some. And as you can see, we have this little line here. This is going to be our kind of divider or the hinge of the laptop. So what I'm gonna do is grab this and remember we're working on the top section for this. So we're going to draw this out and click Fit the plane. Whoops, Control Z that, and we'll drag this under here. This is going to be our mousepad. So we will call it and make it small, something reasonable. And we wanted to roughly be in the middle. It looks like that's good. And we're going to put this over top. So first off, I'm going to do some quick changing around up here. That looks pretty good. And now when you change the color of this to ideally something pretty close. But I think we want to grab this color, get a sync it up and then we wanna make it a little darker. Maybe lighter. I don't play around with color first, second, see if we could find something that looks good. So I guess that means that looks okay. Could definitely be better, but we are trying to do this a little quick here, so I don't take up too much you guys this time. And if you look, we did make a little bit of a mistake here. We'd never did the corners on the bottom of the keyboard. So let's grab a corner tool and we'll pull these corners out, some pull this one in more. That looks pretty good. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. And we probably need to adjust these corners just slightly. So we want them to be looking like they are corners. Because as we all know from a MacBook, they pretty much all have this rounded edge if they're, especially if they're older ones. I know that 2010 or so one's definitely have a nice rounded edge. I think we went a little too far on this one, so I'm gonna reduce a little bit. That looks OK. And luckily, when it comes down to a MacBook, especially in a cartoon design, this is gonna be just fine how it is, because we don't really need to change anything about it. And there's no clickers or anything like that. If we were obviously working with, say, a Windows PC or something, there might be two clickers at the top or something like that, but that is not the case here. So I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna move this back some Make that a little bit. Better, I think that looks pretty good. And lastly, we just need to do the keys. And luckily, because like I said, this is a cartoon design, we'd only have to do incredibly good keys. They don't have to be perfect and then only you have to have any kind of text on them. So we're going to do something kinda like that. And we'll throw, we've got enough stroke on it already, but we'll throw a black on it. I guess. I imagined most keys are blight most of the time. And we're gonna click Fit to plane on this. And that's looking pretty good. And we got it above our curve down here. And we can just leave that right there. And now what we're gonna do is go ahead and duplicate this. Pull it out some. And we'll duplicate it again. And I'm gonna Control Z that because we can actually use the power duplicated here. So we'll just keep on click and duplicate. And I'm gonna use the duplicate it like this. So I'm gonna have all the top ones duplicated the same way. We need to add one more, two more, maybe. It looks okay. Now what I'm gonna do is grab through all of these and we're going to center them up a little better. So within right about there. So I'm kind of imagining these to be a little bit of the number part. So we're going to control g. All of these put them in a group of their own. And now we're gonna do is just go ahead and duplicate the whole group, move them down. But it's somewhere right around in here on a normal keyboard, you're going to have a shift bar and some different sized keys. So for that, we are going to duplicate this yet again. But this time we're going to start working inside of duplication a little bit. So we're going to open up the group and we're going to grab this key and we're going to delete this key, and we're going to turn this key longer, like so should be roughly good there and we need to do the top one as well. So we're going to delete the one in front of it. And we're gonna take this one and we are going to push it out some like so. Then we have yet another one. We're going to duplicate this the same way. We're going to add a little bit more variety into this one as well though. So this is roughly where shift keys are. So we're gonna make these really long. So we're gonna duplicate this. And we are going to delete this one. This make those a little bit longer. We're going to grab this one, delete it, and move this one a little bit longer. And it looks like maybe this one could be a little bit shorter. That looks OK right there. And lastly, we just need to duplicate this whole group one more time. This time we're going to delete a bunch of stuff and we're going to create the space bar. That looks good roughly. And we are going to open the group up. And what we're gonna do is shrink this won't back some, move, this one over some of this one over sum. And we're going to shrink this one back 6m. Alright, there, it looks pretty good. We'll do that and we'll move this over sum, the sum over sum. So I think we want about three keys. And then we need to delete this one, this one. And we need to expand this one and we'll see how that looks. Look off. So I think for the purpose of a cartoon, when will we will go ahead? And in this case, since it is the last row, will go into leet one more of these, Center, the spacebar up a little bit more. And we will move this one over some like so. Obviously do this however you want. I think this is going to look best. Move this and lower sum right there, like that. But we have a little bit of a mistake in the fact that there's a lot of space in between the keys and the little mouse pad here. So quick little fix. We can extend the mouse pad up a little bit because I think it should be a little bit bigger than it was. So what we can do is hold, shift and grab all the keys. And they're a little higher up. So what we're gonna do is just move them back. Like so. That looks good. And what we can do is actually reduce the size of this a little bit. And then we'll grab this and this with this n. And lastly, for the purpose of this, the new MacBook has a nice screen up here. So what we'll do is go ahead and draw us a nice square out. And we'll put it up top, doesn't really matter. And we'll click Fifth plane. And we will go Remove tool, put it right here. And we need to make it look like a screened somehow. So what I'm gonna do to do that is probably just put a grey on it. Something cute. We could just do that or we could even honestly, we could just do something like this color, maybe we did that and then we could go to effects and we could probably put some kind of effect on this MOOC, but three D on it. That makes it look a little bit more like screen. Let's see if we could put an outer glow, wanted to make it look good. Let's turn our Gulotta like red. And I'll send the radius up and we'll make the color of the globe, I guess blue looks okay. And lastly, we should probably change the color a little bit so we'll make it a little blue itself, something like that. So I guess that sort of looks like a screen. It could definitely be better, but that is going to be our laptop that we just designed using 3D isometric shapes within Affinity Designer. So I hope you guys did follow along a little bit of an intro to some of the very, very advanced and complex things you can do with the software. Not incredibly useful for me. I just about never find myself using something like this, but it is possible. Do. Lastly, we wanna click the grid settings and you can cut off show grid. We can turn this into an actual usable file. Now, one thing I might want do is reduce the size of the screen. Some Mike a little bit better. Grab these two together and we can move it down some like that. I might look good. We could also drag of both of these out some. So if we wanted to grab a node tool, we could see how this is going to look if we were to track both of these out and drag this one in. Yeah, so I think that looks a little bit better like that. We could add some Hindus here, we could add more details if you want it. But for the purpose of this, I think you guys pretty much learned everything that you need to learn in order to do this. Because spend more time on the details if you want. But I'm not going to that way. If you guys don't want to waste a bunch of your time, you don't have to. So with that being said, thank you guys for checking out this lesson. This is the last lesson in the course. So I hope you guys did get some value and stay tuned for the thank you video. At the end it is the next video. I'm gonna be giving you guys some special things, I guess, and just giving you a big thank you. So I'll catch you guys in the thank you. Video. 30. Ending and Thank You: Ok guys, so you've finished the course Now let's talk about what's next, as well as some additional help. Obviously this is an essential scores, so we mostly talked about the basics. However, we did cover some of the more advanced things towards the end of the course. But when it comes to Affinity Designer, a lot of the things you're going to want to focus on, the things you're going to get good at are the very things we already talked about. You're just gonna wanna go out and get more experience. So there's plenty of resources out there on the internet where you guys can get some more additional help when it comes down to say using the pen tool, for example, it's quite difficult to do. And it's really just going to take some experience as well as more pointers and more advice and things like that to help you out when it comes down to stuff like the pen tool, isometric designs, those can get really complicated as well as a very, very detailed graphics. If we look, this was actually created in Affinity Designer. Now, we haven't talked about anything like this or even done anything close to this. So if you are trying to get into a lot of vector art and things like that, you're definitely going to want to continue to brush up on your skills and further your knowledge in order to create some amazing things like that image. On the flip side, if you want to get more into logos, icons, and more basic types of designs, then you can really get into more of the details, the nitty-gritty figuring out your style, whether you want to be very basic or if you want to add some more details like reflections and shadows and things like that, or a lot of nitty-gritty little things. Obviously the icons we focused on were very basic. The only thing we pretty much did was a shadow. Whoever, if you look at this, for example, you could also make this in Affinity Designer. This is gonna take much more time as it is much more complex, but it is a much better looking image than some of the very basic things you could do in five or ten minutes. On the flip side, if you wanted to get into more pixel art and more editing pictures that have already been taken like photography based pictures and things like that. And you can definitely get into the brush aspect a whole lot more. You can get into shadows. You could get into kind of creating a lot of those things from default. I'm pretty terrible it things like that. So I don't personally have the skillset to do a lot of that, especially when it comes down to very detailed things. But, you know, if you are looking into getting into photography and you want to be able to edit your photos a little better with Affinity Designer then, you know, that might be where you want to go, the brush avenue and the color avenues. But with that being said, if I can't help you guys in any way, shape, form, or fashion, or you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. I try to respond to pretty much everything I see. That way I can give you guys continued support. So thank you guys again for checking out the course. Be sure to check out some of my other courses. And with all that being said, I will catch you guys next time.