Affinity Designer for Beginners | Updated for Version 2

1. Class Introduction: Want to learn Affinity Designer, then this is for you. Today, I'm excited to announce my brand new course, Affinity Designer for beginners. This course has been designed for complete beginners. Even if you've never used Affinity Designer before, you'll still be able to easily follow along with these tutorials. We'll start off by learning the foundational skills of Affinity Designer. After watching just the first few lessons of the course, you'll already know how to make simple pieces of art. But we won't stop at just the basics. After you learn the foundational skills of affinity, we'll build on that foundation as we learn how to use Affinity's most important tools, allowing you to create even more interesting designs. You're going to learn so many great affinity skills in this course. But we're not just going to learn what a bunch of random buttons do. With every new tool that you learn about, we're going to see how that tool works in the real world by completing a start to finish project together. We'll make this fun little guy to review the shape tools that we learn about. Then later on, we'll make this camp poster to review text tools and layer effects. Further into the course, we'll put our paintbrush skills to the test as we make this delicious ice cream. Everything in this course builds on each other so that you can quickly improve your affinity skills. At the very end of the course, we'll take everything that you've learned and put it all together to complete three final projects. These projects are the perfect way to solidify everything that you've learned throughout the course and just look at them. They're beautiful. By the time you finish these projects, you'll feel totally prepared to make beautiful designs all on your own. But before we dive into affinity, I want to mention that this course comes with a few example files that we'll be using throughout the course. I encourage you to download and use them because practicing what you learn is the best way to retain all of the new skills that you'll be learning. You can download those files in the next lesson, and then you're ready to begin your journey to becoming an affinity designer master. Let's get started. 2. Download the Class Files: Before you begin this class, I recommend you download the exercise files. These files will be necessary for you to follow along with the tutorials. To do this, you first need to come to the project and Resources tab. Then click on the download link. The exercise files will then be downloaded to your computer and you'll be totally prepared to follow along with the rest of the class. 3. Affinity Designer Overview: This chapter, we're going to learn the foundational skills of affinity designer. We'll start from the very beginning and work our way up to completing a simple design together. Let's get started. 4. New Documents, Saving, Exporting: Welcome to Affinity Designer. When you first open up this amazing program, your screen is going to look something like this. Now, I know there's a lot going on here, but don't be intimidated. We're going to take it nice and slow as we go throughout this course, and in no time, you'll totally understand everything that you see here. To start off in this video, I'm going to teach you how to open up a brand new document, how to save your work, and how to export it. Let's go ahead and get started and create a new document. Go ahead and come on up here to the top of the screen, press on file, and then new. This dialogue box will pop up and this just gives you lots of different options you can use to customize the sizing of your document. Over here, you can scroll through this list and see that we have quite a few different sizes that you could choose. But personally, I like to just come over here and manually put in the size that I want. Start customizing. I like to come over here to where it says page width and page height. Now you can see a preview right over here for the dimensions. But if you want to change these, all you need to do is click in this box, and then you can type in any number you want, then press Enter, and you can see it update right here. Here we have a nice vertical facing document. I'll just go ahead and choose a larger number, and now you can see it's more horizontal. It's super easy to change up those dimensions. But so far, I've been working in pixels. If you want to change the document units to something a little more understandable and concrete, you can go ahead and change it to inches or millimeters, centimeters, any of these here. Then once you've updated that, you can go over here and change that number. I'm just going to stick to pixels, and that's how you customize the size. Now there's a few other things you can customize. This was just the layout section. If you come over here to color, you can change the color format. Now this is a little confusing, but just know that RGB works in most cases. The only time you wouldn't want to use RGB is if you're going to take this design to a commercial printer. For example, let's say you're going to go to a business and have them print off 1,000 business cards. In that case, you want to use CMYK. But for most other cases, if you're going to share your work online or if you're going to print it on your home printer, go ahead and use RGB. One last setting that you can change in the color area is you can check on transparent background. By default, you will have a white background, but you can check this on and the background magically disappears. This can be pretty useful for some designs. Go ahead and check that on if you want. I'll go ahead and turn that off. Now we have three last sections here, margin bleed and scale. These sections have more advanced settings that we're not going to get into for this course. But I did want to point out that if you ever see blue lines appear here on your document, that's margin. Go into margin and make sure include margins is turned off. If it's turned on, you'll be able to see blue lines surrounding your document, and those will still be there after you've created your document. They work like guides for placing things in your document. I'm just going to turn that off. Let's go back to layout. I'm going to use the same page width and height throughout this course. I'm going to type in 1,500 here. For the height, I'm going to use 100. This is just a dimension that looks nice on my computer screen. Feel free to change this up however you want. But I'm just going to keep using this exact same size, so you can do the same if you'd like. Once everything set up exactly perfectly, you can go ahead and press Create. Congratulations. You just did something in affinity designer. We now have our beautiful new document. Throughout the rest of this course, we're going to learn how to create beautiful designs in your documents. But for now, I just want to keep it simple so that we can practice saving and exporting our work. I'm just going to for demonstration purposes, make a really quick design. With this new design, I'm going to save this work. Saving and exporting your work in affinity is pretty similar to most other programs, this should feel pretty natural to you. All you need to do is come up to the top of the screen to file, and then you can press on Save as Then you can go where you want to save your file. You can give it a name. Okay. And then you can press save. This will save your file as an affinity designer file on your computer, which means at any time, you can go ahead and go back to it and open it up and continue working. If you want to do that, all you need to do is go to the top of the screen to file, and then open. Now you can see here's where we have our practice file. All you would need to do is select it and then press open. Now, I already have it open, so my screen didn't change. But if you just barely opened the program and then opened it, this is what your screen would look like after that. Let's say that you keep working on your design. You move some things around, maybe you change some colors, and you like how this looks. Actually, I don't like that color. Let's see. There we go. Let's say you do like how this looks, and you want to save your work. Since this is already saved as an affinity file, all I need to do is go to file and then press save. As a quick side note, if you go to file and then open. This is also how you can open any of the exercise files throughout this course. Just go into one of the folders, click on the file you want to open, and then press open. Saving your work is great if you want to come back to your work later on. But what if you're done with your design and you want to share this finished work with someone else? Well, in that case, it's time to export. Go ahead and come to the top. Click on file, and then click on Export. Similar to creating a new document. This dialog box will pop up and has some settings you can change. I generally don't like to change the settings. I think the defaults are perfect. But if for some reason, you want to change the file type, you can change it right up here. Now, just so you know, PNG is a pretty commonly used file type for designer files, and this works really well. I personally suggest you just stick to this. But if you do want to change it, this is where you can do that. All you need to do now is press port. You can give your file a name and then save it. After you've exported your PNG, you can now share your beautiful design with anyone you want. That's the very basics of how to start a brand new design, how to save your work, and how to export your finished product. Great work. Now that we know these very basics, in the next video, we're ready to learn about the affinity designer workspace. 5. Affinity Designer's Workspace: Let's learn all about Affinity Designers workspace. There are five main areas in Affinity Designer. We have our main document workspace in the center. All of our tools are on the left side. We have studio panels on the right side. We have a toolbar at the very top underneath that, we have a context tool bar. Now, this document workspace in the very center is pretty straightforward. It's where we'll work on our design. But in this video, I want to take a closer look at the other four areas. Over here, we have all of our amazing tools. We'll learn more about how to use these tools as we go throughout this course, and a lot of these tools have their own video dedicated to them. But right now, I just want to highlight one important concept, and that is that each tool comes with different settings that you can modify. Now, these settings will be found in the context toolbar right up here. As I click on each of these tools, you can see that these settings change because each of these tools have different settings that go along with them. Because this tool bar changes based on the context of the situation. It's called the context toolbar, right above that, we have our permanent toolbar. Now these buttons never change, and we'll learn more about a few of these buttons later on in the course. Now I want to spend some time talking about the studio panels over here. Each of these panels can be accessed by clicking on the name of the panel. There are three different rows here, this top row, this one, and this bottom row. Now, there are actually over 20 different panels and affinity designer, and they all offer a wide range of functionality. But you might be thinking there aren't 20 panels here and you're right. That's because most of the time, you won't need most of the panels. By default, affinity hides some of the lesser used panels. Actually throughout this course, we won't even need all of the panels that are out here by default. Let me show you how to set up your panels the way I like to because personally, I like a cleaner simpler workspace with only the panels that I actually use. Let's remove a few of the panels. To do that, all you need to do is drag on its name. Once it's dragged out here, all you need to do is click on the x to remove it, and just like that, it's gone. The only panels that we'll need in this course are these top panels here, which are color swatches, stroke, and appearance, and we'll also need the layers panel. But other than that, I'm going to click and drag to remove all of the other panels, even these bottom panels down here. This is how I like to have my panels set up, but you might be wondering, how can I get these panels back? If you ever want to access any of these panels again, all you need to do is go to the top of the screen to window. Then down here, we have a list of all of the panels in Affinity Designer to add a panel back in. All you need to do is click on its name. Now you can use the panel from here, or if you wanted to, you could click and drag it to add it back where it was before. I'll just remove that again. If you want to get everything set up back to how it was originally, all you need to do is go to Window, Studio, reset Studio. To make following along with me easier as we go through this course, I suggest that you change your panels the way I just did, and once you've done that, I'll go ahead and join you in the next video. 6. Mac vs. PC: This video, let's talk about Mac versus PC computers. Now before we get too far into this course, I just want to mention that I'm working on a Mac. If you're working on a PC, affinity designer will look ever so slightly different for you. For example, in the last video when we were closing panels, the x to close the panel is on the left side for a MAC, but the x is actually on the right side for a PC. Now, that's just a small difference. The biggest difference is actually with keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are something that I love, and we're actually going to be using them as we go throughout this course. If you're on a Mac computer, you'll often need to press the keys command or option to use the shortcuts in affinity. These buttons are right next to the space bar on your keyboard, if you're on a PC, you'll use control or these buttons are also right next to your space bar. Command on a Mac is the same thing as control on a PC, and Option on a Mac is the same thing as Alt on a PC. Just to make sure that everyone can follow along. Throughout this whole course, I'll say the key for both operating systems. I'll say something like press command or control zero. Meaning that you'll press command and zero if you're on a Mac or control and zero, if you're on a PC. This will be important to know as we start using keyboard shortcuts in the next lesson. I wish that the keys were the same for both computers, so I wouldn't have to do this. Hopefully, this isn't too confusing for you. But now that we have that out of the way, let's continue on with the course. 7. Navigating in Affinity Designer: Let's learn how to navigate around an affinity designer. For demonstration purposes, I included this fun file in the exercise files of the course, and you can download those in the first chapter. Then once you have them downloaded, all you need to do to open it, if you remember, is come to the top of the screen to file, and then press on open. Once you have this file open, you can go ahead and follow along with me. As I teach you how to move around in a document. First, if you're using a track pad, this works just as expected. Just move your fingers to zoom in and move your fingers to zoom out. Once you're zoomed in, you can use two fingers to move around your document. But what if you're not using a track pad? If you're using a mouse instead, that's no problem at all. But there are a few keyboard shortcuts that you should probably keep in mind for zooming in and out. The first one is zooming in. You can zoom into a document by pressing command or control plus. Once you're zoomed in, you can click and hold on the space bar and you'll see this little hand appear. Then you can click and drag to move around your document to zoom out. All you need to do is press Command or Control minus. Or if you want to completely zoom back out, press Command or Control zero. Even though I'm using a track pad. I like to use command or control zero quite a bit, just to zoom all the way back out and see the entire document again. I find the shortcut very useful. If you're using a mouse that has a mouse wheel on it, you can actually use that wheel to zoom in and out. That could save you some time if you don't want to use the keyboard shortcuts. But if you want to do that, you'll need to change your settings. The first thing you need to do is get the move tool out, press escape on your keyboard to make sure that you don't have any of your layers selected, and then click on where it says preferences. With that opened, go ahead and go down to tools, and then check on. Use mouse wheel to zoom. Now you should be able to use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out. That was just a quick video on how to navigate around and designer. In the next video, we're going to talk about layers. 8. Introduction to Layers: This video, let's learn about layers. This simple design that you see here was included in the exercise files, and we'll actually be using this document throughout the next few videos. Here you can see we have a few shapes. Each of these shapes is its own layer, and you can see that over here in our layers panel. We have a layer for the circle, the triangle, and so on. Each of these layers stacks on top of each other like pieces of paper. If I take this really large rectangle and put it on top of all of the other layers, you can see that now it covers everything up. I'll go ahead and bring that back underneath. That's how you can easily re arrange layers and decide what goes on top. You can also turn off layers if you want to by clicking on the little circle that's next to them. Now you can see we still have that circle layer, but it's just invisible. I'll go ahead and turn it back on. If you wanted to completely get rid of a layer, just have it selected and then press delete on your keyboard. Or you could have the layer selected, and then you could press on this trash can down here. But I actually want to bring those back. I'm going to use a keyboard shortcut to bring them back to use this shortcut. All you need to do is press command or Control Z. Command or Control Z is a super useful shortcut. It lets you undo your previous action. I personally find myself using this all the time. It's easy to make a lot of mistakes as you're working with designs, but command or control really comes in handy to undo any of those. Let's say you don't want to completely get rid of a layer by deleting it, but you do want to make it less visible. In that case, you can reduce the visibility of a layer by using opacity. Just click on this arrow here to bring up this slider. Now as I lower this slider, you can see the circle becomes less and less visible. You may have noticed as I was sliding that, that the circle was getting less visible, but we also have this blue bounding box around it, which makes it a little difficult to see what's happening. If you ever want to look at your layer without that bounding box, all you need to do is press escape on your keyboard to remove that bounding box. This will deselect all of your layers. You could also click anywhere outside of your document here. And that will make it so you're not selecting any of your layers. Another thing that you can do with your layers is you can give them names, you might be wondering why you'd want to do this. But later on, when you start making designs with dozens or even hundreds of layers, naming your layers can be really useful for keeping things straight. I'll go ahead and rename this bottom layer. I'll go ahead and double click on the layer, and then I can type in any name that I want. Okay. Then I'll press enter. Now that layer has been renamed. In addition to renaming your layers. You can also change the size of them. To do that, come up here to this hamburger menu. Then you can choose the size of the thumbnails that you're using. If you want to see your layers better, maybe you want to use large thumbnails. Or if you know you're going to have a lot of layers, maybe using small layers could be more helpful. For this course, I'm just going to keep medium thumbnails, but I thought that I would show you what that looks like. As one last tip, I want to demonstrate using the move tool with your layers. Now we'll learn more about the move tool later on in this chapter. But for now, just know that using this black arrow tool helps you to move things around in your document. All you need to do is select your object, and then you can go ahead and move it around. If you don't want to accidentally move a layer, say you accidentally move your background and that makes you angry. All you need to do is lock your layer in place. Go ahead and select your layer and then press on this lock icon. Now you won't be able to move it if you ever want to unlock it again, just go ahead and press on this lock. If you want to move multiple objects at the same time, here's how you do that. Select one of your layers, and then while holding Shift, go ahead and select your other layers, and now you can go ahead and move those all at the same time. You could also do this from the layers panel. Select one layer, and then while holding Shift, select this yellow square. You can see that while I was holding Shift, this top layer and all the layers in between the bottom layer, were all selected at once. You could also use a different keyboard key. You could hold down command or control to select multiple layers, even if they're not right next to each other. Selecting multiple objects like this can be tedious. If you want to keep moving the same thing around though, the solution, grouping. Keep this document open for the next video, where we'll learn all about layer groups. 9. Layer Groups: Let's learn about layer groups. Groups, allow us to keep our layers panel organized by grouping layers together. Once layers are grouped together, they also act as a single object that you can move around all at once. To group layers together. All you need to do is select the layers that you want to group. I'm going to go ahead and select this first layer, and then while holding Shift, I'll select the yellow square. With all of those shapes selected, I'm going to put them in a group by pressing command or control G. Now you can see over here, we have one layer called group. This group behaves as one layer. We can go ahead and turn it on and off all at once, and we can also move it around. But what if you want to work with one of the individual layers again? Can you still do that? Yes, you can. Let's go over here and click on this arrow. This will drop open your group, and now you can see every layer that's a part of the group. Once this group is opened, you can go ahead and click on the layer that you wanted to move, and then you can move it around. Once one of the layers inside of the group is selected, you can just click on any of the other layers directly in the document and move them around as well. However, if I click on an area outside of the document so that nothing is selected. Then I go back to click on an object in the group. This will select the whole group. But a neat trick is that if you do this, nothing selected, and then you want to select this shape here. All you need to do is double click. Now you have that shape selected and you can quickly select the other shapes again. Back over here in the layers panel. You can move layers outside of the group if you don't want them to be a part of the group anymore. All you need to do is click and drag on the layer and then place it so that you can see this blue line on top of the group layer, then you can release, and now it's no longer a part of this group. Or if you don't want to group at all, just select this group layer, right click on it, and then you can come down here to where it says on group. Now we no longer have a group anymore, and all of our layers are on their own just like before. Groups are so useful because you will have lots of layers while making designs and they make working with objects in your design much easier. Go ahead and keep this document open. We'll keep using it as we learn more about the move tool in the next video. 10. Introduction to the Move Tool: Let's learn about the move tool. We've used the move tool a little bit already, but the move tool is the most used tool in affinity designer. Let's learn a little bit more about this awesome little tool. First, though, I'm going to delete this circle and the square just so I can work with one shape at a time as I demonstrate this tool. The main job of the move tool is to move things around. You've already seen this, but I want to show you a few more fancy features of the move tool. The first one is that if you're moving a shape and then you hold down shift, I'll go ahead and move the shape in a straight line from where you started. Go ahead and move your shape and then hold shift, and it'll lock back to where it started. You can also resize things with the move tool by using these nodes here. I'll go ahead and click and drag and you can see how we can resize the shape. But if you wanted to stay proportional, you can hold down shift. This will lock it into its original shape. You can also rotate shapes using this node up here. Just click and drag on this one, and you can move your shape all around. If you want to lock it into 15 degree increments, you can hold down shift. This is pretty useful if you want a 90 degree angle or you want it to be completely turned upside down. You might have noticed that with everything I just showed you, we hold down shift to keep our movements more structured. Shift is like a super short cut, and you'll use it quite a bit. Using shift tells affinity that we want to snap our object to certain dimensions or movements. While shift is a super great shortcut to pull out when you need it, affinity actually has a built in snapping feature that will snap your shapes to your document. You might have noticed that when you move your shape, Sometimes these lines appear. These lines are snapping lines, and they help you to center your object or even line it up with the edge of your document. This can be really helpful most of the time. But if you ever want to move your object more freely, you can actually turn snapping off. All you need to do is come up to the toolbar and click on this magnet icon. Now I can move the object more freely and it won't snap to anything. But if you do want to snap again, you can just click on that magnet and snap your shape wherever you want. That was a lot of snapping talk, but the move tool can do much more. A really fancy trick with the move tool is that it can actually duplicate objects. The way to do this is you need to hold down command or control on your keyboard. Then click and drag on your shape. Notice how each of these triangles become their own layer. Now you know a lot more about the move tool and it's many shortcuts. We're going to be using it a lot throughout the course. Make sure you practice a few of these shortcuts and in the next video, we're going to learn about shapes. Now to prepare for this shape section, let's delete these triangles so that you can learn how to make your own shapes in the next lesson. 11. Introduction to Shapes: Let's learn about shapes. Affinity designer comes with many pre built shapes by default over here, we have the rectangle tool, we have the Ellipse tool, which you can use to make circles, and we have the rounded rectangle tool. I'm going to go ahead and select the rectangle tool. To make a rectangle, all you need to do is click and drag to make the shape. You can also hold down shift if you want to make a perfect square with this rectangle tool. That's pretty easy to go over here and select one of these shapes. I'm actually going to delete this rectangle though, because I want to show you where affinity hides all of its other pre built shape tools. You see this little gray triangle next to the rounded rectangle tool. That's actually a special secret drop down menu. If you click on that little triangle, you can open up all of these other shapes that you can use. I'll go ahead and select the trapezoid tool. Then I can go ahead and click and drag and now you can see that we have a whole new shape. This trapezoid is great in all, but wouldn't it be nice if we could tweak the way it looks. Luckily, affinity gives us so many options to adjust the shapes, even these pre built shapes. In fact, almost all of the shapes in affinity designer come with extra settings that you can modify and these settings are right up here in the context tool bar. For example, the trapezoid has a left point and a right point. You can adjust this percentage to change the angles of your trapezoid. If you wanted to, though, you could actually just click and drag on the orange nodes that you see on the shape. Let's go ahead and practice another example so that I can show you a few more tricks. I'll go ahead and press Delete on my keyboard to get rid of that. Let's go ahead and grab another tool. I'll click on that gray triangle again. This time, I'll go ahead and select the donut tool delicious. I'm going to click and drag and then hold Shift. You can see we have a perfect donut shape. Up here in the context toolbar, we have quite a few different options that we can change. As a little sneaky shortcut, you can actually just click and drag over the name here, and this will increase or decrease the radius of this hole in the middle. This is called scrubby sliders, and you can actually do this with so many of the different options in the context toolbar, as well as the opacity over here. If I click and drag on the word opacity, we can quickly change the opacity. I like using scrubby sliders because I find they save time and I just think they're cool. Go ahead and do that to adjust this radius if you want. We have a few other different things we can adjust up here like the start angle, the end angle, the overall angle. Honestly, sometimes these get a little confusing to me with all their different names, but it's pretty easy to see these orange nodes here that we can go ahead and click and drag to make a custom shape. Each shape comes with these unique settings that you can modify. By using the context toolbar to get more exact measurements or just using the orange nodes, you can customize any of these shapes however you want, which is so useful. As a final tip, I want to teach you a way that you can easily move and resize your shapes. We already know that you can use the move tool to resize and position the shapes. But if you're careful, you can actually move and resize the shapes with the shape tool still out. Just be careful to click on the right area. What I look for here is I wait for my cursor to change into this arrow shape. Now I can go ahead and adjust the size. Once my cursor changes into this little cross hair arrow icon here, you can click and drag to move your shape around. But if you're not careful and click outside before your cursor changes, you'll just create another shape. That's everything I wanted to show you about shapes. We'll be working with shapes a lot throughout this course, we'll definitely get plenty of practice using all of these tips. For now, let's move on to the next video where we'll learn about color. 12. Introduction to Color: Let's learn about color. I'm going to use this exercise vile again. Go ahead and reopen that, or you can just practice and create these shapes on your own. The specific colors don't really matter. I just want to use these shapes to demonstrate all of the different ways we can change color. Every shape in affinity designer actually has two colors. It has a fill color and a stroke color. The fill color is what you can see right here. It's the shapes main color or the color that fills the center of the shape. The stroke is the color of the shapes outline. If we click on this triangle here, we can actually see both of these colors up here in the color panel. Right now, we have the fill color represented by this circle here, and you can see that this color matches. Right here, we can see the stroke color. Now, right now, it's a white circle with a red cross through it, and that actually means that no color is applied to choose the fill or stroke color. All you need to do is click on one of these circles, then to change the color. All you need to do is come over here to the color wheel, and you can drag on this outer circle to change the hue. That's pretty easy to change the fill color. Next, let's go ahead and give the stroke a color. I want the stroke to be white. I'm going to use the center circle here, and I'm just going to drag it toward the white corner of this triangle. Now you can barely see the stroke on that triangle. Let's make it bigger with some tools like the move tool. You can actually change the stroke right up here. You can see we have the fill and stroke colors right next to that, we have this long line here. If I click on that, you can see we have quite a few settings here that will go over more later. But the main one that affects us right now is the width. If I click on this to increase it, you can see our stroke gets bigger. You can use this feature when the move tools out. But if you have any of the other tools out, you can actually adjust the stroke from the stroke panel right here. Just click on it and you can adjust the width here as well. The stroke panel and this panel up here are the exact same with the exact same settings. Just use whichever one is more convenient to you. Back in the color panel. You can press on this little circle here with the cross through it to remove one of the colors. If I click on this, you can see that just like before, we no longer have a stroke applied to the triangle. I can also do this with the fill to remove the fill color. I'm going to click on the stroke again and I'm going to give it a white color. Now you can see we have this cool outline effect here. With the color panel, you can use the color wheel like I've been using, or you can use sliders if you want to. Just come up to the Hamburger menu here, and then you can click on Sliders. Then you can use these sliders to adjust the color. But wait, why isn't the color changing? We can see that the color circle is changing, but the triangle is still white. Well, it looks like I deselected the triangle at one point. Now since that layer isn't selected, the color isn't changing. This actually happens to me quite a bit. I forget to have the right layer selected. If this ever happens to you, just make sure you have your right layer selected and then whatever you're trying to change should work just fine. I'll go ahead and click on that triangle, and now you can see that the colors are working again. Personally, I really don't like these sliders. They are a little confusing to me. I prefer to use the color wheel. I'll go ahead and change that back, but feel free to use the sliders if that's easier for you. In addition, you might notice that I have a triangle here. I'm not sure if this is the default or not. You might have a square instead. If that's the case, you can always go up to the hamburger menu and change it to a triangle. That might make it easier to follow along with me since that's what I'll be using throughout the course. So far we've talked about changing the fill and the stroke color. But I want to get a little more in detail with how to use this color wheel. I'm going to select the yellow square, and I'm going to select its fill color so that we can change that color. The reason I really like using the color wheel is because you can easily change the hue from this outer ring, and then you can pick a shade of that color from inside the triangle. I'm going to change the hue by using this outer circle here. Let's go with a nice green color. Then you can change the hue using this inner circle. If you have this all the way close to this outer circle. This is the most saturated version of this color. If you bring it to one of these other points, you can see that now we have pure white or we can click over here and make it pure black. If I drag it in between pure white and pure black, we'll have some gray color. If I drag it between pure white and the saturated color, we get a light shade of that color. If we drag it between the saturated and darkest points, we'll just get a nice dark version of that color. Of course, we have everything in between if we drag in the middle of the triangle. I love the flexibility of using the color wheel. It might not be the most accurate way to get the perfect color, but personally, I like this more free form way of choosing colors. My last tip for you is to always double check whether you're working on the fill or stroke of an object. It's a very common mistake to think that you're working on the fill color. When you actually have the stroke color selected, and if you have a very thin stroke applied to your shape, it might look like nothing's happening. That's just something to be aware of. It's important to make sure you always have the right layer selected, and it's always important to make sure you have the right stroke or fill selected. With that, we're done with this video. Now you know a lot more about how to change the colors of your shapes. In the next video, we're going to use a brand new exercise file to learn all about child layers. 13. Child Layers: This video, we're going to talk about child layers. Before we do our first practice project in the next video, I just have one last important thing about layers to show you and that's child layers. Child layers are a special layer that lets you put one layer inside of another layer. This means that the child layer will only be visible where the parent layer is visible. I'll show you this, I'll go ahead and use the move tool to move this circle inside of this other circle. To make this layer a child layer to the bigger circle. All you need to do is click and drag on the child layer and place it on top of the parent layer. Once you release your cursor, you can see that now that circle is only visible where the parent layer is visible. This works like groups. If I open this up, you can see that we have our main layer and the child layer. There's still two separate layers, but now they're connected. Once you have layers in this parent child relationship, you can use the move tool to move and resize the entire group at the same time. If you want to move where the child is placed within that, all you need to do is select that child layers layer, and now you can freely move that layer around. This is similar to objects that are in a group. If we have nothing selected and then we click, the parent layer will be selected. But if we double click, you can select that child layer. In addition to making this parent child relationship with our layers, we can actually give a ch layer a child layer of its own. I'm going to make the smaller circle a child layer to our other circle. To do that, I'm going to click on its layer, and then I'm going to drag it so that it's on top of the other child layer. Once I release my mouse, it looks like this object has disappeared. But that's actually because it's only visible, where its parent is visible. All I need to do is move this, where its parent layer is. Now you can see that we have a multigenerational family here, we can move this whole group as one. Or you can click inside to move the group around. You can double click again to move the smallest child layer here. Just like with layer groups, at any time, we can take a child layer out of a group. I'll select the smallest circle here and I'll move it on top of everything. Now you can freely move that outside of the parent child relationship. It might not really seem like it now, but child layers are actually very useful in a lot of different cases, and you'll see that as we go through some of the projects in this course. Now you know all of the basic tools in affinity designer. In the next video, we're ready to make our first project. 14. Mountain Practice Project: His video, we're going to bring together everything that we've learned so far in this course, and we're going to make this cute little mountain design. Now, this might look a little advanced, but you actually already have the tools you need to put this together. Let's get started. First, let's make a new document. I'll come up to the top of the screen two file, and then I'll press new. I'm going to use the page width at 1,500 and the page height at 1,100, and then I'll go ahead and press Create. With this document made, let's start by making a background. I like to use the rectangle tool to give our background a nice color. I'll go ahead and select that tool, and then I'll click and drag to make a rectangle that's large enough to fill the whole space. Now, we're going to make a sunset design here. I'm going to go with orange tones, but feel free to choose any colors that you want. You could do purples and blues or anything like that if you want to. But I'm going to go ahead and make mine a nice soft orange color. Since this is a background layer, I'm going to go ahead and press the lock icon to lock it in place so that I don't accidentally move it. With our background in place, let's start making some of our mountains. To make the mountains. I'm going to come over here and click on this little gray triangle. Then I'm going to select the triangle tool. I'll click and drag to make my first mountain. Now, right now, it's the same color as the background. That's not very good. I want to be able to see what I'm doing. I'm going to choose a light gray color for our mountain. The next thing I want to do to make this look even more like a mountain is I'm going to give it a little snowy cap up here. Now, this is where you can get a little bit creative with your shapes. You could use a circle to do this or any of these other rounded shapes to give it a rounded look, or you could even use the star tool if you wanted your snow to be a little bit more spiky. I'm going to use the tear tool. I'll click and drag to create a tear shape. Then I'm going to make it white. Then to make it so that it's only visible where the mountain is visible. I'm going to make it a child layer. But first, I'm going to go ahead and grab the move tool. With snapping turned on, I'm going to make sure that this is centered to our mountain right here. With that tear drop centered, now I'm going to make it a child layer. I'll drag on this layer and bring it on top of our mountain. Now you can see that you can only see the snowy peak where our mountain is, which is very nice. To make this look a little bit more dimensional, I think this will look nice if this mountain had a shadow. Let's make one. I'm going to grab the rectangle tool. Then I'm going to click and drag a rectangle so that it's covering half of the mountain. I'll make sure that this is right in the center of the mountain. Then I'll make this rectangle black. I don't want this to be outside of the mountain. I'm going to make it a child layer to our mountain. I'll click and drag this on top of that. Then I want to make this layer a little bit less visible so that we can still see some of the snow. I'm going to lower the opacity. With that rectangle layer selected, I'm going to just click and drag over the word opacity. Now you can choose how dark or light you want the shadow to be. Okay. Now I'm going to grab the move tool and I'll select our mountain. Now you can see we can move our mountain wherever we want. We can make it larger or smaller. We can even adjust the height of it if we want it to be a little bit more short. And I'm going to go ahead and center that in the document. Using the move tool, we can easily make more mountains. All we need to do is hold down command or control, and then click and drag on the mountain to make a little friend for it. I want to make a couple of mountains in the background. I'm going to go ahead and shrink the size down so that it appears behind our first mountain. I'm going to go ahead and drag this so that it's beneath the other mountain group. Now you can see in our document, it's behind that first mountain. I'll go ahead and select this background mountain and let's duplicate this one. I'll press command or control. Then I'll click and drag and place this one over here. Again, we can adjust the size of it. We can make it a little more skinny if we wanted to just so that they don't look all perfectly even. This makes it look slightly more realistic, I think. Now we can reposition them however we want. I think we're actually done with the mountain part of this project. The next thing I want to do is I want to set the scene and make it look like it's sunset. I want to add a sun behind these mountains. To create our sun, I'm going to use the Ellipse tool. Now, we actually haven't used this tool yet, but it works pretty similarly to the rectangle tool. I'm going to click and drag and then I'm going to press down shift to make this a perfect circle. Then I'll go ahead and tuck this behind the mountains here. I'll bring the layer behind the mountains as well. Now we can give it a nice sunset color. I think I want to give it more of a red color, but I don't want it to be that bright. I'm going to click and drag on this circle here, and I'm just going to pull it back a little bit to desaturate it. Now we can go ahead and adjust where it's positioned if we want to. We can make it a little lower, like that. But I want to keep it centered. The very last thing I want to do is I want to create some clouds just to add a little bit more going on in the sky. There are a lot of ways to make cloud shapes. You can make very big fluffy clouds or a little bit more simple clouds. I think for this video, I'm going to keep it simple, and I'm going to come over here to our tools. I'll open up our shapes, and I'm going to use the rounded rectangle tool to make our clouds. I'll start by clicking and dragging a rounded rectangle. Then to make the edges more rounded. I'm going to click on this orange node here and I'm going to bring it in all the way as far as it can go. Now you can see we have a very rounded rectangle here. The next thing I'm going to do is I want to choose a color for these clouds. I think white clouds would look nice, but I think just to give it a little bit more interest, I'm going to pull it over ever so slightly to give it a slight tint. Now, this looks a little pink right now. I think I want to pull it over more toward orange so that it just looks a little bit peachy. I think that looks pretty nice, a very nice soft cloud. Now that I have this base shape, I can create clouds with it. I'm going to press on the move tool. Then we can go ahead and adjust the size however we want. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to press command or control to duplicate this layer, and then I'm going to place it like that to give a cloud shape up here. I'll hold down command or control to continue to duplicate it. Just as a tip, when you're duplicating something like this, make sure that you hold down command or control first, click and drag. Then lift up on your mouse before you release command or control. If you duplicate something, but then lift up on command or control before you stop, you'll just move your shape. That's just one little tip for you. In fact, since we're duplicating so many clouds, I would suggest just keep holding down command or control the entire time. Don't even lift it up until you're done duplicating. I really like these clouds. I just think I want to place this one right here behind the mountain. I'm going to find its layer over here in the layers panel. Then I'm going to click and drag to place it behind our mountain. I think this looks pretty cool. I think I'll just make a couple of adjustments to our clouds. Okay. I think this is looking really nice. At this point, we have quite a few layers over here. If you wanted to, you could group some of these clouds together. For example, these two layers are one cloud, but there are separate layers right now. I'm going to hold down shift to select both of those layers, and then I'll press command or control G to group them together. I'll just do that just to clean up our layers. It's good practice just to make sure that all your layers are nice and organized so that it's easy to go back and see what all of your layers are. At this point, I think I really like the placement of everything. If you wanted to at this point, you could go back and change any of the colors that you want. I just want to share one little trick with you. You can actually recolor all of the layers in a group if you have the group selected. For example, I have this cloud group selected. I could make both of these layers, any color that I want. I'll just undo that. I just wanted to show you that it's very easy to recolor everything that's in its own group. With that, we're done. Great work on completing this first chapter of the course and this very first project. It's so exciting to see everything that you've already learned and how it can all work together to create a beautiful design. Now in the next chapter, we're going to learn a few more powerful tools that Affinity Designer has, which allows us to create even more types of designs. 15. Curves for Beginners: Far in this course, we've already seen that affinity comes with some amazing pre built shapes. But in this chapter, we're going to learn all about curves. Curves allow you to make custom shapes that look however you want, simply by connecting dots together. It's actually pretty cool. Let's get started. 16. Pen Tool for Beginners: Let's learn about the Pen tool. You can find the pen tool right over here. Go ahead and select that we can get started learning about this powerful tool. Now this tool can be a little tricky for new users, but we're going to keep it nice and simple in this course. With knowing just a few of the basics of the pen tool, plus good knowledge of shapes that we learned about in the last chapter, you really can create amazing art. Let's start off using the pen tool and polygon mode, which you can find right up here. Polygon mode allows you to lay down points to create your shape, and all of these points will be in a straight line. These points that you see are called nodes, and we'll be working more with that in the next video. But for now, just click to lay down a few points. Then to close your shape, just click on your first point. Once you have a closed shape, you can give it a fill and a stroke. Come on over here to the color panel. Let's start with the fill. I'll go ahead and give that a nice color. For the stroke, it looks like it's already black. That seems pretty good. But I'll just come over here to the stroke panel, and let's increase the width. There we go. Changing the fill and stroke works pretty similarly to the other shape tools that we've already seen. Once you have your shape all made like this, you can go ahead and grab the move tool and you can move the shape however you want. You can re size it, move it around. This is pretty much just like any of the other shapes at this point. I'm going to go ahead and delete this. So that we can have a clean work space for the next pen tool mode that I'm going to show you. Go ahead and grab the pen tool again. This time, we're going to work in smart mode right here. This is pretty similar, but now instead of straight lines, we'll be making curved lines. Again, you can click on the first point to close up your shape. The pen tool is drawing the outline of the shape, which we already learned is called the stroke, Affinity will always keep the same stroke settings that we set on the last shape that we drew. You can see that we still have that thick black stroke. But if you did want to give it a fill, you would have to come over here and choose a color for that. I'll go ahead and give this fall for now. Now I want to show you a couple of tips and tricks that you can use with the pen tool. We already know that you can close your shape by clicking on your first point again. But if you ever don't want to close your shape, and you just want a line. All you need to do to finish your shape is press escape on your keyboard. This will end your shape and now you can go ahead and edit the stroke and move it around with a move tool, however you want. I'll go ahead and change the strokes color on the shape just to show you that. Getting the pen tool back out. I want to show you a couple other things you can do with the pen tool. The first thing you can do is you can turn on rubber band mode, which I find to be pretty helpful. Rubber band mode will give you a preview. You can see right here, this blue line that shows you what your line will look like, once you've laid down your point. You can see here, we're seeing that a new curve will be added. And we can see how that curve will be affected where we lay down that point. This can be pretty useful. I personally like using rubber band mode. I think it's pretty nice. Another thing you can do is you can actually change modes mid shape. So far we've been in smart mode doing our curved lines, but you can go ahead and change it to polygon mode, and now you'll be working with straight lines. And if you're in polygon mode, you can hold down shift to lock your line at a 90 degree angle or straight up and down or a 45 degree angle. That can be pretty useful if you ever want perfectly straight lines. I'll go ahead and close the shape. Then I want to show you how you can modify your shape. You can modify all of these different nodes by using the node tool, which you can find right up here. Using the node tool, you can click and drag on any of these points at any time to change the way that the shape looks. You can do other things with this tool too, but we're going to learn more about the node tool in the next video. Go ahead and create a few shapes on your own and then keep this document open for the next video. Okay. 17. Node Tool: Let's learn about the node tool. In this video, I want to show you how to use the node tool. Make sure that you have a few shapes drawn up here so that we can manipulate some of their points or nodes. I'll go ahead and grab the node tool, and then we can get started learning a few of these extra features that the node tool has. You already saw that you can click and drag on any of the nodes to adjust where they're positioned. If you want to, just like moving any of your shapes around, you can hold down shift, and then you can click and drag and you can see that your node will only move in a straight line. In addition to moving the nodes around, you can actually click and drag on a line in between the two nodes, and you can move the line that way. If you just single click on one of the lines, you can add a node, and then you can go ahead and move that node around. In addition to moving and adding nodes. You can also select nodes and then delete them by selecting it and then pressing delete on your keyboard. With the node tool out, you can also use the context toolbar to convert your nodes. For example, maybe you want this node to be more of a straight angle instead of this curved node here. I use smart mode to make this node, but we can actually convert this to a sharp node right up here. Now you can see that that node is nice and squared off. And you can do the opposite, you can click on a node and convert it to smart mode to make it curved. Then you can adjust it however you want. Now, you might have noticed that the smart nodes have these little handles coming off the sides of them. We're not going to go too deep into these because they're a little bit difficult for new users, but just know that if you click and drag on these handles, this works like magnets, and you can drag it in and out and see how it affects the shape. As I pull this out, the line moves with it. These help you to control and stretch out the angle of your curve. Now that you know all about all of the different things the node tool can do. Here's one last bonus tip. If you have the pen tool out because you've been making lines, you can actually hold down command or control, and this will temporarily bring up the node tool. Then you can move your nodes just like the node tool would. This is a very nice shortcut. You can very quickly switch between these two tools. Okay, so we have pretty good building blocks here, knowing about the Pen tool and the node tool. So in the next video, we're going to move on and learn how to edit Affinitys pre built shapes with the node tool. 18. Turn Shapes into Curves: In this video, we'll turn shapes into curves. So far in this chapter, we've been using the Pen tool to create curves, custom shapes that we've created all on our own. When you create a curve, you can see over here in the layers panel, that this type of layer is called a curve. This is different from our shape layers. When you create a shape, you can see that the name of the shape appears here. This is a completely different type of layer. Because shapes are so different, they have different functionality with them. For example, they have these orange nodes which you don't really have when you create curves like this. But curves also have different functionality as well. You can use the node tool on them to edit their shapes, and they just have a lot more flexibility. But wouldn't it be cool if we could edit the nodes on the star shape, like how we can with our pen tool paths. Well, we actually can. But first, we need to change the shape into a curve layer to convert this shape into a curve. All you need to do is come up here to the context tool bar and then click on Convert to curves. If you don't see this option, that just means you probably have a smaller screen than I do. That's okay. Just come over here and once you've opened up this option, you should be able to click on Convert to curves right in here. Once I click on Convert to curves, this star will change. It will no longer have these orange nodes, and the name of the layer will change to curve. I'll go ahead and do that. You can see curve and no more orange nodes. What this means is now our star is basically a curve, and I can use the node tool to affect any of these nodes just like we did in the last videos. I can move any of these nodes in or out. I can add nodes. I can even convert these nodes by clicking on them, going up to the context toolbar and changing these sharp points into smart mode. Now we have a urounded part to our shape. One thing to note though is that after you convert your shape to curves, you need to make sure that you're using the node tool in order to affect all the nodes. If you have the move tool out, you won't be able to see any of the nodes or affect them. Just make sure you're using the right tool. Turning shapes into curves like this is a great way to customize them. But we can actually do even more. In the next video, I'm going to teach you about another unique tool that you can use to alter your shapes and your curves. 19. Corner Tool: In this video, we'll learn about the corner tool. The corner tool is a special tool that lets us round out any sharp corners of a shape or a curve. Let's start with a shape. I'll select the star tool again. Then we'll hold in shift. I'll go ahead and click and drag to create a star. Then I'll get out the corner tool. Once you have the corner tool out, all you need to do is click and drag on any of these nodes to round out the sharp edge. I'll go ahead and move this one. Now you can see, we have a nice rounded corner here. You can click and drag on these points right here in your document, or you can come up here to where it says radius, and you can type in any value. In addition to rounding out these sharp edges, you can also round out this inner area here. I'll just click and drag and you can see now we have a more curved area here. One thing to note about the corner tool is that this tool automatically transforms any of your shapes into curves. We're working with individual nodes now. This is a curve instead of the original star shape. You no longer have the orange nodes, and you can also use the node tool to move any of these nodes around. That's just something to note. Going back to the corner tool. Another thing you can do with it is you can actually move multiple nodes at once. If I click and drag, I can select more than one node. Then as I move them inward, you can see them move together. In addition to altering shapes with the corner tool, we can also alter pen tool paths. I'll go ahead and put my pen tool in the polygon mode, and then I'll create a shape. Now I can select the corner tool. I can round out any of these edges. The corner tool only works on sharp corners like this. If I had made my pen path using smart mode, You can see that the corner tool will not work on that node. What I want you to get out of this is that shapes and curves are a little bit different, but you can alter shapes and curves using the corner tool and the node tool as much as you want, there's just so much flexibility with this. You might not always find yourself using all of these tools, but I just wanted to show you that all of these things are possible to do. Now that we know a lot more about curves, in the next video, we're going to go back to shapes, and I'm going to show you a really cool trick where you can combine shapes together like puzzle pieces. Okay. 20. Combining Shapes: Let's combine some shapes. This exercise file will be perfect for our practice in this video. A lot of great designs are made by just combining shapes in creative ways, and we can use the geometry operations right up here to do that. The first thing you need to do is you need to select both of the layers that you want to combine. I'll go ahead and hold down shift to select both of these layers. Now you can see that all of these geometry operations have lit up and are available for us to use. For this first one, I'm going to use the ad operation. Once you've clicked on the add operation, you can see that both of these shapes are now combined into one single shape. One thing to note is that this operation, as well as all of these other geometry operations will automatically turn your shape into curves. We will be able to use the node tool to alter the shape. You can see that here. I'll go ahead and grab the move tool again and let's select this next set of shapes. Instead of selecting them from the layers panel, you can also click and drag. Once the whole shapes are covered like this, you can release your mouse and see that both of those layers are selected. You can select shapes either way from the layers panel or right in the document like this. For this next one, let's go ahead and use the subtract operation. This operation will subtract your top shape, which in this case, was the circle from the bottom shape. Now you can see we have this nice little cutout. Let's go ahead and do the next one. We're going to use the intersect operation here. This one will only keep the area where the shapes were intersected. This contrasts with the next operation. I'll go ahead and select our next shapes here, and then I'll select it. You can see that unlike this one, this keeps everything except for where the shapes were intersecting. Finally, I'll go ahead and do this last one. We have the divide operation. At first, this looks like nothing happened. But once you move these layers around, you can see that the shape has been divided. It divided where the shapes intersected and created its own shape there. Now we have three separate layers in the layers panel. I'm going to undo this with command or control Z because I want to show you an advanced trick that you can do. Now we just have our red circle and blue rectangle again. This time, I'm going to hold down Alt or Option on my keyboard. Then I'm going to click on the subtract operation. Now, this is pretty tricky. What's happened is that now we have a compound shape. This means that we actually have kept the red circle and the blue rectangle, what has happened is that now we can still move this circle around. But now this circle is transparent. Wherever we move it, it's still like this blue rectangle is being cut out. This just gives you a little bit more flexibility. But one thing to keep in mind with this compound shape is that these are still shapes, they're not curves. If you want to work with the individual nodes on this compound shape, you'll need to convert it to curves. But that's a little complicated and I don't usually use compound shapes. If that's a little confusing, no worries, I don't really use this very often. I just thought I'd show it to you. To finish off this video, I'm going to select all of these shapes and I'm going to delete them because I want to show you a little bit of a demonstration of how you can combine shapes to make new designs. To do this, let's create a house. I'm going to grab the rectangle tool, and then I'll click and drag while holding Shift to make a nice little square. With that centered in the document nicely. Let's go ahead and give this house a roof. I'll come over here to our other shapes and I'll select the triangle tool. Now we can make a little rooftop. To make these one shape, I'm going to go ahead and select both of them, and then I'll use the ad operation to combine them together. Now you can see they're one shape, they move together, and that's pretty nice. To continue to modify this, I'm going to go ahead and create a doorway. To do this, I'll use the ellipse tool and I'll just click and drag to create an ellipse. If I cut this door out right now, the bottom curves in like this and that looks a little strange. I'm just going to make it so that only half of this oval is showing. Then with that oval placed on top, I'll select both of these, and then I'll use the subtract operation. Now you can see this is still all one shape, and now we can pull out the node tool and we can adjust this shape however we want. We can make the doorway a little bit bigger. We could stretch out the roof if we wanted to. I'll select all of these nodes, and you can see how we can modify it that way. Putting shapes together like this is so freeing. You can really create any shape you want by piecing together multiple shapes. The next video, we're going to do a project together where we'll really practice this technique. 21. Character Practice Project: In this video, we're going to create this adorable character design by combining together everything that we learned throughout this chapter about combining shapes and using the corner tool and all of that, it's going to be a lot of fun. Let's get started. To start off this project, I have this clean blank document here. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to create the head for our character. I'll come over here to our other shapes, and I'm going to select the rounded rectangle tool. Then I'll go ahead and click and drag out a rounded rectangle. I'm going to pull this orange node to create this nice rounded shape. Then I'll drag it downward a bit to create more of an oval shape. Now we can go ahead and give it a fill color. I'll go ahead and go into the oranges and then I can go and give it a nice skin color. Next, let's go ahead and create the body. I'm going to grab the move tool and I'm going to duplicate this first shape we've made by holding command or control. Then I'll click and drag, I'll release my mouse, and I'll release command or control. I'm going to make this first shape a little bit smaller. Then we have the body down here. Now, using this body, I'm going to create a tank top on our character. To do that, I'm going to use multiple different shapes to create the effect. First, let's get out the rectangle tool and I'm going to draw a rectangle on top of our shape, leaving space on each side of this rounded rectangle to create arms for our character. I'm going to grab the move tool, and I'm just going to make sure that this is centered with this shape right here. That looks pretty good. Then I'll go ahead and give this tank top a color. I think I'll go ahead and go with a nice light blue shade. There we go. Next, I want to create a cutout for the neck hole. To do that, I'll go ahead and grab the circle tool. I'll hold shift while dragging out a circle and then I'll place that circle right here. Now, because I want this to be a neck hole area, I want to cut this out of the rectangle. With that circle placed on top, I'll hold shift to select both of these. Then I'm going to use the subtract operation. That looks really good. Now you can see we have this nice cutout shape. To make this tank top only appear in the rounded rectangle, I'm just going to make it a child layer. Now you can see that that looks pretty good. We have our nice tank top and head here. This looks good so far. I'll go ahead and position this here. Then I want to create a shadow right under the head to create a neck. To do that, I'm going to go ahead and grab the rounded rectangle again. I'll click and drag one here. I'll make it super rounded by dragging this all the way in. There we go. And with it centered with the body like that. I'm going to make this a darker skin tone shade. I'll click right here to apply the original shade. Then I'm just going to make it darker. Then I'll place the head on top of everything. Now you can see that we have this neck area and we can go ahead and adjust where it's positioned. I think I want the head a little bit lower. This is looking pretty good. We have the head and the body. Now it's time to work on the face details. To start, let's make the eyes. Now, you can make the eyes any shape or color that you want. I've used ellipses in the past to create circular eyes. But to make him look a little bit more smiley, I'm going to actually use the crescent tool. I'll click and drag to create a crescent. Then I'm going to adjust these orange nodes. I'm going to pull this one down a little bit. Then I'll rotate it while holding shift so that it's perfectly on its side. Then I'll go ahead and place this. Now, this looks very large at the moment. I'll cover my cursor over this corner node here. I'll just shrink that down. I think I want the eyes to be a dark brown color. I'm going to go ahead and adjust the color now. I'll bring it over toward red a le bit just to warm it up. Okay, I like how that looks. Next, I'm going to grab the move tool and I'm just going to duplicate this I by holding command or control. Then I'll click and drag to place that I Once you like the spacing between the eyes, you can select both of them and then center them with the face. You can also adjust where they're positioned. I suggest putting them slightly lower on the head than you would expect. This creates a more acute and youthful look, and it's also going to create space to add hair later on. I think I like how these eyes look, but I do think I want to make the color. With both of them selected, I'll go ahead and adjust the color here. I think I also want to make them smaller. I'll select both of them, and while holding shift, I'll go ahead and shrink those down. Then I'll adjust the spacing again and center them up. Next, let's go ahead and create the mouth. I'll use the crescent tool again. I'll go ahead and click and drag. This time, I'm going to pull this node all the way up like that. Then I'll put it on its side by rotating and holding shift. Then I can place this on the face. I'm going to change the fill color to a nice red color. I think that looks pretty good. I'm just going to grab the move tool. Then I'm going to click on the head. Then I'll click on the mouth again, and I'll just make sure that it's nice and centered with the head. There's so many snapping lines going on. I'm having a little bit of trouble getting it centered with the head. I'm first going to select everything, and I'm just going to make sure that it's centered with the whole document. Then I'll click on the mouth again and make sure that this is centered with the document. This is a little bit tricky. I'm having some trouble here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to turn these eyes off, and then I'm going to center this. Now it's not snapping to the eyes. It's perfectly centered in the document. Turning the eyes back on. I think I'll go ahead and select both of the eyes while holding shift. I'm just going to move them upward using the arrow keys. Now that we have that nice and centered. The next thing I want to do to this mouth is I want to round out the corners of the mouth. I'm going to grab the corner tool, and then I'm going to select both of the corners of the mouth. Then I'll just drag them in to make this a bit more rounded. Let's keep adding some detail to the mouth. The first thing I'm going to do is I want to add some teeth. I'm going to come in here to our shapes. Let's use the rounded rectangle tool to do this. I'll click and drag out a rectangle up here, I'll round it out. Maybe not all the way, but just a little rounded. I'll make sure that it's nice and centered. Then I'm going to make it white. Then I'm going to make it a child layer to the mouth so that it's only visible where the mouth is. I'll click and drag this layer on top. Now you can see it. You can only see the teeth right at the top there. As one last mouth detail, I want to add a rounded rectangle to make a tongue. I'm going to click and drag with this rounded rectangle tool still selected. I'll go ahead and drag it out like that. Then using the orange node, I'll go ahead and curve this. I want the tongue to be the same color red, so I'll click right here to select that color. Then I'm just going to make it a bit darker. Okay, this is looking really good. What a cute little face. While we're still up here working on the head, I'm going to quickly add some ears. I'm going to click and drag using this rounded rectangle tool. I'm going to fully round this out. I'm also going to make sure that this isn't a child layer to our mouth. I'll go ahead and click and drag this above everything for now. Then I want to use the same darker color that I used on the neck. I'll go ahead and select that here. Then I'm going to drag this so that it's beneath the head. Now we can adjust where this is positioned. I'll make sure that this is centered with the head. I think I want the ears to be a little bit more rounded. I'm going to select the rounded rectangle tool again and I'm just going to make sure that this is pulled in all the way. Okay, this looks so good. He looks so happy. The next thing I want to do is I want to make some hair. We're going to combine shapes and have a little bit of fun with this because I want to make a swoop effect with the hair. To start, I'm going to grab the rounded rectangle tool, and I'm just going to create a base right up here on top. I'm going to pull in this orange node all the way. I'm going to make this the same color as the eyes. I'll go ahead and click on the darkest brown color here. I'm not worrying about centering it quite yet. I'm just trying to create this nice shape here first. We have a rounded rectangle. The next thing that I want to do is I want to use a crescent tool to create the swoop effect. I'll just click and drag to create that crescent. Then I'll pull this orange node all the way over like this. Then I'm going to flip it around by rotating it while holding shift. Then I'll go ahead and place it right here. I want this to line up nicely. I don't want you to see any corners jutting out. If yours is looking a little bit off, just make sure that you've lined it up nicely. I think I want to make this a bit taller and a little bit wider. Just checking in on the bottom there. I think I got to pull it in. I'll use the arrow keys to just bump it up a little bit. Okay. I'm going to turn snapping off for a moment just so I can get this lined up properly. That looks pretty good. I'll go ahead and turn snapping back on. Now we have this nice shape for our hair. Next, I want to combine these shapes together. I'll hold shift to select them both. Then I'll use the add operation. Now this is all one shape. We can go ahead and make it taller or shorter, however we want. Now, I think I'm ready to create the swoop effect. I want this to be more curved. I'm going to use the corner tool here. I'm not sure why there are two nodes here. I'm going to select one and delete it. Then using this node, I'm just going to pull outward like this. Now you can see we have that nice swoop effect, and I think that looks pretty nice. I'll pull out the move tool again and make sure that I like where this is positioned. I can put this higher up on his head or lower down. I think I want to make it just a little bit smaller. But I think that's looking pretty cute. Let's go ahead and finish with some finishing touches here. First, I'm going to grab the ellipse tool and I'll just click and drag by holding Shift, I'm going to place this guy in a little circle here just to frame him out. With that nice and centered like that, I'll go ahead and pull this circle underneath everything just so we can see better. I'm going to make the fill color a nice dark blue color. That looks pretty good. Then I think I want to give this a stroke. Selecting the stroke color here, I'm going to select this dark color that we used for the hair. Then I'm going to go to our stroke panel and I'll increase the width. I want to place him inside of the circle right now he's overlapping with it. I'm going to actually select all of the layers except for the circle by holding shift. Then I'm going to group them by pressing command or control G. With them all grouped together, now I can place this as a child layer to our circle, and you can see that now he's inside of it like that. I'm just going to make him a little bit larger, I won't hold shift while I'm resizing because he's in a group right now and that just messes things up for some reason. Now with him centered in the circle. Let's do one last finishing touch by giving this guy a little shadow behind him. To do that, I'm going to first come in here and I'm going to duplicate this group to duplicate this group. I'm just going to use the move tool and then I'll hold down command or control and I'll click and drag. Then we have two copies of our character. Then with this whole group selected, I'm going to select every layer in this group. Then I'm going to use the add operation to put it all together. Now, there was a child layer in here, but I'll just go ahead and delete that. We don't need that right now. Now we have a duplicate copy of our guy, and now he's all one color. I'm going to come back to the color panel and I'm just going to make this a nice dark color. I'll select this blue color here. I'll make sure that I'm applying that as a fill. There we go. I'll just make that a little bit darker. To make this shadow appear like it's beneath our character. I'm just going to click to close up this group. Then I'm going to place it underneath our character. Now you can see we have a nice shadow behind him. I'll go ahead and select our whole circle and I'll just center it in the document. Now we're done. I know that was a lot of work and parts of it were a little bit tricky, but I think our character turned out so cute. I hope you have fun creating this project on your own, and I hope you enjoyed this chapter. Now that we're done with that. In the next chapter, we're going to focus on mastering color. 22. Mastering Color: We already know how to quickly change the color using the color panel. But in this chapter, we're going to dive a little bit deeper and learn how to apply color in some different and unique ways. Let's get started. 23. Fill Tool: In this video, we'll learn how to add gradients using the fill tool. Go ahead and get this exercise file out, and then we can get started. To add a gradient, all you need to do is select the fill tool over here. Then select the layer that you want to give your gradient to. In this case, I'll just choose this background rectangle here. Then all we need to do is click and drag and you can see we have this lovely gradient here. I want to show you all the ways you can customize this gradient. The first thing you can do is you can actually hover over these nodes on the end and you can click and drag if you want to make subtle adjustments to how your gradient is positioned. You can also just click and drag to make a new gradient. While you're clicking and dragging, you can actually hold down shift if you want this to be in a perfectly straight line. That's pretty nice. Once you like how your gradient is positioned, you can change the colors by clicking on the color stops on the end, and then coming over here and adjusting the color. I'll go ahead and give my color stops two new colors here. That looks pretty good. Using this midpoint here, you can actually change how quickly the color transitions from one color to the other. You can just click and drag on this and you can see now that the gradient stays yellow for a lot longer and then quickly becomes this orange color, or you can do the opposite. You can also add another color stop to this line by just clicking on it. By default, this will just become the color that was at this point in the gradient. But you can come over here and change this to an all new color to introduce another color to your gradient. You can also click and drag on this color stop to change where it's positioned. If you've added another color stop and you don't like how that looks, you can always select it and then press delete or backspace on your keyboard to remove it. Up in the context toolbar, we have a few more options that we can change about our gradient. The first one is right here, you can flip the gradient around to change where the colors are. That can be pretty useful. You can also change the type of gradient here. The two most common types that I use are linear, which is what we have here and radial radial gradient will make your gradient the shape of a circle. One of your color stops will be the central color, and then you can fade it out into a different color. I think these colors are too similar. I'm just going to select this mid color here just to show you this. You can see we have red in the center and it fades out to yellow. Or maybe this is more obvious if I turn it white. We have this nice white glow in the center that fades outward. Let's practice by applying one more gradient. I'll select this other rectangle here, and then I'll go ahead and I'll click and drag downward. Now you can see we have this really pretty blue color fading into this darker blue. I think I like how that looks, so I won't change the color stops, but feel free to play around with this, adding gradients to both of these shapes. Once you like how those, we'll go ahead and move on to the next video. 24. Stroke Panel: Let's learn more about the stroke panel. I'm going to select the move tool. Then I'm going to select our first rectangle here in the layers. We can come right up here into the context toolbar to give it a stroke. I'll click here and I'll increase the width. By default, it's set to Black. I think that looks pretty good. I'll just raise this up. You can see that this is basically what we've been doing so far, increasing the width of our stroke. But we actually have quite a few more options here that we can customize. Now, personally, I like to use the stroke panel that's over here, because no matter what tool I have out, I can always quickly come over here and make adjustments, but feel free to use the move tools stroke panel or this one, they're both exactly the same. This panel has quite a few different buttons here, but there are only a few that are the most important. I'll just keep it simple and show you those ones. The first thing you might want to change is the join. This will change the way the corners look on your stroke. Right now we have a round join and you can see that here. But if I change it to a sharp join or I guess mit join. You can see we have nice sharp corners here. You can also change the way your stroke aligns with the shape. Right now, it's aligned right in the center. You can see this blue line is the outside of the square. If I change this and align it to the inside. Now we're on the inside area of the square or we can change it to the outside. I personally like changing it to the outside because a lot of times when it's just centered like this and we keep raising up the stroke, it really starts to swallow our shape. But if it's aligned to the outside, we can make it as big or small as we want, and it won't affect the size of the interior shape. This last one is pretty important to know. It's called scale with object. With this turned off. If we make our square really small, you can see that our stroke stays really big. I'll just press command or control Z to undo that. Now if we turn on scale with object and then resize it, you can see that the stroke will get smaller along with our shape, which is really nice. I usually like to turn this on for my strokes. I know there are a lot more buttons here, but these are the most important ones to know adjusting the size, the join alignment, and the scaling. Now that we know more about the stroke panel. In the next video, I'm going to show you the appearance panel, which also helps you to affect your stroke. 25. Appearance Panel: Let's learn about the appearance panel. The appearance panel allows us to add multiple strokes to an object. Just make sure you have your object selected, and then come over here to the appearance panel, you can easily add a new stroke to your object. I'll go ahead and click Add stroke here. Now, by default, this stroke is invisible. We can come up here and select the stroke and then we can give it a color. I'll click here, and I'll go ahead and make the color white. Then we can come right here to where it says one point. Click on that, and now we basically have the stroke panel for this individual stroke. I'll go ahead and increase the width all the way. Then I'll go ahead and make this a sharp join, and I'll align this to the outside. Right now, this stroke is on top of everything. This is similar to our layers panel. Whatever is on top will be visible. Because this is a larger stroke than our black stroke, we can't see the black stroke. But it's pretty easy to reorder these. Just like the layers panel, just select your stroke and then drag it to change the order. Let's go ahead and add one more stroke. I'll select the top stroke, and I'll apply another stroke on top of that. Then I'll go ahead and apply color to it. I think this time, I'll go with a nice purple color. Then coming over here, I'll click on where it says one point. I'll go ahead and increase the width. Now, I want to increase this with quite a bit, but it only goes up to 100 pixels. Well, lucky for us. Affinity lets us type in any number we want. I'll just click in this box and I'll type in 200 and then I'll press Enter on my keyboard. I'll go ahead and make the join sharp and I'll align this to the outside. Again, this was placed on top of everything. I need to drag it underneath all of our other strokes so that we can make sure everything is visible. Before I forget, let's just go back in and turn on scale with object for all of these strokes. As a side note. A finity designer currently has a bug here where the stroke width will sometimes change if you turn on scale with object. But we can go ahead and open any of these strokes and see that we still have 200 here. This is something to do with the way things are sized. But we can still see that the strokes are still set to the correct amount. Now we can go back and change any of the colors or sizes, however we want. I think I'll reduce this stroke here. Maybe let's do one 50. That looks pretty good. I think I'll change the color. Okay. Using the appearance panel is a super easy way to add multiple strokes to an object. This can really come in handy. In the next video, I want to show you how you can use the color picker to sample any color that you want. Okay. 26. Color Picker: This video, we'll learn about the color picker. The color picker allows you to sample a color and part of your design and apply that color somewhere else. I love this tool and I use it all the time. I'm excited to show you this. Affinity has a color picker tool down here. But normally, I just like to go to the color panel and use the color picker that's right here. Now, for demonstration purposes, I'm going to select the ellipse tool, and I'm just quickly going to draw out a circle here. I'm going to remove its stroke and select its fill. Now, let's say that I wanted to make the fill of this circle, the same color as this outer stroke here. To do that, all we need to do is come over here to the color picker and click and drag on it, and you can see that as I drag it over these areas, a color will appear in this circle. All I need to do is hover it over this purple area, then I'll release. In this color has now been captured or sampled right here by the color picker. To apply this color to the fill, just click on it. Remember, if you ever click on this, just to make sure you have the right fill or stroke selected. This color picker is super handy. I know in the last project, we were using these swatch squares, and I find these really useful as well. But this is a little bit limited because it only samples the last ten colors that you used. But with the color picker, you can always go into your design and sample any of the colors that you've ever used, which is super handy. Speaking of the swatches, in the next video, we're going to dive deeper into the swatches and we're going to take a look at the swatches panel. 27. Swatches: Let's learn about the swatches panel. In the last video, we saw how useful the color picker is. But sometimes in your designs, you want to keep using the same colors over and over and it can be a little bit frustrating if you need to continue to use the color picker over and over. In that case, you can actually use swatches. Swatches allow you to save colors and use them later on. Now in this watches panel, you can see that we have our recent colors that we've used throughout this document right up here. This is similar to what you see over here in the color panel. And it only saves the last ten colors that you used. Below that, affinity actually comes with a few default watches that you can use. Right now, you can see we're in the grays. But if you open this up, we actually have quite a few different ones. I'll go into the colors. Now you can see we have all of these different color swatches. We can easily apply a color to any object that we have selected. I'll just go ahead and select this circle to show you this. Then we can choose any of these colors. But the main reason why I want to show you this swatches panel is because you can actually create your own swatches. First, we need to make a palette to store our swatches in. To do that, come on up to the Hamburger menu. Then you can go down here and add a document palette. Document palettes will add swatches that are stored in just this document that you're working on. If you save this affinity file, later on, you can still access this document palette. It also means that if you send the file over to a friend, they can still see the swatches that you've saved. You can also add an application palette. These swatches are saved in affinity designer and will be available on all of your affinity designer documents. This is pretty useful. If you ever find yourself needing the same colors over and over. Every time you open up affinity, all your colors will be right there. If you're on a Mac computer, you also have a system palette, but you really don't need to worry about that. Let's go ahead and add a document palette. Right away, you can give your document palette a name. I'll go ahead and just name this demo swatches. Once you press enter on your keyboard. You can see right here, we have a new demo swatches category to add a swatch. All you need to do is select an object that has a color that you like. In this case, I'll go ahead and just select this circle. Then all you need to do is click right here on this button. This will add your current color to your palette. Now, for demonstration purposes, I'm going to have the Ellipse tool out, and then I'm just going to make a few circles over here. Then I'm going to select this top circle and I'm going to apply a unique color to it. I'll go ahead and make that blue. Then going back into our swatches panel. This time, instead of adding it as a regular swatch, I'm actually going to mix it up a little bit. I'm going to click on this second button right here. Once I do that, this color has been added as a global color. This color is an editable color that can be applied to multiple objects. Just to show you this, I'm going to select these other circles, and I'm going to apply this color swatch to them. Now, you might notice that this swatch has a little triangle on it, and that just means it's a global color. Go ahead and double click on that swatch, and now watch what happens. Now you can see that I can change the color of that swatch and all of your shapes that have that color applied to them will change. But you might notice that only three of the circles are changing. That's because this first one actually doesn't have this swatch applied. We sampled the color from it, but in order for this also to change, we need to select it and actually apply this swatch to it. Now it can join the party and it can change along with the other circles. A two last tips, in this hamburger menu, you can actually import and export palettes. I'll share some color palettes with you later on in this course, and you can see what that looks like. As one last tip, you can actually change the appearance of your swatches to make them bigger or smaller. I'll go ahead and show you what this looks like when your swatches are nice and big. They can get quite large, or if you have a lot of different colors, you can change this appearance to small. Now, this makes it a little hard to click on, I generally like to keep my swatches set to medium, but feel free to change this if you'd like Okay, that was pretty fun. Now you know how to create your own swatches, your own palettes, and that's so useful. In the next video, I'm going to show you a few color resources that can really help you out with your designs. Okay. 28. Color Resources: In this video, I want to share some color resources with you that will be pretty helpful with your designs. Now, before we start, I want to reset this document back to how it originally was as an exercise file. To do that, I'm actually just going to hold down command or control Z, and now we can just watch as everything resets itself. It's pretty cool to see everything that we've done to this document. There we go. To show you a nice color resource. In this video, I want to show you my favorite website for finding beautiful colors because knowing how to apply colors and knowing which colors to apply are two very different things. This website that I want to show you today is called color. I'll leave that linked below this video. On this website, you can see so many amazing palettes and you can sort these palettes by brand new palettes. You can see the most popular palettes here. Or you can go into these categories to choose a category that you like. I'll go into the warm category, and you can see all these beautiful color palettes. Once you find one that you like, you can go ahead and click on it, and then you can download this as an image. Go ahead and do that. Then we can head back over to Designer. Now that we've saved that image, I want to show you a really cool trick where you can bring those colors into affinity. Go ahead and head over to the Swatches panel. Then go to the Hamburger menu and go to where it says, create palette from image. This dialog box opens up right here. Just go to select image and then navigate to wherever you save that palette, and then press open. This will automatically pull the colors from your image to create a palette. Because there's only four colors here, it was very easily able to select the exact colors from this. You could do this with an actual photograph, but a lot of times photographs have so many colors in them. It can be tricky to get the exact colors that you want. But by using this website, you can easily pull out these colors. Down here, we can choose if we want this to be a document palette or if we want it to be an application or system palette. Since this is just for this video, I'll go ahead and load it as a document palette. Then I can press create and easy as that. We now have this beautiful color hunt palette here, and we can use any of these colors for our image. I think I'll go ahead and do that now. I'm going to select the background rectangle. Let's start by giving this a gradient. Maybe I'll do a radial gradient again. I'll come up here to where it says type and I'll change it to radial. Then I think I want this center color to be this light yellow. Then I'll change this outer color to be orange. That looks fun. I'll pull the midpoint out just a little bit. There we go. Next, let's give this rectangle a new color. I think I'll go ahead and make it this yellow color. Then I want to give this rectangle a stroke. Coming over here to the color panel, we should be able to give it a stroke. But right now we have the fill tool selected. We can't see our stroke. I'm going to select the move tool. Now we can go ahead and select the stroke color. Then I'll go back to our swatches and I'll go ahead and apply this last color here. Then I'll go into our stroke panel, and I'll increase the width. Let's go ahead and give the sharp corners and align it to the outside. Just like that, we've used all of the colors for our new palette. I find the color hunt website to be super useful because people have loaded up these palettes, they already all agree that these colors look good together, and all you need to do is pull them into your design. Now that you know how to load up your own palettes, in the next video, we're going to move on to a different topic. We're going to learn how to make adjustment layers. 29. Adjustment Layers: Let's learn about adjustment layers. Adjustment layers are special layers that you can add to your document. They allow you to quickly see what your final design would look like and all sorts of different color styles that you might not have even considered before. Let's select the background and let's play around with changing its color. To add an adjustment layer, all you need to do is come down here and click on the symbol. Now you can see we have quite a few different adjustment layer types here. Now, by far, the most common adjustment layer type that you'll use an affinity designer is the HSL adjustment. The others are a lot more common for photo editing and affinity photo. I'm going to apply this HSL adjustment. By default, you can see over here in our layers. This adjustment has been applied as a child layer, which means it will only affect the layer that we had selected. Now in this dialog box, we can make some adjustments to the colors of the background. We can use the hue slider. As we slide this around, you can see that the entire color changes. If you shift the saturation slider, your colors will get a lot brighter or a lot more dull. Last, we have luminosity, which affects how light or how dark the colors appear. Now, like I said, right now, this has been placed as a child layer, but we can actually pull this on top of everything so that everything is affected at the same time. Now to go back in and continue your adjustments. All you need to do is click right here, and this will open the dialog box again. You can continue to play around with these colors. I think that looks pretty nice. I'll go ahead and close out of this dialogue box. I just wanted to finish this off by saying this layer is just like any of your other layers. You can turn them on and off just like this and you can delete them just like any other layer. Remember to go back and edit, just click on this icon here and you can continue your edits. Okay. With that, we are done learning about color for this chapter. We've learned so much about the color panel and all of the panels at the top there, swatches, stroke, and appearance. Now that we've finished all of that, in the next video, we're going to do a super fun project that brings together all of our color skills along with some of our shape skills to create a really fun design. 30. Monster Practice Project: In this video, we're going to complete a super adorable monster project. This is a really fun project that you can customize anyway you want. I think you're really going to enjoy this one. Let's go ahead and get started. To start off here, I've already created a new document that's one 1,500 by 100. Once you have that setup, the first thing we're going to do is we're actually going to import a palette for the colors that we're going to use for this project to import this palette, go to this watches panel. Then click on the Hamburger menu, and then you can go on down to import palette. I'll just download this as a document palette. Then you can navigate to the mastering color folder and the exercise files, and you can click on this palette file here. Go ahead and open that up. Just like that, we have our acute monster project palette right here. These are all the colors that we're going to use. Now that we have all our colors, we can get started creating this monster. I'm going to come over here and in our other shapes for the body, I'm going to use the tier tool. Now, this tool has a pretty nice shape here. I'm just going to create an elongated tier tool shape. Then I'm going to flip it upside down by rotating it while holding shift. Then I'll go ahead and give it a color. I want to use this fourth color right here. I'll click on that, making sure our fill is selected here. Then I want to refine this shape a little bit more. I don't really want this to come to a point like this. I want this to be a bit more rounded. Now you might think you could just click on these orange handles to bring it in. But the orange handles in this case are actually just moving the shape around like that. In order to actually round this out, I need to use the corner tool. I'll select that. Then I can click and drag on this node to round it out. I think I like how that looks. I'm just going to select the move tool and make a couple more refinements. I think I want this to be a little slimmer and taller just to give more room for the body. I think this looks really nice. Now we have our body. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to create a big eyeball right in the center here. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool, and then I'll click and drag to create a perfect circle. I'm holding down shift to do that. Then I'll go ahead and center it and I'll bring it down a little bit. Now, for this eye, I want to give it a fill and a stroke. Starting with the fill selected, I'm going to make the eye this color. It's not a perfect white, it's slightly gray, and I'll show you why that is and a little bit. But for now, go ahead and select that light gray color. Then for the stroke, I'm going to go ahead and select that. I'm going to use a darker green color for the stroke. I'll click on that darker green color and then to make the stroke appear more visible. Let's go on over to the stroke panel. I'm just going to increase the width here. I'll go ahead and align this to the outside, and I'll also check on scale with object. I think I want to add one more stroke to his eye, just to give it a little bit more detail. I'm going to come over here to the appearance panel. I'm going to add a stroke. Now for this stroke, I'll go ahead and click on its color. Then to use our swatch colors. I'm actually not going to use this color section. I'm actually going to come right here into our swatches so that I can select one of these other ones. Now for this other stroke, I'm actually going to use this last color here. I'll click on that. Then we can adjust its size. I'll click right here. I'll increase the width, I think that looks pretty good. I'll just turn on scale with object. Now we have the outer area of the eye all completed. I'm going to add one more circle to the center here while holding Shift. Now, this center circle is going to be his is. I want to remove the stroke, I'll go to the color panel and I'll have the stroke selected, and I'll just remove that. Then I'll select the fill circle. For the inside of this circle, let's go to the swatches panel, and I'm going to select this darkest color. I'm going to make this a little bit wider while holding shift. Then I'll carefully hover over here so I can move it and I'll make sure that it's nice and centered. Actually, I think I'll make it a little bit larger. Our eye is really coming along now. Now the reason why I didn't make this pure white in the background is because I actually want to create a few little eye sparkles to his eye that are pure white. Let's do that now. I'm going to click and drag. We holding shift to create a perfect circle here. I'm going to make this perfect circle, this lightest color here. Then I'll click and drag will holding shift again to create a second circle there. Now you can see how these little circles just give a little bit of a highlight, a little bit of a shine to our little Alien fella. The eye is looking really good. But the more I look at this body, the more I feel that I don't really like the shape of it. I'm going to select the corner tool one more time, and let's just drag this in a little bit more. I don't want there to be such a huge difference between the top and bottom. I think that looks pretty good. Then I'll use the move tool to stretch this out. I think I like that better. There's still a little bit of a larger part to the top of his body and then it narrows down, but it's just not quite so dramatic. Now that I like that shape, I'm actually going to duplicate this tier shape. To do that, I'm going to hold down command or control, and then I'm going to drag downward to duplicate the body. For this duplicate layer, I'm actually going to move this underneath the original body and then I'm going to give it a darker color. I'll choose this slightly darker color there. You can see that this is just giving a shadow effect. You can move this inward a little bit more if you don't want it to be quite so extreme. I think that looks pretty nice. As I'm going, I'm trying to create moments of three D effects like these little ice sparkles or this shadow here. Just to give it a little bit more dimension and to make him not look quite so flat as a character. To continue working on the body here, I want to give him a couple of little hair tuffs right up here. I'm going to use the ellipse tool to do that. I'll go ahead and click and drag and I'm not going to hold shift this time. I'm just going to click and drag like that, making a little bit of a skinnier oval shape. Using the move tool, I'll go ahead and move how these are positioned. I think I want them to overlap just a little bit. I want this to blend in with his body. I'm going to use the same color as his body for the fill. Just like that. Oh, he looks so cute. Now, our layers are getting a little bit confusing. I'm going to select all of the layers by holding shift and clicking like that. Then I'm going to press command or control G to group them together. Then I'm just going to drag the eye on top of everything for now. Back to the body. I just added this shadow layer and these two hair tuffs. Next to give a little bit more detail. I'm going to add a few spots on his body. Using the ellipse tool again, I'm just going to click and drag to create a few oval shapes. I'm going to make these oval shapes, this lighter color right here. I'll go ahead and rotate these and using the move tool, I'm going to hold down command or control and click to duplicate a few of these spots. Now, snapping is giving me a hard time right now. I'm going to turn that off for now so that I can freely move these spots around the body. There we go. Once you like your spots and how they're placed in size. The last thing we're going to do for the body is I'm going to add a bit of a shadow going across his body. Now to do this, I actually want to merge this body layer with the two hair tuffs. Go ahead and find your hair tufts and move them so that they're next to each other. Then select all of them with the body, and I'm going to merge them together using the add operation. I wanted to merge them into one shape so that the shadow will affect the hair tufts and the body all at the same time. To create a shadow, what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the Pen tool. Then I'm going to trace out a path. I'll start up here. Then I'm going to make sure I'm in smart mode so that this can be a nice curved shadow. I'm just going to click. I think I like that. Then I'll go ahead and close out my shape going around the outside, and I'll close it like that. I'm going to make the fill this second color right here. Then I'm going to make this a child layer to the body by clicking and dragging it on top of the body. Then I think I'm going to lower the opacity of this layer just to give it a more subtle effect. I think that looks really good. Now we have the e and all of the body layers. I'll go ahead and group all of the body layers by holding shift and clicking on all of them. Then I'll press command or control G to group them together. We just have a few more details to add, but this is already looking so good. The next thing I want to add is I want to give him some legs. I'm going to come over here to our shapes, and I'm going to select the rounded rectangle tool. I'll go ahead and have that selected. Then I'm just going to click and drag out a rounded rectangle. I'm going to round these edges. I'll go ahead and bring that inward. Then I'm going to reposition this. I don't want his leg to be outside like that, giving him a strange lump shape. I'm going to place it like this so that it's more aligned with the body. Once I like that, I'll go ahead and grab the move tool and I'll press command or control. Then I'll click and drag to duplicate that leg. I'll go ahead and rotate it, so it looks somewhat similar to the other one. It's okay if they're not the exact same angle. The next thing I want to do to his legs is I want to give him little feet and I had to be a little bit creative here with how to get the right feet shape. What I'm actually going to use is I'm going to use the tear drop tool. This might sound a little weird, but go ahead and click and drag. Then move it to the side like this and then move it in place. You see that? It looks like a foot. Go ahead and line that up. Then we're holding command or control, go ahead and click and drag and you can go ahead and rotate it to create the other foot. These shapes don't line up perfectly perfect, but I think this looks pretty good. You can go ahead and play around with it a little bit to try to get this edge to be nice and smooth, but I think that looks pretty good. I think I'll just leave it like that. Now I'm going to group these leg layers together with command or control G, and then I'll drag it underneath the body. Now that he has legs, let's go ahead and give him some arms. I'm going to grab the pen tool again. Then I'm going to make sure I'm in smart mode. I'm also going to turn on rubber band mode so that I can see what I'm doing. To give him these arms, I'm thinking that I want to give him noodle arms where there's not a clearly defined elbow, but it's just bending smoothly. To do that, I'm going to start inside about here. Then I'll go ahead and place a point out here like this. Then I want to create a bend like that so that it looks like his hand is behind his back. To make sure I like how this looks, I'll just press escape first. Then I'm going to give this curve a stroke. I'll select the stroke here. Then I'm going to give it a color. Let's choose the fourth one so that it matches the body. Then in the stroke panel, I'll just increase the width. This looks a little bit too dramatic for me. It's coming out a bit too far. I'm going to hold down command or control so that I can temporarily have out the node tool, and then I'll just move this node inward. And I'll press escape again. I think that looks really nice. Let's give him another arm over here. I'll start on the inside again. Then I'll click out here and I'll click up here like that. I'll press escape. Then let's give him some fingers. I'll click here and here, then I'll press escape. Then I'll click here and here, and I'll press escape. These arms are very neutly. I think they could be a little bit thicker. I'm going to select all of these layers, and I'm just going to increase their stroke at the same time. There we go. We'll go ahead and select the node tool to make a few adjustments to raise that a little bit. Maybe bring this up a bit. And bring that inward. This looks really good. I'm just going to group these all together with command or control G. Then we're going to give him a mouth next. I'm going to select the eye layer so that this is on top of everything. To create the mouth, I'll go ahead and select the rounded rectangle tool. Then I'll go ahead and click and drag out a rounded rectangle and I'll completely round in these corners. Right now, it looks like he has a pretty thick stroke. I'll go to the color panel and I'll just remove the stroke. Then going into our swatches, I'll select the fill, and I'm going to make it the darkest color. Then using the move tool, I'm just going to adjust this here. I'll make it a little bit wider and thicker. Then I'll go ahead and turn on snapping so that I can line this up here. There we go. Now we have this nice mouth right here to make this look even more like a mouth. I want to add a couple of teeth. I want this to be a little pointy teeth. To do that, I'll come to our shapes and I'll use the triangle tool. Then I'll click and drag to create a triangle. I want to change the fill to make it this lightest color here. I'll click on that. Then using the move tool, I'll hold command or control to duplicate these teeth. Then I'll hold down shift and I'll click on this other tooth, and I'll just make sure that these are centered. And I'll drag them downward just slightly. Our monster looks so cute right now. To give this a finishing touch, I want to add a shadow underneath him. To do that, I'm just going to grab the ellipse tool. Then I'll click and drag to create a oval shape here. Then I'm going to use this darkest gray color as the fill, and I'll just drag this underneath him. Feel free to play with the opacity a le bit if you want it to be a little less intense. And as one last final touch, I want to add a gradient to the background to add a floor detail here. To do that, first, I need to add a background. I'll click on the rectangle tool and I'll just click and drag out a rectangle. I'll drag this underneath everything. Then I'll grab the gradient tool and I'll click and drag to create a gradient. I want this first color stop to be the lightest color here. Then I think this dark color looks pretty nice. I'll just lower this down a little bit and drag this outward a little bit. Actually, this fill looks a little bit too dark. I'm actually going to fill it with this second color here and I'll make sure that this one is the lightest color. This is looking a little bit too subtle. I wanted this to be a darker gray, but I didn't want it to be darker than the shadow. You know what, actually that looks pretty good. I'll use this last color here. I'll just make sure that it's low enough that this gray is still. Okay. Okay. I hope you can see what I mean. I was just trying to create a bit of a gradient. Here's the before and after of that. Now, I think we're done with our monster, but I want to give you a little tip. If you wanted to, you could actually duplicate this monster and create another one. I'm going to group all of the monster layers together with command or Control G. Then I'll go ahead and move him to the side. Then I'll hold down command or control and I'll click and drag out another one. So that the shadows don't overlap. I'll go ahead and make this one a little bit smaller. Then to make him his own unique little monster. I'm going to use the HSL adjustment to change his colors. Let's go over to our adjustments here and then apply an HSL. Then we can use this hue slider to make him any color that we want. Oh, I like that blue color. I think I'll increase the saturation a little bit. And just like that. We have two adorable little monsters. This project was two for the price of one. Now that you're done with that, I hope you understand how to use swatches better. I hope that this was fun practice using some of the other tools that we learned throughout this course. Now that we're done with that, we're going to move on to the next chapter, where we'll learn about some powerful tools that will give your designs a real boost. 31. Powerful Tools to Know: Chapter is mishmash of a bunch of fun and unique tools that you can use in your designs. They don't neatly fit under one single umbrella, but all of these tools are really important to learn, and I think you're really going to enjoy this chapter. Let's get started. 32. Master the Move Tool: In this video, we'll learn all about the move tool. Now, we've already learned about the move tool, but I want to teach you some extra tips. But just to start off, let's review. We already know that the move tool can click and drag to move objects around. You can hold shift to keep your objects in a straight line. You can also re size objects, and you can hold down shift to keep them proportional. You can also rotate your objects and you can hold down shift to rotate them and snap them into 15 degree increments, ops. We already know you can hold down command or control and click and drag to duplicate it. We know you can click and drag to select multiple objects at once and move them around. Just as a reminder, make sure that your selection completely covers both of your objects. There we go. But now, we're going to learn some new things. I'm going to hold down command or Control Z to undo until we're back to the beginning. Here's a new shortcut. If you want to resize something, you can hold down command or control, and this will resize it from its center point. Normally, this looks like this. You're resizing it and it's moving off to the side. But if you hold down command or control, your object will stay nice and centered, if you combine this with shift, you can resize from center and keep it proportional, which is usually how I use the shortcut. Another thing you can do with the move tool is once you have an object selected, you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move your object one pixel at a time. You can also hold down shift and then use the arrow keys, so you can move your shape a little bit faster that way. If you look at the numbers that are appearing as you're moving your shape, you can see numbers right up here. This is telling you how many pixels away your shape is from the next nearest object or in this case, from the outside of the document. To see an example of where you would want to see these numbers, I'm just going to shrink down this heart with command or control and shift. Then I'm going to duplicate it twice by holding command or control and shift. Then I'll select all of these objects and I'll center them. Right now, I just free handed how far apart these hearts are, and you can probably tell they're not perfectly even. But if I use the arrow keys, I can see that right now it's 40 pixels away from this other heart. I can use that information and move this heart so that it's also 40 pixels away, and now they're nice and even with those evenly spaced, I can select all of them and center them. Doesn't that look nice. Next, I'm going to delete these hearts, just to show you another thing you can do with the move tool. When you have something selected with the move tool, you can actually go up to the context toolbar and you can actually hide your selection box. You can do that by clicking on this little right here. Now as I move this around, the selection box will disappear, which could come in handy. Of course, when I release it, the selection box is back. But this might be nice if you find the selection box a little bit distracting as you're moving things around. Another thing you can change up here in the context toolbar is you can click on this cross hair icon and you can move where this is. Now, why would you want to do that? Let me explain. This cross hair icon right here is the point of rotation. As I rotate this hard around, it will rotate around that center point. However, I could actually move this crosshair icon and I'm just going to move it to the bottom of the heart. Now as I rotate around, you can see that I'm rotating from the bottom of the heart. I'll just move it back to the center. But it's pretty cool that you can change the rotation point, and this is actually really going to come in handy a little bit later. That's all I wanted to share with you about the move tool. Now you can walk away from this video and know that you are the master of the move tool. Congratulations. Go ahead and practice a few of these shortcuts. They really come in handy for me, especially holding down command or control and shift while resizing something from its center point. Anyway, go ahead and practice some of those and I'll see you in the next video. 33. Flipping and Transparency: This video, let's learn about flipping and transparency. In addition to using the move tool for what we saw in the last video, you can also use the move tool to flip objects. Just make sure you have the move tool out and then select your object. Then you can go up to the toolbar at the very top and you can use these two buttons to flip your object around. Using this first one, we can flip our object horizontally. And using this one, we can flip our object vertically. To show you one reason you might want to use this feature. Let's do a little mini project by giving this dinosaur a reflection. To start, I'm going to raise our dinosaur up just a little bit. Then I'm going to hold down command or control and I'll click and drag to make a duplicate copy of our dinosaur. Then I'll come up to the top and let's flip this dinosaur vertically. Go ahead and reposition your dinosaur so that the little feet match up. Perfect. Now we're going to make this a reflection. The way we're going to do that is we're going to use a brand new tool, the transparency tool. Go ahead and click on that. The transparency tool is like the gradient tool. But instead of making a color gradient, it as a transparent gradient. What you want to do is you want to click where you want it to stay visible and then drag out to where you want it to disappear. Over here in the color panel, we can adjust the opacity of these color stops. With this first one selected, you can see right here that its opacity is set to 0% and this one right here is set to 100%. If we wanted to, we could change that opacity here, making it more visible. Like that. I think I'm actually going to keep this one at 0%. Then I'm going to change this first color stop, and I'm just going to decrease this because this is a reflection, it shouldn't be perfectly clear. Now with that all lined up and looking good, I'm going to group these dinosaurs together. I'll just hold shift to click and then I'll press command or control G. I was thinking this dinosaur looks a little bit lonely. Yes, he has his reflection, but why don't we give this dinosaur a friend? I'll just move this dinosaur to the side. Then while holding command or control, I'll click and drag to give the dinosaur a duplicate copy. Then I'll go ahead and flip this horizontally. To make this dinosaur look a little bit different, I'm going to apply an HSL adjustment. Then I can adjust the hue to give this other dinosaur a new color. Now I'll just select both of them. Using the move tool, I'll just make sure they're nice and centered in the document. Just like that, we've completed a fun little mini project for these dinosaurs. I know you won't always use the transparency tool, but it's nice to know that it exists, and I really do think that flipping things horizontally and vertically can be really helpful in your designs. Now that you understand how to do that, in the next video, we're going to master the art of snapping. 34. Master Snapping: This video we'll master snapping. As a reminder, snapping lines are the lines that we see when we snap an object to the center or sides of a document, or if we snap an object to other objects. We already know that we can turn snapping off by clicking on this magnet up here. But how can we manipulate the way things are snapping to each other. All you need to do is click on this drop down and this menu will open up. Now, there are a lot of options here, but here's the most important ones. First, we have screen tolerance. As we make screen tolerance higher, snapping will become more and more aggressive. Just to show you how aggressive it can be, I'm just going to click in this box, and I'm going to type in 100. Okay. And now, I'll just close that up and you can see how aggressive this snapping is. I can hardly move the square around. It just automatically will snap to anything that's around it. Now, this is pretty aggressive and the default number eight works pretty well for me. I'll go ahead and leave that there. But you can feel free to adjust this however you want. The next thing you can change is the number of candidates. Now, by default, there are six candidates. You can see that here, what that means is affinity will only snap to the last six layers that you've had selected. To see this, I'm going to try snapping this yellow square to the purple square. You can see that it's not snapping. That's because while I was making this document, I had a bunch of other squares that I ended up deleting. But because of that, it's been a while since I had the Purple square selected. All I need to do is click once on this Purple squared to select it. Then I can immediately come back to the yellow square and it will snap just fine. By clicking on that purple square, it became a candidate. Usually the six candidates works pretty well for me because it gives you quite a few things to snap to without becoming overwhelming. If you bring the number too high, then you'll end up snapping to way too many things. I don't recommend that you raise this. The next thing is only snap to visible objects. I like to keep that turned on so that if you ever turn off a layer, affinity won't snap to it. Don't worry about the rest of these settings, you can just leave them at their default setting. As you can see, Affinity default snapping works well for most people, but now you know what it's doing, so you can tweak these options however you want to make it work better for you. As one final bonus tip, if you ever want to temporarily ignore snapping without needing to completely turn it off and on again, all you need to do is start moving your object, and then hold down Alt or Option and you'll be able to freely move your object without any snapping happening. I'll lift up the alt or option key, and you can see that now it immediately begins snapping again. I find the shortcut pretty useful. Now that you understand a lot more about snapping, we're ready to move on to the next video. Where we'll learn about a really fun technique called Power duplicate. 35. Power Duplicate: Let's learn about power duplicate. We've already learned that if you have an object selected, you can hold down command or control and then click and drag to duplicate your object. But there's actually another way to duplicate. All you need to do is have your object selected and then press Command or Control J. I like to think of J as in jump, the new layer is jumping out of the original layer. I'll go ahead and move this circle. You can see we have two copies here. These two ways of duplicating seem like they do the same thing, but there's actually one important difference. If you duplicate with command or control J, affinity also gives you the ability to power duplicate. Power duplication allows you to duplicate an object, change its size, position, or rotation, and then duplicate the object again with all of your changes repeated. To show you this, I'll just delete these duplicate hearts and circles. And then I'll select the original heart. To power duplicate, first, make sure your object is selected, then press command or Control J. I'm just going to move it downward. Then I'm going to press command or Control J again. You can see that this new duplicate layer is moved the same distance as the first layer and you can keep duplicating as many times as you want. But if you click off of the object, this power duplication will be broken and you'll need to start a new chain of power duplication. You see how that didn't power duplicate that time. This works for more than just changing the position. This also works to change the size and rotation. To show you the size one, I'll just select this circle here, and then I'll press command or control. This time, I'll move it downward, and then I'll increase the size. I'm going to increase this from the center point by holding down command or control and shift. Now let's power duplicate, I'll press command or control J, you can see that the distance and sizing has all been duplicated, and I can do that one more time, and now it's off the screen, but you can see that it got a lot bigger too. And last, I want to show you that this also works with rotation. I'll just zoom in here to this little stick that we have. I'll select it, and then I'll duplicate it with command or control J. While holding Shift, I'll rotate this 15 degrees. Now I can press command or control J. You can see that we have this rotation repeated and it creates this nice little pattern. Now we've seen that power duplication works for distance for size, and for rotation. I'm just going to select all of the layers that we have here except for this bottom one and I'll delete them. Now I want to show you one final demonstration of how powerful power duplicate is. To show you this, I'll select the heart tool, and then I'll click and drag out a heart. I'll hold shift while doing this. Then I'll bring it up to the corner and I'll change its fill. Right now, we have this heart and I'll just select the move tool. Now I want to cover this whole document with hearts. To do that, I'll press command or Control J, and then I'll move it downward. Then I'll press command or Control J to power duplicate all the way down the document. Okay. Now I'm going to click and drag to select all of these hearts. Then I'm going to duplicate this column by pressing Command or Control J. Then I'll move this column to the side while holding shift to keep it straight. And watch this. This is pretty cool. Now I'll press command or Control J, and we can duplicate that entire column. Now, I'm just going to select all of the hearts and I'll go ahead and center them in the document. Just like that, we were very quickly able to duplicate all of these hearts across the page. To finish off this video, I just want to give you a couple of tips. I'm going to select some of these hearts and delete them. To power duplicate, I just wanted to point out that you must use command or Control J. If you simply click and drag with command or control held down, this won't power duplicate. You're just moving them freely around. Make sure that you use command or Control J to start your chain of power duplication. Now, sometimes you don't want power duplication to happen. In that case, all you need to do to break the chain is click off of that object, then click back on it and use command or Control J to duplicate again. Hopefully, that all made sense. This power duplication trick is super handy and we're definitely going to use it later on as we complete projects. Now that you know about that, in the next video, we're going to move on and learn about layer effects. 36. Layer Effects: Let's learn about layer effects. Layer effects allow you to apply special effects to any object in your document. All you need to do is select the layer that you want to effect, and then come on down here and press on F x. This dialog box will appear and it has many options of different effects that you can apply. I'm just going to show you a few of these in this video, but it's pretty easy to apply these effects. Let me just show you this first one. All you need to do to apply the Gaucian blur is click on it. Then check it on. Now, all you need to do is raise this radius, and you can see this Gaucian blur effect being applied to the star. To see this a little bit more clearly, I'm just going to remove the selection. Now you can see how that was applied. You can also select the star, and you can turn off the gaussian blur by checking right here and you can turn off the effect on and off that way. Next, I want to show you how to do an outer shadow. I'll just click right here and turn that on. Outer shadow is a pretty popular effect. I want to make sure that I show you this. Now here, there's quite a few options to change. But what I like to do is I like to just drag everything up. To add that outer shadow. Then I'll adjust these sliders to change how this effect works. You can see as I bring this up and down that the radius is changing how smooth and large the shadow is. I think I'll keep that up. I like this fuzzy edge. You can also change how fuzzy this looks by decreasing the intensity. The intensity really just adds harshness to it. The offset will change how far away the shadow is from the star. If it's closer like that, you can see what that looks like, or you can move it far away to make the star look like it's floating. You can also change the angle. If you'd rather the shadow go a different direction, you can just click and drag right in here. That's how the outer shadow works. Last, I want to show you how to apply the outer glow effect. I'll go ahead and click on that and I'll check it on. Then I'll increase the radius. You can see I could raise that quite a bit to 100. But just like any of the other sliders in affinity, you can always click in this box and give it a larger number. Now you can really see that glow. You can also change the color of the glow. If you want to give it a little bit of a different effect. While you can apply these effects one at a time, you can also apply multiple effects to an object all at once. I'll keep that outer glow on and then I'll check on the Guscian blur. Now you can see what that looks like. If you ever close out of this and want to go back to adjust it more, click on the F x right here, and this will open up the dialogue box again. Another thing that you can do in this dialogue box is you can turn on scale with object. This will make it so the layer effects will change their size and intensity as you make the object bigger or smaller. At any time you can go back and change how these layer effects. Layer effects are just a super nice way to quickly add an effect to your layer, and there are a lot of other effects here, and you can easily check them on and play with the sliders if you want to see how they work. But I just wanted to show you the most common ones in this video. With that done, in the next video, we're going to learn how to add text to your documents. 37. The Text Tool: Let's learn about the text tool. Go ahead and just open a blank document. We don't need an exercise file for this one, and then we can go ahead and get started. The text tool is found right here. Go ahead and click on that to select it. To add text to your document, it's pretty easy. All you need to do is click and drag and you can see a preview of the size that your text will be. That can be a pretty good starting point. Then once you've released your mouse, go ahead and type in whatever word you want. After typing, you can get the move tool out and you can resize this text however you want and reposition it. I'm just going to move mine to the side and you'll see why in just a minute. But first, let's go ahead and change the text color. To change your text color, just have it selected with the move tool, and then come over here. Now you might think you need to change the stroke since these are all skinny lines and that's similar to the stroke. But don't be fooled, we actually need to change the fill. Go ahead and choose a new color for your text. Then we can go ahead and change the font. To change the font, just have your text selected with the move tool, and then come right up here to the context toolbar and click on this drop down. Now you can see why I move my text to the side, just for demonstration purposes. I want you to be able to see all the different text fonts that we can change this to. All we need to do is hover over these different fonts to see a preview of what our font would look like. There are quite a few default fonts here in affinity. Go ahead and explore these and pick one that you like. I'll go ahead and just pick a random one. Here we go. Once you've changed the font and you've changed the color, you might want to go back and do more typing. If you want to do that, go ahead and get the text tool out again and this little cursor will pop up here, and then you can continue typing. Okay. Then you can get the move tool out and you can reposition and resize this text, just like that. I just want to clarify why I'm changing tools. You use the text tool to create the text to type it all out, and then select the move tool if you want to change the color, the size, or the font. Just to throw in one more advanced tip for you. If you select the text box with the move tool, you can hold down Alt or option and then use the arrow keys on your keyboard to change the kerning, which is the space between the individual letters. This might come in handy for you with some of the fonts. I just wanted to mention that. And just like that, now you know how to add text to tier designs. In the next video, I want to expand on this a little, and I'm going to show you how you can add brand new fonts into this program. Okay. 38. Adding New Fonts: Let's add some new fonts to affinity designer. Affinity will use any of the fonts that are already installed on your computer. But did you know that you can super easily add fonts to your computer? The website I like to use for this is called defantm This, in my opinion, is the best place to get all the fonts you want. They have a huge variety, and it's super easy to use. If you come down to this red box here, you can search by category, you can choose a font category like this. Once you find a category that you like, you can go ahead and scroll down and see all of these different fonts, and these fonts are listed by popularity. You can see that this one was actually downloaded 1 million times, which is pretty impressive. If you find a font that you like, all you need to do is press download. But before you do that, I just have a couple of tips for you that will help you to find the right font. My first tip is that you can actually type in some text right up here at the top. Then press Enter. Now all of these fonts will appear with that text. This is really useful for me personally. The other day, I wanted to make a YouTube thumbnail that said affinity Revolution. But I found myself downloading fonts over and over, trying to get the R to look right. I guess r is just a tricky letter. But then I realized if I type affinity revolution right up here, I can quickly scroll through this list and find just the right font for what I want. Another tip I have for you is that some fonts are free for personal use, and others are 100% free. If a font is 100% free, that means that you can use it for commercial work. If you want to filter and only find fonts that are free to use for commercial work, all you need to do is come up here and click on more options. Then check on 100% free, and then go ahead and press submit. Now, all of the fonts that you see here are 100% free for commercial use. Once you download a font, you'll need to install it on your computer. If you're on a Mac, go ahead and double click on this file. You'll then see a folder. Go ahead and open that up. Then go ahead and select all of the font files. If there's more than one, just click and drag, and then double click. Then you can press Install font. It looks like that's been downloaded. Now you can go ahead and close all of these folders, and you can also go ahead and delete the font folder. On a PC, it's a very similar process, but I actually don't own a PC computer to demonstrate this. I'm going to leave a link underneath this video to a quick YouTube video that shows you how to install fonts on windows. You just need to watch the video from a minute 30 to 3 minutes and he'll show you how to easily install fonts. After you've installed your font, you can go ahead and select your text and you can see that it's immediately available for you to use. If you remember what the font is called, you can also just start typing. It will automatically come up right here. That was pretty easy. Now you have the power to add as many fonts as you want and you can really get the specific font that you need for your design. In the next video, I'm going to show you another great resource that you can use for finding free photos and graphics. 39. Free Photos and Graphics!: In this video, I want to show you another great website where you can get free photos and illustrations to use in any of your designs, even for commercial work. That website is called pixabay.com. Go ahead and type in whatever you're looking for right here. Then press Enter. Then we can scroll down through all of the images here and we can download these images to download an image, just click on it. And then click right here where it says free download. Here you can choose any size that you'd like. I'll go ahead and press download. Once you have this downloaded, you can go ahead and open it in Affinity Designer. Back in Affinity Designer, just come up to the top of the screen and click on file, and then you can click on pen. Then I'll go ahead and open up this image that I've saved. Now we have it and we can use it for our design. Or we can make a new document. And then we can press Create. We can add this dog image to our photo by using the place image tool. This tool looks like a landscape photo right here. Go ahead and click on that, and then you can select the image and press open. Then all you need to do is click and this will place the image in your document. Now, this image is large, so I'll go ahead and use the tool to resize this. Now you can use it in your design. Once you have your photo as a layer like this, you can also add a border to it if you'd like. Just click on the stroke color. Then go ahead and add a color. In the stroke panel, we can increase the width. Now our little photo has a nice little border. That's a super easy way to add any photo. But let's say you're looking for something a little bit more specific. Maybe you want to add a vector graphic. Let's go back to Pixabay. And right up here where it says dog, I'll just click on that and I'll press Enter again. Now we're right back here to all of our dog photos to filter this and make it a vector graphic. All you need to do is click on photos, and then click on Vector graphics. Then you can scroll down here and see that all of these are vector graphics you can use. I'll go ahead and select this one. Then I'll press on free download and then make sure that you click on Vector graphic. Then press download. Back in affinity, I'm going to open this as a new document. I'll go to file and then open. Then I'll go ahead and select that vector graphic and I'll press open. If this dialogue pops up, that's okay. Just press open. Now you can see our beautiful design here. But what's interesting about this is that all of these dogs have their own layers associated with them over here in the layers panel. I'll click on this to open that up and wow you can see just how many layers are involved in the single document. If you want to clean up these layers a little bit and make it more manageable, this is actually pretty easy to do. Just make sure you have the move tool selected, and then click and drag to select one of the dogs. Then you can group all of these layers together by pressing command or control G. You can do this for all of the dogs in this document. I like to do this just to clean up the layers a little bit and make it easier to work with. Now that I've done that, I'll go ahead and select one of the dogs, and I'll press command or control C to copy it. Then I'll go back into our other dog document here, and I'll press command or control V to paste it in. Now we have both of our adorable dog images all in one place. You can go ahead and easily resize and position it. As I make it smaller though, you can see that this isn't resizing properly. I'm going to undo all of my resizing. Then I'm going to go to the strokes panel and I'm going to check on Scale with Object. Now as I resize it, it should resize just fine. That's how you can easily add any photos or vector graphics into your designs. I think Pixabay is a wonderful resource for this and can really help you out. Now that we're done learning about that, we're almost done with this chapter, and we're going to wrap it all up in the next video by completing a beautiful project. 40. Adventure Poster Project: In this video, we're going to create this adorable adventure poster. We're going to use so many of the skills that we learned throughout this chapter. And I think this is going to be a lot of fun. Let's get started. To start, let's make a new document. I'll come to the top two file and then new. For this document, I'm going to make it a width of 1,000 and a height of 1,500. That way, our document looks like a piece of paper that we printed this poster out onto. I'll go ahead and press Create. Okay. Now to start, let's go ahead and give our background a color. I'll grab the rectangle tool, and then I'll click and drag out a rectangle. I'll go ahead and give it a color. I think I'll go ahead and choose a nice yellow color. Since this is our background, I'm going to press on the lock icon so that we don't accidentally move this background. Next, let's make some trees. To make these trees, I'm going to stack triangles on top of each other. I'll go ahead and click and drag out a triangle here. I'll give it a nice color. Let's come over here and go to our greens and I'll go ahead and make this a nice dark green color. Okay. Because I want multiple triangles, I'll select the move tool. Then I'll hold down command or control and I'll click and drag to duplicate that out a few times. Now, I think this looks a little top heavy, so I'll select the top triangle here and I'll just make that smaller. Once you have a tree shape that you like, go ahead and select all of these layers and then use the add operation to combine them all together. Now we have one single shape here. I almost forgot we need to add a tree trunk. I'll come over here and use the rounded rectangle tool. I'll click and drag out a rectangle. Then I want to curve this just a bit like that. I'll go ahead and give it a color. I think I want to use the orange shoe and I'll just drag this back a little bit to make it a dark desaturated brown color. Then using the move tool, I'm just going to center this with the tree and I'll drag its layer underneath the other part of the tree. I think this tree looks really good. I'm just going to select both of these layers and I'll group them together with command or control G. Now that we have our tree, I want to use this tree to create a pattern of trees being duplicated around a circle. To start, I'm just going to resize this tree to make it a little bit smaller. Then I'll center it in the document. Then I'm going to grab the ellipse tool and I'll click and drag out while holding Shift, to make a perfect circle. I'll center it with the document. I'll make sure that it's lined up with the tree. Okay. I think I'll actually make the circle a little bit bigger. But I'm going to make sure to hold down command or control and shift while I do that. Then I'll lower it down. This should work nicely. The reason why I chose to add a circle is so that we can move the rotation point of this tree down here. That way it rotates around the circle. To do that, I'll select the tree and then click right here so that I can see it's rotation point. Then I'll drag this down, so it's centered in the circle. Now that we have the rotation point I'll set up, I'm going to duplicate this tree with command or control. Then while holding Shift, I'm going to rotate this tree 30 degrees like that. We've done all the prep work. Now's the fun part. I'm going to press command or control J multiple times until we have trees all around the circle. With this all set up, we no longer need this circle layer. I'll go ahead and delete that. I'll go ahead and click on this cross hair icon so that we no longer see this rotation point. I think this design looks really cool. To give it a little bit more flare. I'm going to change the color of every other tree. Starting with this one, I'll click in here and I'll select this green part, and I'm going to make it a blue color. I like this color, so I think that's what I'll use. From here on out, I'm just going to click twice on this green part. Then I can go ahead and come over to our swatches and I'll just click on that color. I'll double click and click on that color for every other tree around the circle. Now that we have that done, let's organize our layers a little bit. I'm going to close up all of these groups. Then I'm going to select all of these tree layers and I'll group them together. Now I can reposition this group however I'd like. I just want to make sure it's nice and centered in the document like that, and that it's on the top half of the document to make room for our words down here. Next, we're going to add a little something extra to our design by using a vector graphic coming over here to Pb. I'm going to type in the word sun You can see we have a lot of photos, but I want a vector graphic. I'm going to come over here to images and al select vector graphics. Now we have all these really cool vector graphics that we can use. But I'm looking for something maybe like that. Actually, I think I like this one. I'll go ahead and click on that and then I'll download it and I'll make it a vector graphic. I'll go ahead and press download on that. Back in designer. Now we can go ahead and place this. To do that. Let's go to file open. I'll select that vector graphic and then I'll press open and open. Then I'll just copy this with Command or Control C, and then I'll paste it into our document with Command or Control V. I'll go ahead and resize this. I'm going to position this right in the center of all of our trees. Now that I have the sun in here, I really like its colors, but it clashes with the background. Let's go ahead and adjust our background. I want to do that by selecting the rectangle and let's apply a radial gradient behind the sun. I'll get the fill tool out. Then I'll click and drag from the center point outward, and I'll change this to a radial gradient. I'm going to sample the colors of the sun to make this blend nicely with this new image. I'll select the center point. Then using the color picker. I'm going to sample this yellow color and I'll apply that color to this color stop. Then I'll select this outer color stop. I'm going to do the same thing. This time, I'm going to sample this outer color right here and I'll apply that. This looks really pretty. It blends a lot nicer with the sun. I think I do want to adjust that gradient though, so I'll click on the fill tool again. I'm just going to stretch this out. And we can adjust the midpoint as well. Okay, I think we're done with the design at the top. Now we can go ahead and add some words down here. To create a point of separation, I think I'm going to add a couple of lines here using the rectangle tool. I'm just going to click and drag a skinny rectangle here. I'm going to change the fill color to this orange color that we got from the sun. Okay. I'll center that. Let's do this one more time. I'll hold down command or control, and I'll click and drag to create a second line. Okay. Now I'll add our text underneath that. I'll go ahead and select the text tool. Then I'll click and drag. Let's type in the word adventure. I think I want to look for a new font for this. Let's head on over to For this text, I want to go in the typewriter category because I want this to look like it was a poster that you just see hung up on a camp bulletin board or something like that. I'm going to use this at right here. It's called JH typewriter. I'll go ahead and download that. Now over here on the desktop, I'll just double quick. I'll click again. This time, I'll go ahead and select all of these, I'll open them up, and then I'll install them. I'll close all of that and delete these. Now back over here and designer, we can go ahead and use that font. With a move tool selected, I'll come up here to our fonts, and I'll just start typing in J H. Now that font should come up. I think that font looks really cool. I'll just make sure that this is nice and centered in our document. It looks like these rectangles aren't centered, so I'll just move those. Okay. Okay. Okay. I think I want to adjust the curning of these letters, so I'll hold down Alt or Option, and I'm just going to make the space a little bit wider between them. Then I'll recenter it. I think I want to make this text white. That looks pretty nice. To make this text pop from the background even more. I think I'm going to add a layer effect. I'll click right here. I think I want to add a bit of a drop shadow. I'll click on outer shadow and I'll check that on. Then I'll raise up the radius, the offset and the intensity. Once you've adjusted these settings, how you like them, make sure that you turn on scale with object, and then you can close. As one last detail, I'm going to add a little bit of extra text underneath this. I'll grab the text tool, and then I'll click and drag a smaller version of this. This time, I'm just going to type explore the great outdoors Okay. I'll go ahead and shrink that down and line it up. A trick that I like to do is I like to line up my text with this text here. Then I like to shrink it down until it lines up with the other side. This just frames it nicely because the text is lined up on both sides. I'll go ahead and change the fail next. I'll make it a dark gray color. Now we can go ahead and reposition everything. And I think that's looking really nice. So with that, we've completed our adventure poster project. I hope you enjoyed using all of these skills that we've accumulated throughout this chapter. Now that we're done with this chapter, and the next one, we're going to learn about the pixel persona. 41. The Pixel Persona: Affinity Designer has a little secret. In addition to all of these tools that we've been using throughout the course, affinity designer also comes with a whole other set of tools that you can use. These other tools are what you would normally find in a photo editing program like Affinity Photo. These tools are accessed in a whole different workspace, which you can get to by clicking on this button right up here. As you can see, we have a whole new set of tools over here on the left side, and we have new panels over here on the right side. This new workspace is called the pixel persona. Persona is just AffinitysFancy term for workspace. This is the pixel workspace. If you ever want to get back to affinity designers, regular workspace, you can do that by pressing on this button. This normal workspace is called the designer persona. It's pretty special that affinity designer offers this whole separate workspace so that you don't get overwhelmed by having so many tools on your side bar at once. Go ahead and go back to the pixel persona, since that's where we'll be working in the next video. Also, I'm going to remove a few of these panels like I did back in the designer persona. Since the only ones we'll be using are the layers panel, the brushes panel, and the color panel. I'll just quickly do that. I'm also going to move the brushes panel up here. That way we can quickly navigate between the color and brushes, and the layers panel can always stay visible. As a reminder, you can always add more panels back into this by going up to the top of the screen to window. Then you can click here to add any of those windows back in, or you could reset your studio. Now that our work space is all cleaned up, let's jump in and see what the pixel persona can do in the next video. Okay. 42. Paint Brush Tool: This video we'll learn about the paint brush. In the pixel persona, you can do basic photo editing. If you're familiar with photo editing tools, the pixel persona is where you can access affinity selection tools, which are crucial to advanced photo editing. But photo editing isn't really the point of this course. What we're interested in is the Pixel persona's paint brush. We can use this paint brush to add texture to our designs. With the paint brush selected, I'm going to go ahead and add a new pixel layer. I'll click this button right here. This pixel layer is a blank layer that our paint will go onto. Now we can go ahead and paint. The paint brush has quite a few options up in the context toolbar, and the two that are most important to worry about are the width and the flow. The width is what controls how big your paint brush is. You can type in a number here. To have a smaller brush. You can also use the drop down to adjust the size of your brush. You can use scrubby sliders to click and drag over the word. But my personal favorite way to adjust the size is to use the bracket keys on my keyboard. These keys are found next to the letter P. If you click the right bracket key, your brush will get larger. If you click the left bracket key, your brush will get smaller. Sometimes I just find this easier to quickly use the bracket keys as I'm painting, rather than come up here and change the width, but feel free to do whatever works better for you. The other option I want you to pay attention to is the flow. Flow changes how much paint you're applying with each paint stroke. If we make it a lower number, Then each paint stroke will only apply a little bit of paint at a time, and you can slowly build it up the more you paint over the area. 100% flow is what we were already working in. That's 100% paint. It allows you to very quickly add paint to your canvas. But sometimes you might just want to carefully blend in painting, and that's when you'd want to lower your flow. The paint brush has a lot of other settings, but those are the only two that you need to worry about to make beautiful designs in this course. If you come over here, you can change the color of your brush using the color panel. Finally, let's take a look at this beautiful, amazing brushes panel. This brushes panel has a wide variety of different brushes that you can choose from. Right now we're in the basic area. You can see all of these are pretty normal standard round brushes. But if you click here, you can see we actually have so many categories of different textures that we can use. If I go into this watercolor category, you can see, wow, there are so many different ones here to choose from. I'll go ahead and just pick one. Now you can see that as I'm painting, it looks like watercolor, which is pretty cool. Let's try one more. Maybe let's do sprays and splatters. These look pretty cool. You can go ahead and paint with those two. This is what I would generally use the paint brush for in affinity designer. These textures are so cool and they can really help to add a little bit of spice to your design. Now that you understand a bit more about how the paint brush works, we're going to explore more of the different ways you can add texture in the next video. 43. Adding Texture: Let's add some texture. I'm going to start this video off with this blank document here. Then I'll go into the designer persona. Now I'm going to create a circle shape, so I'll select the ellipse tool. Then we'll hold in shift, I'll click and drag, and I'll go ahead and center this in our document. Then I'll give it a color. I think I'll choose a nice blue color here. Using this circle, we're going to add some texture to it. To add texture, let's go back into the pixel persona, and then we can get out the paint brush tool and add a new pixel layer, and we can go ahead and add some paint right on top of this. To add our texture, we can really use any of the brushes that we want. Let's go into a new category, the textures. I'll just scroll through here. I think I'll go ahead and go with this one. Then without brush selected, I can go into our colors and choose a new color. I think I'll go with this blue color, but I'll just make it a bit darker. Now we can go ahead and paint over our circle. Right now, our paint is spilling over the sides to prevent that from happening. All we need to do is make this pixel layer a child layer to that circle. Now you can see it beautifully snaps into place. We have this nice crisp edge. I think this looks really pretty. It reminds me of the moon. All right. That's a very easy, simple way to add texture to shapes. Basically, that's it. Let's go ahead and do one more practice example by opening the exercise file that came for this chapter. Okay. Huh. With this exercise file, I want to add some texture to make the plant pot and the plant itself a little bit more interesting. Especially with a shape like this. All of these leaves start to blend together, even though they're all separate layers. By adding a little bit of texture here and there, we should be able to make each of these individual leaves stand out a little bit more. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start by just applying some texture to this pot. Now, automatically, this has opened in the designer persona. We need to move over to the pixel persona and then select the paint brush tool. Then I'm going to go ahead and add a new pixel layer and I'm going to make this a child layer to our pot. Now you can see that there. Now we can add some texture to our pot. I think I want to go with a color that's a little bit darker of an orange. Then I'll go into our brushes. Again, we can choose any brush that we want. I think I'm going to go back to the sprays and splatters. I think I'm going to use this one, the finest spray tilting. Yeah. With that brush selected, it looks like it automatically is quite small. I'm just going to increase the width. That looks pretty good, maybe a bit larger. I'm really bumping up the width here. There we go. Because this is a child layer, I can paint right on the edge and it will only appear on the edge of the pot, which is pretty nice. I'm going to continue to add some spray. Right now, this is looking a bit harsh. I think I'll lower the flow of this brush so that we can softly blend the spray into this pot. I added a bit of texture, adding a bit more texture on this right side. That way, it's a texture and shadow effect. I think I want to give this a little bit more color though. Going back to the color panel, I'm going to choose a lighter orange color, and I'm just going to add a little bit more lightness to this side. Maybe make it even lighter. Just to give a little bit of a high light effect on this side. I think I went too far. I'll press command or control Z to undo that. But now you can see we have this really pretty era cada looking pot with even a little bit of shading. It was as simple as adding some texture and changing up the colors. Here's the before and after. Let's do the same process, but this time we'll do it on the leaves. Starting with this far left leaf, I'll go ahead and add a new pixel layer and I'll make it a child layer to this leaf. Make sure you have your pixel layer selected here. I think I want to use this blue color. I'll go ahead and sample that and select it. But I'm going to make it a bit darker. With the plant pot, we made the darker side on the right. I'm going to do the same thing here, adding this darkness to the right side. I like adding the texture all over, but then just building it up more on one side. I think that looks pretty nice. I'm going to continue this with all of the other leaves. Let's move on to the middle left. We'll add a pixel layer and make it a child layer. Then we can do the same thing over here. Okay. And remember, you can always adjust the flow of your brush if you want this to be a little less intense. All right. There we go. I just finished adding texture to all the leaves. I think this looks really nice. Now you can see just how simple adding texture can be. As one final tip, I want to remind you that at any time you can access the HSL adjustment and change up these colors. For example, I'm going to come into the plant pot group, and I'm just going to select the layer. Then I'll add an HSL adjustment to it. Then I can shift the hue of the texture, and you can see just how much we can change that up. We can change it just slightly. Maybe I'll make it a little bit more red but a little less saturated and a little darker. I just wanted you to keep that in mind. At any time you could change up the colors. As simple as that, we've added some beautiful texture. I know this was a very short chapter, but we're actually ready to move on to the final project of this chapter in the next video, where we're going to create a super adorable popsicle design. We'll get started with that in the next video. 44. Ice Cream Practice Project: This video, we're going to do the final project of this chapter by creating this super adorable ice pop. It's going to be a lot of fun, and I think this looks really cute. Let's go ahead and get started. Starting with our blank document, I'm going to make the main body of our popsicle. I'm going to go ahead and grab the rectangle tool. I'll click and drag to make a long rectangle like this. Then I'm going to use the corner tool. Now, the reason why I want to use the corner tool is because I only want to curve these top two nodes here. I'll click and drag to select them both, and then I'll bring them both in until these circles overlap like that. Now you can see we have this cute little ice pop shape. We can also select these bottom nodes and round them just a little bit. Now we can go ahead and give our rectangle a color. I think I want this to be an orange cream cycle, but feel free to do whatever you want. Now I'm just going to use the move tool to make sure this is nice and centered. I'll just raise this up a little bit to make room for the popsicle stick. This time, I think I'll just use the rounded rectangle tool. I'll click and drag out a rounded rectangle. Then I'll go ahead and curve the stick in just a little bit. I'll make sure this is centered and as long as I want it to be. Then I'll go ahead and give it a color. This time, I'm going to go with a brown color like that. I'll just drag this underneath our popsicle. All right. Next, I'm going to add a few more details to make this look more realistic. First, I'm going to give a shadow to our popsicle stick down here, I'm going to use the pen tool to do that. I'll select the pen tool. Then I'm just going to click here and here. Then I'll go ahead and close it up here. I've created a shape like that. I'm going to give this a black fill. I'll go ahead and bring it underneath our popsicle layer. Now we can go ahead and adjust this however we want. Using the node tool, you can see we can drag this downward to make more of a shadow. But I think I'm just going to keep it small like that. Then I'm going to lower the opacity of this shadow. Next, I'm going to add a little bit of a highlight. I'm going to use a different tool for this. Go over here toward tools, I'm going to select the doughnut tool. Then I'll click and drag out a doughnut shape. Now, you don't need to hold shift or keep it proportional. Because in this case, I want to try to match the curvature here of this ice cream. I think I'm actually going to make it a little bit flatter. You see how that matches up on that side. We're just trying to get the curves to match up, and I think that looks pretty good. Now, I'm going to change the fail to white. Now here's where these orange nodes will come in handy. I'm going to drag these orange nodes around to make this look more like a highlight shape. There we go. Now you can start to see it. We have this little highlight coming around here. I think that looks pretty good. To make this look more rounded and natural, I'm going to use the corner tool, and I'm just going to select this shape and highlight all of the nodes. Then I'm going to bring them all inward until they're all super curved. Now you can see what that looks like. Your highlight might look a little bit different from mine, and that's totally okay. As long as you have a highlight here, I think the effect looks pretty nice. Now I'm going to select this curve, and I think I'm just going to lower the opacity a little bit to give it an orange tint. Now it's time for the grand finale. We're going to add some texture to this ice pop. I'll go ahead and go into the pixel persona. Then I'll grab the paint brush tool. And I'll add a new pixel layer. Let's go ahead and start by adding a texture to the popsicle stick. I'll make this a child layer to that. Then we can go ahead and select which brush we want to use. Now, there's no right or wrong texture. Feel free to use whatever you want. In this case, a brush that I think looks pretty good for this is a watercolor brush and I'm going to select the fourth one down. Then I'm going to change the color. I'll go ahead and sample this brown color. But I'll make it a little bit darker. Okay. And now with a nice big brush, I'm just going to do one pain stroke downward. Okay. Now you can see what that looks like. Here's the before and after. I really like the texture that this is added, but I think I want this to stand out a bit more. I'm actually going to have that layer selected and I'm going to add an HSL adjustment to it. Then I'm going to shift the luminosity down and you can see how this just makes it pop a little bit more by darkening that color even more, we're getting more contrast. I think I will increase the saturation a bit and maybe nudge it over a little bit toward red by moving the hue slider over to the right. Okay. That popsicle stick really does look like a wooden popsicle stick. I'm really proud of that. Now we can go ahead and add some texture to the ice cream. I'm going to add a new pixel layer and this time, I'll make it a child layer to the ice cream. I'm going to go ahead and sample the orange paint color right here. I'll apply that to my brush. This time, I'm just going to make it slightly more red. Then I'll go into our brushes and we can choose a nice brush for this. I want to give this some texture like it has some iciness to it. A brush that I tested and really liked for this is in the sprays and splatters and it's the very bottom one. Go ahead and make the brush nice and big. Then you can go ahead and paint over this popsicle. I think I like how this looks, but I want to adjust the colors a little bit. I actually think I'm going to add another HSL adjustment to this texture here. I'm going to make it slightly less red by moving the hue slider to the left. Then I'll increase the saturation a little bit and I'll just make it a little bit darker. I think I like that better. You can see that before and after. It's a little bit subtle, but I think this looks nice. Maybe I'll make it a bit. Okay. And with that, I think our texture looks really nice. Let's go back to the designer persona. Here in the designer persona. I'm going to select the move tool and I'll select all of the layers. I'm just going to center them. To finish off our design, let's give the background some pizzas. I'm going to go ahead and add the rectangle tool and I'll just make a rectangle in the background. Then I'll drag it underneath everything. I'll just close up these groups. There we go. With this background, I wanted to go from more of a white color in the center to more of a peach color on the outside. I'll use a gradient to do that. I'll select the fill tool. Then starting from the center of the popsicle, I'm just going to click and drag outward. Then I'll make it a radial gradient. Let's start by adjusting this center color. I want this to be almost white. Then with this outer color stop, I'm going to make this a light peach color. Just make it a little bit more red. I really like how that looks. The very last thing I want to do is I'm actually going to add some texture to this gradient background. Coming back into the pixel persona. I'm going to add one more new pixel layer, since it's on top of that rectangle, it'll only affect the rectangle, so that's perfect. I'll go ahead and make sure I have the paint brush selected. Then I'll make sure that I have some nice orange paint. Then I'll go into our brushes. Now, I want to create a swirly texture to the background, and I think the watercolor brushes are really good for this. I'm going to scroll down and I'll select the second to last brush here. I'll go ahead and make this nice and large. Wow, that's very big. Maybe a little less. Okay. Now I can go ahead and paint across the background. Now you can see we have this nice shirley texture. Here's the before and after. Feel free to adjust this however you want. Maybe you want to lower the opacity and just keep it subtle. Maybe you want to add an HSL adjustment to make the colors different. Feel free to do whatever you want to that, and then we are done. I think this turned out super cute. I really like how this looks. I hope you enjoyed this project. I don't know if you believe this, but we're actually almost done with this course. We just have one more chapter left where we're going to complete a few final projects together. Go ahead and get ready for that, and I'll meet you in the next chapter. 45. Final Projects: 's bring together everything that you've learned throughout this course. In this special project based chapter, we're going to complete three different projects together. We'll start by making this super adorable monkey head. Then we're going to create this really cool explorer badge and we'll finish off this whole course by making this rocket ship. These projects are really fun to complete. Let's go ahead and get started. 46. Monkey Head Project: Okay. In this first final project, we're going to create this adorable monkey head design. This is going to be a lot of fun and we're really going to be working with combining shapes together to create this. Let's go ahead and get started. To start, let's go ahead and grab the ellipse tool, while holding Shift, let's make a big circle. I'm going to go ahead and center this. There we go. I'm going to make the fill black. Now, this will be the base of our monkey head. Go ahead and make this as large as you'd like. I think I'll make mine slightly larger, so I'll just hold down command or control and shift, and I'll drag to do that. Now we have the head. Now, we're just going to create two ears. Instead of holding shift, I'm going to just drag out an oval shape like that. Then I can go ahead and place the ear. I think I'll make mine a little bit larger like that. You can adjust the position on the head how you like. I think I want to keep it pretty well centered, maybe slightly downward. With that looking good, I'm just going to grab the move tool and while holding shift and command. I'm going to drag this across to the other side. And now we have our basic monkey head outline. I think this looks pretty nice so far. Once you like the placement of how this all looks, go ahead and select all of the layers and then use the add operation to make them all nice and consolidated into one shape. Next, let's go ahead and make the face. I'll grab the ellipse tool again. Then we'll hold in shift. I'm going to click and drag a little circle like this, and then I'll turn it white. Now, this little circle is going to be for one of the areas. I'll go ahead and hold down command or control and shift, and I'll go ahead and drag that out to make a second area. Then I'll go ahead and select both of these. Using the move tool, I'll just make sure these are nice and centered. It looks like it's snapping to two areas the head and the center of the document. That means that this shape must not be perfectly centered. I'll go ahead and center that up. Then I'll center up these eyes. That's better. Now with the ellipse tool, I'm just going to do this one more time, dragging out an oval shape for this bottom area. I want to stretch it so it's the same length as these other two circles so that they match up on each side. I'll just drag this down a little bit to round it out. With that looking good, I'm just going to select all of these white circles, and I'll use the add operation to put them all together. Now it's time to add a few face details. Using the ellipse tool. I'm going to click and drag out a oval shape, and this will be used for the nose. I'll make it black. I'll go ahead and center it like that. Now it's time to make the eyes. I'm going to click and drag while holding Shift, and you're going to want to make these a little bit smaller than you think. Something like that. Then while holding command or control and shift, go ahead and drag that to the other side. This looks like it's lined up perfectly with the nose, which is great. I'll go ahead and leave those as is. Now you might be thinking, we have this whole eye area. Why not center it with that eye area. But the reason for this is I'm making a more compact face to make the monkey appear and younger. You can feel free to adjust the positions if you'd like. But that's just why I'm doing that. To give the eyes a little bit of life. I'm going to click and drag with the ellipse tool while holding shift to make a small circle and then I'm going to turn it white. This small circle will be like a little highlight. I'll just make that a little bit bigger. Then we can place that wherever we want, whichever direction you put it in is the direction that it will look like this monkey is looking in. Go ahead and reposition that. I'll hold command or control and shift, and then I'll move this to the other eye. And I think that's looking really good. Now that I finish those eyes, just to keep things organized, I'll select all of the eye layers, and then I'm going to group them with command or Control G. Now to fill in some of this top area, I'm going to give our little monkey character some eyebrows. Let's go into our shapes and see which shape would work for that. I think the crescent tool would look pretty good. I'll select that. Then I'll click and drag a crescent shape. I'll go ahead and make that black, then I'll rotate it. Okay. I think I want this monkey to look a little bit surprised. I'll keep the eyebrows raised like that. Then I'm going to duplicate this while holding command or control, and then I'll click and drag. I want this to be a perfect mirror. I'm going to use the flip horizontal option right here, and then I'll move it in place. Our monkey already looks very surprised to add a little bit more surprise. Let's go ahead and add his mouth. I'll come over to our tools again. This time, I'll go ahead and use the segment tool. Then I'll click and drag out a segment. You can already start to see that he looks a little bit surprised. That's pretty cute. I want this to look a little less harsh on the bottom though. I'm going to use the corner tool. I'll select both of these lower nodes and then I'll round them inward. If you haven't already, go ahead and use the move tool to rotate the mouth a little bit. Now I'm going to add a tongue to his mouth. To do that, I'm just going to go to the ellipse tool again. Then I'll click and drag an oval shape like that, and I'll make it white. I'll go ahead and make this a child layer to the mouth. You can see we have a slight stroke right here, but I want this to stand out a little bit more to create some separation between the mouth and the tongue. To do that, I'm actually going to select the mouth shape, and I'm going to add a stroke to it. We already have a black stroke here. In the stroke panel, I'm just going to increase the width. Now you can see we have a bit more separation. I think that looks better. This is looking so good so far. Let's add a little bit more detail to our monkey's face by giving him a little bit of a shadow detail. To do that, I'll go ahead and grab the pen tool. Then I'm going to make sure that I'm in smart mode so that we have curved nodes. Then I'm just going to use the pen tool to trace the left side of the face. I'll start nice and high up here. Then I'll click inward, here and here. Inward here and here. Then I'll just go around to close up the shape. I'm going to fill this using the color panel. I'll just click on the fill color and I'll make it black. Then I'll go ahead and lower the opacity quite a bit, just to make this a very subtle shadow. Then I'll go ahead and make this a child layer to the face. I think I like how this looks. I think I want this node to reflect the pointiness of his face right here. So I'll select that node and convert it to a sharp node. Then I think I'm just going to drag everything in a little bit. Okay. Okay, I think this looks pretty nice. This is just adding a little bit of detail there. And I don't really like this top one intersecting with the eyebrow. So I think I'm actually going to pull that back a bit. That's looking pretty good. Now the next thing we need to do is make the inner ear area. Right now, they're just black, but I'm going to use some white circles to add in some more detail. I'll go ahead and select the ellipse tool. Then I'll click and drag out an oval shape that looks similar to the shape of the ear already. I'll go ahead and make this white. Then I want to make some alterations to this circle. Go ahead and get the shape how you like it first. Okay. And then I'm going to convert this to curves. Now, using the node tool, I'm going to add a couple of nodes to create the ear shape. I want to create a indent right here to mimic the shape of an ear. To do that, I want to move this node inward. However, if I grab the move tool and do that now, then the whole oval will move. We won't have a sharp indent like I'm thinking. I'll do that with command or control z. Instead, to create the indent that I want, I need to add another node. I'm going to add a node above and below. Then I'll go ahead and drag this node inward. Now you can see we have a nice indentation. I like how that ear looks so far. I think I want to add a shadow to it, similar to the face shadow. I'll grab the pen tool, and I'm just going to create a little bit of a curve here. I'll close it up around the outside, and I'll fill it with black. Then I'll make it a child layer to the ear and I'll go ahead and lower the opacity. Now, I want the opacity of this shadow to match the face shadow. I need to go back to the face shadow layer and see what its opacity is. It looks like this shadow has a 12% opacity. Now going back to the ear, I'll just make sure to lower that to 12. Now I'm going to select the move tool and I'm going to select this ear layer with the shadow included. Then I'm going to duplicate this. I'll press command or control J to duplicate it. Then I'm going to flip it horizontally using this option here. Then while holding Shift, I'll click and drag to place this in the other ear. At this point, you can adjust any of the placements that you want. But I actually think mine looks pretty good, so I'm going to leave it as is, and we're done. Great work on this project. I think that was a lot of fun. It was a really great final project for this course. With that one finished. You're ready to move on to the next project, where we're going to create a rocket ship. 47. Rocket Ship Project: In this video, we're going to complete a rocket ship project. Now, this project will be pretty fun because we'll get to experiment with different ways of putting shapes together and cutting them out. We also get to use a color palette that I already prepared for this video. Let's go ahead and jump into Affinity Designer. Starting here, I already created a new document. It can be any size that you want. Let's start by importing those swatches that I prepared. Coming up here to the swatches panel, I'll go to the Hamburger menu and then we'll go down to where it says, import palette, and I'll go ahead and add this as a document palette. Little sneak peek. We have one for the next video too, but let's go ahead and click on the rocket colors. Then we'll press open. These are the colors that we'll use in this rocket. I kept it nice and simple with just five colors, but this will really create a really pretty design. To get started, we're going to make the rocket body. To do this, I'm going to grab the ellipse tool. Then I'm going to click and drag a long skinny oval like this. I'll go ahead and center that in the documents. Then I'm going to fail this with this light color here. Then I'm going to add a black stroke to this shape. It looks like we already have one, but I'll just select that and use this swatch color. Then we'll go over to the stroke panel and I'll go ahead and increase the width. I think I'll increase it to around ten pixels. Now to refine this shape a little bit more. I'm going to convert this oval to curves. The reason why I'm doing that is because I want the top to be a little bit more sharp. I'm going to come over here and select the node tool. Then I'll select this node, and I'll make it a sharp node. Then just to balance it out, also make this a sharp node down here at the bottom. Next, I want to cut out a little bit of a notch here at the bottom. To do that, I'm going to use the Ellipse tool. I'll go ahead and select that. Then I'll click and drag out an ellipse shape, and I'll make sure that it's nice and centered with this rocket. Go ahead and pull it up as high as you want your notch to be. I think I like that shape right there. Now with that selected and the other layer selected, I'm going to go ahead and cut this out by using the subtract operation right up here. Perfect. Now we have the rocket body, you can totally see the shape now. Now we get to add all the little extra details to this rocket. To start, I'm going to create a rocket blaster nozzle to the bottom. I don't know. I'm not a rocket scientist, but let's go ahead and grab that rectangle tool. Then go ahead and click and drag out a square like that and make sure that it's centered. I'm going to go ahead and go to the swatches panel, and I'm going to make the fill of this one, this purple color right here. Then I'll go ahead and drag this underneath our rocket. This is where our smoke will come out of. I think that looks a little bit too tall, so I'll just shrink that down. The next thing I'm going to create is a few wings to come off of the rocket. I'm going to use the crescent tool to do this. Come on over here to our shapes and select the crescent tool. Then go ahead and click and drag out a crescent shape. I'll go ahead and make the fill of these wings, this red color. Then I'll go ahead and position these on the rocket. I'm just going to rotate this. I think I want this to be a little bit flatter. I'm just going to curve that in or maybe just make it skinnier like that. I'm going to curve it in a little bit. Then I'm going to place it underneath everything. Go ahead and adjust the wing, however you'd like. And make sure that it's nice and lined up with the bottom here. I think I like that shape. Now I'm going to duplicate this, I'll hold down command or control J to duplicate it. Then I'm going to flip it horizontally and I'll go ahead and drag this to the other side. I made sure that the tips of these are both lined up with the very center of the document. That way, they're the same distance apart. But I think they're a little bit too wide that way. To make sure that they stay evenly space like this, I'm going to hold down shift and use my arrow keys to move these a certain amount. Let's go ahead and see what this looks like. I'll hold shift and I'll use the arrow key to move it inward, one, two, I think two times is good. I'll just do that to the other side. I'll hold shift and use the rokeys one, two, and now they should be the exact same distance apart. I'm going to make a third wing right here in the center, but I'm not going to use a crescent tool for this since this is a different angle. Instead, I'm going to use the ellipse tool and I'll just click and drag out a skinny ellipse like this. Then I'm going to use the same technique that I used to create the body. I'm going to convert this shape to curves. Then I'll select the node tool and I'll change this top node to a sharp node, and I'll change the bottom one to a sharp node as well. A looks pretty good. I think I like how this looks. However, I do think I want to stretch out the rocket body a little bit more. I'll select the move tool, and I'm just going to drag this out a little bit to make a little bit more room because the next thing we're going to add is a little bit of a cone shape right up here at the top. To create this little cone shape section, I'm going to grab the ellipse tool, and then I'm going to click and drag while holding Shift to create a super large circle. I'll put this on top of everything, and all you should be able to see is just this little top section of the rocket. Now this is all we want to keep to create this cone shape at the top. But if we subtracted the circle from the rest of the rocket right now, then the whole rest of the rocket would disappear. Instead, I'm going to go ahead and select the rocket body, and I'm going to duplicate it with command or control. Then I'll go ahead and drag this up here and I'm going to subtract the circle from it. The circle should be on top, go ahead and select that body layer, and then use the subtract operation. And just like magic. Now we have this separate shape here. You can see this is a totally different layer here. We still have our original rocket and this piece. I'll go ahead and make the fill of this piece, that red color. Now you can really start to see this rocket coming along. The next thing I want to add is a little window for our astronauts to look out of. To do that, I'm going to grab the Ellipse tool and then I'll click and drag while holding Shift to create a perfect circle. I'll make sure that's nice and centered. And I'm going to make it nice and large like that. Then I'm going to create an interior window as well to add the glass part of the window. I'm going to select the circle layer and I'm going to duplicate it with command or control J. With this duplicate copy, I'm going to resize it while holding command or control and shift so that it resizes from its center point. Then I'm going to make the fill of this purple color. I think I want the window to be a little bit larger. I'm actually going to select this wing and I'm just going to drag it downward. That way, I can select both of these layers. I'll go ahead and resize them while holding shift, and then I'll center them. I think I'm going to make this internal circle a little bit bigger. I'll hold command or control and shift. There we go. Actually, I think I made it too big. Proportions are hard. Sorry. That took me a little bit to get right, but I think that window size looks good. The next thing that I'm going to do is I want to add a shadow to give this rocket a little bit more dimension. I'm going to do that by adding a shadow to half of this rocket. To do this, I'm going to grab the rectangle tool. Then I'm going to click and drag out a rectangle across the entire right side of this rocket. I'll make the fill this black color, and I'll make sure to remove the stroke. Then I'm going to make this a child layer to a few different parts of this rocket. Starting with the rocket body, I'll just drag that on top. Then I'll lower the opacity. I think I'll lower it quite a bit to around 20%. Maybe a little higher. I changed my mind. I think I like how 30% looks. Now, that's only being applied to the body right now, so it looks a little bit strange. I'm going to duplicate this with command or Control J. Then I'm going to drag it and make it a child layer to the wing, just this middle wing right here. Now you can see that's being applied to this center wing. I'll duplicate it again with command or Control J. I'm going to make it a child layer to the little cone shape on the top. Now you can see we have it applied to this shape, the body, and this wing. It looks like we're just missing this wing. I'll go ahead and duplicate it one more time. Then I need to find that wing. There it is. I'll just drag that on top. Now you can see we have a shadow on the right side of the entire rocket. I think this looks pretty good. I didn't want to apply it to the window because window glass. I'm not really sure how the shadow would look with that. I think this looks good. I'm just going to do that. Now that I'm looking at it, I think the shadow on the body looks a little bit too dark, but I like how it looks everywhere else. I'm just going to come to the body layer and with its child layer selected. I'm just going to lower the opacity a bit. I think I like that better. At this point, I think we've built our rocket very nicely. I'm actually going to group everything together. I'll hold shift to select everything, and then I'll press command or control G. Now with everything selected and put into a group, I'm going to go over to the stroke panel and I'll turn on scale with object. This means as I resize and move our rocket around, all of the strokes will scale with it and they'll stay the proper size. I'll go ahead and make this a little bit larger, but I'll make sure to keep it in the center. This is pretty exciting. We're done with the rocket now. Now we just get to add a few little environmental details to really sell the fact that this is a rocket. To start with these environmental details, I'm going to create a circle shape for the background. I'll grab the ellipse tool and then we'll holding shift. I'll click and drag out a circle like that. I want the rocket to peek out of the top of this circle like it's blasting out of it. I'll go ahead and drag this to the bottom though. I'm going to change the fill of this circle to the purple color. Oops I had my stroke selected, I'll just make that the black color. I'll select the fill and make that the purple color. Now that I'm looking at it, I think this is a little bit too much black stroke going on. I'm going to select the ellipse and I'm actually going to make the stroke this purple color, but I want to make it a little bit lighter than the internal purple. I'll go to the color panel. I'm just going to make this a little bit of a lighter purple color. That looks pretty nice. Now it's bothering me that it's not centered anymore. I'm going to select both of these, and with the move tool, I'll just drag it up. Perfect. We have our rocket and we have a little bit of a frame as a last step. I'm going to add some smoke that's coming out of the rocket, and this is where we finally get to use this last swatch color, the yellow. To start adding the smoke, I'm going to select the Ellipse tool. Then I'm going to click and drag out a circle by holding shift. Then I'm going to remove the stroke, and I'm going to change the fill to this yellow color. Then I'm going to select the move tool. This is where we can get fun and creative and you can place these circles wherever you want. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make this circle a little bit smaller first. Then I'm going to make this a child layer to our circle so that it's locked into the circle. Now with that circle layer selected, I'm going to duplicate it and move it around to create this smoke shape. I'll press command or Control J, and I'll go ahead and move that around, or you can just press command or control, and you can just keep that held down as you duplicate circles. I don't really like that these circles are snapping. It's making it hard to move them around. I'm going to temporarily turn off snapping. Then I'll continue to move them around while holding down command or control. As a tip, if you have a big area like this at the bottom, you could just fill it in with a larger circle. That's totally fine. Once your circles have covered everything at the bottom, we're going to add some smoke that's coming directly out of our rocket ship. I'm just going to zoom in here so that we can see the area that we're working with. Now, to create the smoke that's coming out, I'm going to use the rectangle tool, and I'll go ahead and click and drag out a rectangle like this. Then I'm going to convert this to curves. I'm going to do something a little bit tricky here to create a shape that looks like this with the sides coming inward. I needed to convert this to curves and then alter a few of the nodes. To start, I'm going to grab the node tool. Then I'm going to click and drag out this point while holding shift to keep it nice and straight. Then I'm going to click and drag on this line to curve it in word. I like how it looks on this side, but I don't think I could duplicate it perfectly symmetrically on this side. Instead, I'm going to show you a little trick. Go ahead and position this how you want it. Then I'm going to duplicate this with command or control. Now we have two of those layers, and I'm just going to flip this horizontally and I'll go ahead and position it over here. Now, both of these smokes are coming out perfectly at the same angle. I think that looks pretty good. I'm just going to reposition this circle here. I think I'll make it a little bit larger just to cover that little space. I think I actually want to move both of these inward. I'll just select them both and make sure they're nice and centered with the document. It's not snapping to anything because I have my snapping turned off. I'll go ahead and turn that back on. Then I'll select both of them and center them up. Then if you want to get fancy, you can go ahead and merge all these shapes together if you wanted to just to clean up your layers. But they're already a child layer to this circle, so I can just close that up. Now you can go ahead and see our final version of this rocket ship. I think this project turned out so cool. All these different ways we subtracted shapes or converted them to curves and made them sharp. I just think this looks really cool. I hope you enjoyed it. We're actually almost done with the course. We only have one more project. Go ahead and get ready for that in the next video. Okay. 48. Explore Badge Project: The very first project that we did together in this course was a Sunset Mountain project. I thought it'd be fun to finish off this course by making another Sunset mountain. But this time, we'll see how much better we can make it with all of the new skills that we've learned. This is going to be a really fun way to finish off this course, so let's get started. To start off, I've already made a new document, and I also went ahead and imported those color swatches that we'll be using for this project. To get started, I want to create a badge shape. It'll look something like this. To do that, I'm going to use the rectangle tool. I'll click and drag out a nice long rectangle. Then I'm going to select the corner tool so that I can curve the bottom. To do that, I'll just select both of these bottom nodes and I'll drag them in until their circles overlap. That looks pretty good. Next, let's go ahead and give this rectangle some colors. I think for this rectangle, I'm going to make it stroke this brown color. Then I'm going to give it no fill. To see this better, let's go over to the stroke panel, and then I'll increase the width. I think I'll increase it to 20 pixels, and then I'll make sure that we have a nice sharp join and I'll turn on a scale with object. With that finished, I'll just grab the move tool and I'll make sure that this is nice and centered in our document. Now we're going to begin to fill in the details inside of the badge. To start, I think it'd be good to make our mountains. To create these mountains, I'm actually going to use the pen tool. I'll make sure that it's in polygon mode so that we have nice straight lines. Then I'll just create a little bit of a mountain landscape here. Then go ahead and close it up. I'll go ahead and give this a fill. Coming over to the swatches panel. I want to give this a brown fill and no stroke, pretty much the opposite of what we see here. As a little bonus tip, you can actually click on this arrow right here to switch these colors. Perfect. I think I want to adjust some of these nodes because some of these mountains look a bit lopsided. I'm going to grab the node tool and I'll go ahead and make a few adjustments here. Once you like how your mountain peaks look, go ahead and make it a child layer to this curve. I think our mountains look pretty good so far, but I want to add a little bit of snow on top. To do that, I'm actually going to use the pen tool. With the pen tool selected, go ahead and zoom in here and add a little bit of snow. To add the snow, I'm going to do this as a stylized snow. I'm just going to click and click. Then I'll go ahead and click here, here and here. Right now, this curve has no stroke or fill, and I want to make it the lightest yellow color for the fill. I'll go ahead and click on that. Now you can see how that looks. You can see it's a little bit stylized, but I think it's a pretty cool effect. I'm going to continue to give these mountains snow similar to this. I'll grab the pen tool and do this again, and I'll fill it with the yellow color and one last time. At this point, we can adjust any of the nodes we'd like. Remember that when you have the pen tool out, all you need to do is hold down command or control to temporarily have the node tool out and move the points around. Just to keep these layers tidy over here, I'm going to make all of these snowy peaks right here, a child layer to our mountains. I'll go ahead and do that now. Okay, so we're done with our mountains. I think this already looks pretty cool. However, I think I do want to move our mountain layer. Using the move, I'm actually going to use the arrow keys and shift on my keyboard to bump it down a few notches. I want there to be enough room to add a sun and some text up here. I think that spacing works a little bit better. With our mountains done, the next thing I want to add is the sun. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool and then I'll hold down shift to create a perfect circle. The fill of the sun should be the same color as the snow, this looks good. I'm going to place the sun beneath the mountain layer. That way it's just peeking out from behind. But I want this to still be in the group. I'll just make sure that it's underneath like that. If yours is fully under the group, it won't be inside this group at all. Make sure that it's dragged a little over to the side like that. Then it'll still be part of this group. Here's the fun part. I want to create multiple strokes on this circle to create the nice sunset colors. To do that, we're going to use the appearance panel. Starting right here with this first stroke, I'll go ahead and click it. I want to change the color. I'll go over to our swatches and I'll choose this color right here. Then I'm going to click right in here so we can change some of the settings. First, I'm going to change the alignment so that the stroke is on the outside of our sun. Then I'll go ahead and change the width. I want this to be nice and large. I think 90 pixels looks pretty good for this. Then I'll make sure scale with object is checked on. I'm going to do this a few more times. Let's go ahead and add another stroke. This time, I'll change the strokes color to the next color right here. I'll go ahead and increase the width. Now, keep in mind that this stroke is still a stroke to this original yellow circle. We actually need to make this a much larger width. The original stroke is 90 pixels. I need to double that. This is going to be 180 pixels. Make sure to align it with the outside or it'll look like this. And make sure scale with object is turned on. Then I want this to be underneath this first stroke here. I'll go ahead and drag it underneath like that. Let's keep going. I'll add another stroke. I'll change the color and we'll go ahead and use this next color here. This time, I'm going to add 90 pixels to that last amount. The last amount was 180. I'll just add 90 pixels again, so we'll go with two 70. I'll align this to the outside and I'll scale it with the object. Then I'll drag it beneath all the other strokes. Wow, this is really starting to come together. Let's do this one more time, just to finish filling out the sky. I think we're on this color. We'll go ahead and add 90 to two 70. We've made it all the way to three 60. I'll align it to the outside and scale it with object, and I'll drag it underneath all the other strokes. I think this looks really nice. At this point, I'm going to grab the move tool and we can actually reposition the sun. I think I want this a little bit lower in the sky. We can also resize it if you want to. Since we turned on scale with object, this should work perfectly and keep all of our strokes looking good. I'll shift and just make it a little bit smaller. Okay. Okay, and I think this looks pretty nice. Now we have our beautiful sunset and our mountains. The next thing I want to add is a little banner right up at the top that we'll say the word that we want to say. Before I do that, I think I'll just make this slightly bigger. Now, let's go ahead and add that banner. To do that, I'm going to grab the rectangle tool. Then I'm going to click and drag out a banner right here. Now you might be wondering what's going on? This looks really weird. Well, right now, this banner has a stroke similar to the last stroke that we added. You can see we actually have a 360 pixel stroke. To get rid of that. Let's go ahead and go over to the swatches panel, and I'll just say no stroke for that. I'm going to make sure this rectangle is a child layer to our original badge and it looks like it is. That's perfect. Now, let's go ahead and add some text to this banner. I'll go ahead and grab the text tool, and I'll click and drag to start our text. I'm going to type out the word explore. Okay. Now, right now, this text is black. I'm going to grab the move tool, and then I'm going to change the fill color right here to this brown color. Now we can choose a fun font. Let's come over here to our fonts, and you can really choose any font that you want that you think fits the vibe of this badge. I think I'm going to go with this one right here. I think that looks pretty nice. But feel free to use whichever font you want, it really doesn't matter. Once you have your font, you can go ahead and resize it and center it. Actually, now that I'm looking at it, I don't really like the way the ese look. Maybe I'll choose a different font. Oh, that one looks good. Perfect. I think since I chose a font that's a little bit more condensed down. I'm going to move this rectangle in to shorten it. Then I'll select the text and I'll center it again. I want to add a line here. To do that, I'll just use the pen tool. Go ahead and make sure it's in polygon mode. Then click on your first point and click on this point right here. I want this to be the same width and color as this outer border. I'm going to select the stroke. I'll make it that brown color. Then in the stroke panel, I'm going to make it the same thickness as the outer stroke, which was 20 pixels. This is looking really nice. Okay. Wow, I really like that. To add a little bit of sparkle, I'm going to add some stars to the sky. Now, I know this isn't entirely realistic during sunset, but I think it has a cool look, so we're just going to go with it. To make some stars, I'm going to use a new tool coming over here. I'm going to use the double star tool. I'll go ahead and click and drag while holding Shift. Wow, that looks really interesting. Right now, it has a stroke, I've actually never seen that before. That looks really cool. That's not exactly what I was going for though. But hey, if you want to give your tiny little star a really big stroke, I guess that's what happens. Very interesting. I'm actually going to make sure that this has no stroke. Now we have a tiny star. I want this star to have a yellow fill, so make sure you have that. Then selecting the move tool. I'm just going to make this a bit larger. I think I actually want to reduce the number of points. Right up here, it says we have five points. I'm just going to reduce that to four points. I think that looks a little bit better. Now we can add as many stars to the sky as we want. I'll just hold down command or control, and I'll click and drag to create more stars. Once you like how your stars look, we're going to make all of these stars a child layer to the badge. I'll select all of them while holding Shift. I'll go ahead and group them together with command or Control G. Then I'll make them a child layer to this original badge. Everything should be inside the badge. Okay, now to finish this off, let's create a really nice looking background. I'll grab the rectangle tool and I'll go ahead and click and drag out a rectangle. I'll make sure that this is underneath everything and outside of the group. I'll go ahead and lock this layer. Now we can go ahead and add a nice gradient to the background. I'll grab that fill tool. Then starting from the center of the document, I'll click and drag outward for the center color. I'm going to use the lightest orange color. Then for this outer color, I'm going to use the next one. I think this looks nice, but I'm going to make this a radial gradient so it's even coloring all around. In addition to adding this really pretty background, I want to make the badge stand out a little bit more. To do that, I'm first going to start by giving our badge another stroke. With that layer selected, go ahead and go to the appearance panel and then add another stroke. I want this stroke to be underneath our original stroke. Then I'll go ahead and click on the color, and I'm going to make it this light yellow color. Then I'll click on the stroke settings, and I'll go ahead and increase the width. I think I'm going to make this Actually, first, I'm going to align it to the outside. Then I'll make this about 30 pixels, and I'll give it sharp corners. Of course, I'll turn on scale with object. I think that looks pretty nice. To separate it from its background even more, let's go ahead and add a drop shadow. I'll select the badge layer, and then I'll go to the F x. I'll go to outer shadow and I'll check that on. Then we can go ahead and give this a nice little shadow off to the side here. I'll make sure scale with object is turned on and then we're good to go. Because we were turning on scale with object all along the way, if we resize this, everything should resize perfectly. With that, we're done. Congratulations on finishing the last project of this course. I think this turned out a lot better from our first project, and I'm really of all the work that we put into this. Great job. 49. Class Conclusion: Great job. You made it to the end of the course. I'm so proud of you. You've been able to learn so many different designer skills throughout this course, and now you're ready to go off and create your own projects. I'm really proud of all the work that you've done, and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.