Affinity Designer V1 | Using the Pencil Tool, Sculpt Mode & Masks

1. Welcome | Class Project: [MUSIC] Hi, I'm Tracey Capone. I'm an illustrator, photographer and teacher. Welcome to my class all about creating floral typography right on your iPad using Affinity Designer. When you take this class, you'll learn how to create your own custom letters using designers built-in shapes and geometric operations, and how you can use pre-made font in your design as well. We'll also use designers shape tools to easily create the flowers and leaves so using your design, and I'll show you the quickest way to add texture to them for more dimension. We'll take a look at the Asset Studio where you can see your finished objects both as single and group players for use in multiple projects. Finally, I'll show you how to use a duplicate of your letter shape to mask your florals into another letter and use the sculpt mode on the pencil tool to reveal select portions of those flowers while leaving the rest hidden. The letters you create in this class can be used in illustrations as downloadable graphics on print on demand products stationary and so much more. Best of all the mass can reveal methods I'll show you in the class can be applied to any shape that you create in design are not just text. When you take this class, you'll receive as a free download, a large type font I created, especially for the class, a set of letter, flower and leaf assets, and a specialty vector brush packed as an additional texture to the flowers. For this class, you'll need an iPad, the Affinity Designer app, and an apple pencil or compatible stylus. You can even use your finger if you'd like. I do want to note this class is best suited for students who are already familiar with designer. If you're new to the program, I recommend starting with the beginner class, such as my last one about creating textured florals in designer. Well, I'll show you some basic beginner steps in this one. I am assuming if familiarity with the app, so I won't be going into the same level of detail as the other. [MUSIC] The project for this class will be to create a piece of floral typography, either a single letter or word using the methods taught in the class. If you'd like, you're welcome to use something other than flowers. Because again, the method can be used on any shape you create the designer. It's always helpful for others to see what can be achieved by taking the class, so I'd love it if you would share your project to the project section of the class. I can't wait to see what you create. So let's get started. 2. Downloads & Resources: Before we get started, I wanted to show you how to download the resource guide, font brush, and assets pack that it provided as free downloads with the class. I want to note you're going to need to access the download through the Projects and Resources section on the Skillshare website and not through the app and you'll find a link at the top of that section. When you click the link, you're going to need a password and I'm going to put that up on the screen now. Once you've accessed the Dropbox folder, you're going to see this files that you need to download and you'll download these either to your iPad or to an iCloud folder wherever you can access them through your iPad. You're going to see the resource guide, you'll see the brush as well as the assets pack and the Zaftig font that I created for the class. Now, just a note, if you took my textured florals class, the brush pack is the same so you don't need to download that a second time. Go ahead and download these again either to your iPad or to an accessible Cloud file, and we'll go ahead and open them on the iPad. The resource guide is going to give you information about what you're going to need for the class. It's also going to give you my list of favorite brush and texture makers. While I'm not going to be using a lot of them in this class, I did want to provide you with my list in case you want to use them for your own creations. It's also going to give you information about the downloads that I'm providing with the class as well as written instructions how to do that, but we are going to actually go through that here in this section. Then finally, it just gives you information about where you can share your creations to. If you share to your Instagram page and you want to tag me, I'll be happy to share it on my page as well. I'd love to see what you create. Let's go ahead and start downloading our assets. Let's start by downloading our assets. Again, I've saved off all of those files to an accessible Cloud file. I'm going to select my Asset Studio, go to my burger menu at the top and tap "Import Category." I'll find my file and select it. It's going to import it into my Asset Studio. Now, its not going to automatically pop up. I can just go ahead and locate it here and there it is. This includes some floral and leaf shapes that I've created for you. If you don't want to use the font pack or you don't want to create your own letters while you're taking the class, you're welcome to use these art deco letters that I created as well. You just tap them, hit "Insert" and you can place it in your document. That's the assets. Let's go ahead and download the brush pack. Now, I want to download the vector brush pack that was provided in the downloads. Again, I've placed that in an accessible Cloud file, you could also download it directly to your iPad. I'm going to go ahead and select my "Brush Studio" and go into the burger menu and select "Import Brushes." I'll locate the file and I'll just go ahead and tap it. It will automatically import to my brushes. Now again, if you've already taken my textural flowers class, this is the same pack, so you don't need to download it again. Let's go ahead and download the font set. Finally, if you'd like to use the font pack that I provided as part of the download, just go ahead and get that installed on our iPads as well. Now, again I save this off to a Cloud file so I can easily access it and you're going to need a font management app to get this in place. I'm using iFont and you can find that in the Apple Store. I've located the file that I saved, I'm going to select it. I want to share it so I'm going to copy it to iFont. I'll just scroll over until I see that option, if you don't see it here, you can also select more and it'll give you a further list. I'll go ahead and tap "Copy" to iFont. Now, I've already installed this in my system, I'll go ahead and select something I haven't. If you haven't yet installed a font, you're going to see it in this installer option here and it's going to be highlighted in blue. Just go ahead and click on that. Now, if you have a passcode set up on your iPad, that'll come up here and you can go ahead and enter it, I've temporarily turned mine off. You'll allow it to do the profile download because ultimately you're going to approve that. Now, you need to go into your "Settings" and you're going to see iPad suggestions at the left here and one of them will say, Profile Downloaded. Just go ahead and view that, click Install and then install again and it will install it onto your iPad. Now, I find that I have to close designer out and reopen it to get the fonts to pull in. Just go ahead and close your app, reopen it and you should be good to go. We're all ready to begin. If you have any issues downloading the files or importing, just let me know. In the next section we're going to begin creating some of the basic flower and leaf shapes for our designs. I'll see you there. 3. Creating Basic Flower & Leaf Shapes: In this section we're going to begin creating the flower and leaf shapes that we're going to cut into our letters. Now, I'm going to keep it really simple in this class, we're going to focus on using the built-in shapes and the rectangle tool. If you wanted more organic type flowers you could also use your pen and pencil tools to get more free form shapes as well, but again we'll keep it pretty simple here. First thing I want to do is create a daisy type flower. I'll grab my ellipse tool and I want to make it pink. I have this nice pink here as my fill, I'm going to keep my stroke off and I'll just drag out a nice long pedal. I need this to be a curve so that I can use my node pools so with it selected I'll tap "To curves", I'll grab my node tool and I want the top and the bottom to be pointed so I'm going to drag across those two nodes to select them. Tap "Sharp" at the bottom and now I have a nice top and bottom that are pointed and it's a pretty nice-looking pedal shape here. You could go ahead and make further changes to this, I'm going to keep this as is because again I'm looking for really simple shapes here. I want to create a flower out of this, so I'm going to use this pedal to duplicate and rotate around. If I were to start rotating right now though it's going to rotate around the center of itself and I don't want that. I actually want it to rotate around the bottom so I'll grab my transform origin point here and I'm going to drag that down to the bottom. If you have snapping on, it's going to help guide you there. Now, when I rotate it, it'll rotate around the bottom of the petal. I'll go ahead and duplicate this in place, I'll hit my "Edit menu" and duplicate, and I'm going to start rotating this second petal around and I'll hold my finger down so it snaps in 15 degree increments, I'm going to go to about 45 degrees. With it still selected I'll just keep hitting "Duplicate" all the way around, and as long as I keep that selected, I'II normally duplicate it but it will rotate at 45 degrees. I have my flower shape here, I want to create one large curve out of this rather than multiples, so I'll tap on the first one, I'll two-finger tap on the last, I'll go up to my edit menu and I'm going to tap "Add". Now, I have one large curve to work with rather than multiples. I'm going to add some texture to this though. I'll go into my documents menu and I'll "Place image", I want to grab a nice, warm looking, brighter texture here, so I'll just drag out. You want to make sure you drag large, place it and you can always make it smaller but to start big and size down. Now, I need to clip it into this petal layer, I'm going to drag that layer until I see the blue line over the top of the middle of that layer and you want to keep it to the right, don't put it over the photo because that's a whole different effect. If I drop it now that texture is within that layer, and if I grab my move tool I can move it around if I don't like exactly where its placed. I can also size it up and down and rotate it if I want. I like how that's looking I just want to change the blend mode of it, with that layer selected I'll go into "Layer" options and I'm going to change this to soft light. I'm actually going to keep the opacity where it is because I like the level of texture and brightness, I'll just de-select that. Now, let's go ahead and add the middle section. Now, when I'm adding my middles I typically add a fill and a stroke because I changed the appearance of the stroke to give it more of that filament type feel. I'm going to select this yellow color for my fill and I think I'm going to select black for my stroke and I just want to drop it down to slightly. I'll grab my ellipse tool again and I'll start dragging out a circle and if you keep your finger down while you do that you'll get a nice perfect circle, I like that size, I think that's good. I'll grab my move tool and I'm going to drag this to the center of my flower and again as long as you have snapping on, it'll guide you to the center. Now, I want to change the appearance of that stroke, I'm going to go up to my brush studio, and I'm going to pick that textural brush pack that I provided as a download. You can pick any one of these and it's going to change the appearance to whatever brush is left. I'm going to go ahead and select this coffee bean stamen, and if you look now it's taken that regular stroke and it's changed to the appearance of that brush. You can go into your stroke studio and you can change the width of it if you want. You can change how it's laying on the flower, I'm actually going to change the alignment just to get it a little bit on the inside of the middle as well as the outside. I also want to make sure that scale with object is on so that when I scale up and down that also scales with it, so that's on and I'm good to go there. I like how that flower is looking, I just want to group these two layers together to make it easier to work with so I've selected both, I'll hit "Group" and I'm going to make it smaller just to get it out of the way. If you drag down with three fingers, it will drag from the middle and keep your ratio. I'm just going to tuck this off to the side and we'll make our second flower and then we'll start adding stems to both of them. Let's go ahead and create a second flower, I want to do the opposite of what I did here where this pink and this is yellow. I'm going to grab yellow as my fill and I'm going to grab the trapezoid, and I'll just tap on yellow here and I want to drag out a nice trapezoid here. Again, I need it to be a curve because I want to use my nodes so I'll tap "To curves" and I'm going to grab my node tool and just make some slight changes to this before I start rotating it around, I'll just drag this in, and I want to narrow this a little bit. I could do that two ways, I could select my trapezoid tool and I could move my left point. I'm going to go ahead and create my second flower and I want it to be the opposite colors of this one. I'm trying to keep it somewhat limited color palette for this design because I don't want it to get distracting, so I'm just going to do the opposite what I did here. I'll grab my trapezoid which I want to make it more of a boxy type flower and I set my fill to the yellow that I used for the middle and I've turned my stroke off. You can just select the stroke and flip up, that's one of the easiest ways to turn it off or you can just tap it down here in quick colors. I accidentally turned my fill off there and I'm going to drag out a trapezoid. Again I want this to be a curve because I need to use my node tool so I'll tap "To curves" and now, I'll grab my node tool because I want to make some minor change to this. I'm going to take this path and I'm going to drag it in a little bit just to bend it, and I want to drag these two nodes closer to one another, if you hold your finger down while you do that it keeps it in a straight line. Now, I'm ready to duplicate this around itself. Again, I need to make sure that my transform origin point is at the top this time since this is facing this direction. Now, if I rotate it will rotate around the middle of itself. I'll duplicate it in place and I'm going to start rotating it. I'm going to rotate to I think 30 degrees this time and I'll just go ahead and create my full flower again just by going to edit and continuing to hit "Duplicate" so that it not only duplicates it, but it rotates it the same distance each time. I have my full flower, it's a little bit sparse, but we're going to fix that in a second. I want to select all of these curves, I can either tap and two-finger tap here or I could drag up. Now, because that flowers there, it's a little bit easier to do it here. I have all my layers for this yellow flower selected, I'm going to go to my edit menu and tap "Add". Now, I have one curve, I actually want to duplicate this curve and I'm going to rotate that duplicate. With it selected, I'll go to my edit, "Duplicate" and I'm just going to rotate again and I'm not going to worry about holding my finger down. I just want to rotate it until I see a little bit of a opening there and I'm also going to take this bottom one and I'm going to drop the opacity or the light value rather a little bit just by dragging down from the color icon and you can see that the color is changing there, where the light values, changing. I just do that just to give it some dimension. Now, I can't add texture to a group, and if I were to group, if I were to do an add on both of these, it's going to change all to the same color. But you can use your fill tool to add texture. The first thing I want to do is group these together, I have both of them selected and I've selected "Group". I'm going to make this a little bit smaller just so that we have some working space. I'm going to drag this to the middle here. Now I want to duplicate this because I want to add texture to it but I want to keep the yellow too. With the group selected, I'll go ahead and hit "Duplicate" and I'm going to add my texture that top group. I'll grab my fill tool here and I'm going to drag up, and now you get this gray gradient, and I can add a bitmap texture to this. I'm going to my texture menu at the bottom, and I'm going to select "Bitmap", and it'll take me back to my texture file. I'm going to select the same texture I used for the other one and I'll just use these handles to drag it out to where I want. I like how that looks. I'll move it in a little bit. Now I want to change the blend mode of the entire group, not just the texture. I'm going to tap on the layer options, and I'm going to go ahead and select "Soft Light" again. But I am going to drop the opacity a little bit. That kept the dark and light value of the two pedals, it also added the texture and kept the color. That's the easiest way to add texture to a group of layers while keeping the properties of the layers intact. Let's go ahead and add the middle section now. Again, I'll grab my ellipse tool, and I want to make the fill pink, and I'm going to make the stroke black again. Now, I'll just go ahead and drag out of circle and I'll search pretty large right now. I'm going to drop that down just a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and place this and give me that little cross hatch, so I know what's right in the middle, and I think I'm going to grab a different type of filament here. I'm going to grab this little dotted one, and raise the size. Scale with object is on, I'm just going to play around with this and see. I actually like how that's in the center more than on the outside, so I'm going to keep it like that. I can go ahead and add texture to this. I'm going to grab the texture from this flower. I think I'm just going to duplicate the texture I have here. I'm going to drag it up to this ellipse and clip it. I just need to make sure I move it from here down, so I'll select that texture and just move it in place. Now I have that texture there. I don't need to go back into place the image. If I want to use that same texture, you can just duplicate it in your layers and move it up. I like how those two are looking. I just want to group these three layers together. I'll select the three and group it so that entire flower heads together, and I'm going to make this a little bit smaller. Now, let's go ahead and create some stems for these. We're going to go ahead and start adding in some stems and leaves to this. You could go ahead and use your shape tools to create this. I'm actually going to show you how to use the assets to do it. If you've created some shapes and you save them off like I have here with the assets pack I provided, these are single layers that I've saved off, so I can go ahead and tap one of them and insert it, and it's going to insert it the exact same way that I saved it. Now, if I wanted to, I could go ahead and add some color to this, so I'm going to choose this nice and bright green color for my fill, and I'll go ahead and move this behind this yellow leaf layer. I want to add some texture to it. I can go ahead and do that as well just to a place image, and I'm going to pick a nice, bright, warm texture here. I'll go ahead and drag up, and I'm going to clip it to the curve. The reason I wanted to show you this, is because you can do anything to an asset that you would to a shape that you create. If you know that you're going to be using something a lot like leaf shapes and things like that, consider creating them and saving them as assets so you don't have to reinvent the wheel each time. I use these to save off flowers that I really like, that I know I want to add as a little bit of a fill in an illustration, or if I'm going to be doing something over and over and want to use it for future documents, I can do that as well. I think this particular flower is done. I'm going to go ahead and make sure that these are grouped together, and I'll turn that off for now. Let's go ahead and focus on our pink flower. I can now go back to my Asset Studio and I had this other stem here, so I'll drag that in place. I'll change the color. I'm going to pick that same color. I'll drag it behind my pink flower and again go ahead and add some texture to it and drag up. Change this to soft light. I like how that's looking. I'm going to keep the opacity where it's at and I'll just make sure that this is grouped together as well. Now we have our two flowers in place. Let's go ahead and take a look at how we can easily create some leaf shapes. I'm going to go ahead and create some leaf shapes. Now I've included some of the assets pack that you can use for the purposes of the class if you want. But I'll show you how to create, so I'm using the shapes as well. I've selected this teal color. Sometimes I like to have a little fun with the color of the leaves. I'm going to go ahead and grab my trapezoid and just drag out a stem. I want this to have a nice little bend to it, but I can't do that as is, I need to convert it first and grab my node tool. I want something to work with here to make it easier to bend. I have no nodes right now because it's a straight object, but I can add them. I'll just tap, and tap again, and now I have two nodes to work with. But because these are sharp nodes, if I drag across to select them and just start bending, they're going to be a sharp curve and I don't want that, I want it to be rounded. I'll go ahead and tap "Smooth" and the "Contextual" menu, and that converts my nodes to smooth ones. Now if I select them both and I drag, I get nice little bend there. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to move this node here at the top a little bit closer just to narrow off the top, and you can double the bottom if you wanted to. I don't tend to worry about it with these because they are typically off the edge of my letter. I'm trying to narrow this up a little bit. Let's go ahead and add some leaf shapes to this. I'll grab my ellipse tool, and I'm going to drag out a leaf. I want to convert it to curves because I want to change the top and the bottom to pointed, so I'll go ahead and select my two nodes, tap "Sharp". Now, I'm going to go ahead and make a little bit of a change to this to give it a little bit more of a leaf shape rather than a pedal. I'm going to drag this handle up and I think I'm going to drag this node down and in a little bit, maybe drag this handle out. It has a little bit of a curve now rather than a straight up and down. Now I want to move this into place as my top leaf here, and this is the one we're going to duplicate around. You could go into your shape tool and just drag out a shape for each leaf, or you could go ahead and duplicate this around. I'm just going to duplicate it. I'm going to to finger tap and drag, and I'll do that one more time. Now, I can also, once I get this going in the direction I want it to with it selected, I could do my duplicate, and I can just duplicate out the amount that I want, and then I'll move them into place. I have six here and I think that's good. I'm going to select all six. As long as my entire leaf shape at the top here and the entire stem isn't part of this bounding box, it's only going to select those six. That's what I want. I'll go to my edit menu and tap "Duplicate", and I want to flip this. So I'll go to my transform studio, and do a horizontal flip, and drag it over. Now these are all out of place but that's not a problem because you're working with separate curves here. Which means I can take each of this and I can move them exactly where I want them. What I'm going to do is go ahead and start moving these around, and I'm going to flip them in certain spots and make them a little bit longer. Just to make the leaf shapes look a little bit different from one another, I left the flowers pretty basic and vector u shaped, but because these are hands-off a background element, I like to make these a little bit more organic than the flowers just so they stand out a little bit. I like how this is looking. I want head ahead and I move things around, and I also use my node tool a little bit just to manipulate them. The other thing I do is make sure that they're not lined up exactly across from each other because that's not typically how you'll see it in nature. Now I want to create one large piece out of this rather than multiple curves. I'll tap and then two-finger tap on the bottom, and go ahead and do an add. I could have also dragged it across, and now I have my one large leaf shapes, so I'm all set there. Let's go ahead and add these to our assets pack here. You could create your own new category if you want. I'm just going to go ahead and add this to this. If you want to create your own category, you just go to the Burger menu at the top and tap "Add Category". You will always need to have at least one subcategory before you can start adding anything. In this case here, I have the flower and leaf shapes and the art deco letters. I want to add another category for finished flowers, so I'm going to tap "Add Subcategory" and it will add it here down at the bottom. Let me rename this. I'll go into the Burger menu for the subcategory, tap "Rename", and I'm going to name this finished florals. Now I want to start adding these three elements to that. With them selected and I want to select the entire group because it's going to select all of the layers that make up this flower, I'm going to go into my Asset Studio, go into that subcategory, and tap "Add Asset from Selection". Now it's gone ahead and added this entire flower shape and all of the elements that make it up as an asset. I'll go ahead and select my yellow flower, and I'm going to do the same thing. Sometimes it takes a beat or two to get it in there. I'll select my leaf shape and I'll go ahead and add that. Now, if I were to delete these, I could just tap "Insert" and it will insert all of those the exact same size and exactly how I save them. This is a really great feature to designer to help you in circumstances where you'd have to use a repeat of something and don't want to have to keep creating it or keep duplicating it each time. In the next section, we're going to start creating the letters that we're going to start clipping these objects to. So I'll see you there. 4. Creating Letters With Shapes: We're going to begin creating the shapes we're going to use to clip our florals to and I'm going to show you how to approach this two ways. In this section, I'm going to show you how to create your own letters using the built-in shapes and the Rectangle tool, and then in the next section, I'll show you how you can prepare a pre-made font for the same process. Now, the benefit of using an original letter shape is that whatever you create, not only are you working with something that's inherently low hue, but there's also no concerns about commercial licensing if you plan on selling what you create. I wanted to bring this up. This is actually my final project for the class and I brought it up to show you that when I work with this process of clipping and unmasking, I typically work with larger size fonts. The fonts that have more weight or more canvas area to work with, show the process a little bit better. From a distance you can see the clipping where if you're working with a smaller font that has less weight, you might not be able to see that. For example, I have this leaf here clipped across the H. If this were a much smaller font, you wouldn't necessarily be able to see that without zooming in. Let's go ahead and start creating our shapes. I've started out with a 10 by 10 canvas at 300 DPI. You can set your canvas up to any size you'd like. Just keep in mind that whenever you begin adding any raster elements to your illustrations, you need to think ahead to the largest size you plan to print so you don't run into pixelation. I've also dragged out a rectangle here and I've locked it in place with a little lock in the layer studio. I do this because I don't like working on the white background that automatically comes up and I have a difficult time drawing on the transparent canvas. Now I may end up changing this color at the end of it when I've done my entire design but I typically start off with just an off-white. You don't need to do this process or this step if you don't want to, it's totally up to you. I'm going to go ahead and start with the letter A. I'm going to grab my Rectangle tool and I have my fill set to black with no stroke. I'm just going to drag out a nice thick rectangle. Now just a quick tip here, if you plan to create a set of letters with the same shapes and want a cohesive look, for example, my Art Deco font here that has at least one side that's heavier and one that's thinner, go ahead and create an asset of the shape you plan to use because it's going to create it in the exact size that you save it up. That way you don't have to worry about dragging out the same size each time, and best of all, those shapes are always going to be available to your future shapes as well. Now I want my rectangle to have a nice slant so I can create the left side of my A. With it selected, I'll go to my transform studio and I'm going to select the Shear tool here, and if I start dragging left, you'll see the bottom start to move left. I'm going to stop about there. Now, I don't need to repeat the process, I'm just going to drag this over and I'm going to duplicate this. I'll hit my ''Edit'' menu and hit "Duplicate''. Now I'm going to go back into my transform studio and I'm going to flip that. Now I have the right side of my A. I'm just going to drag this over. If you have snapping on and you hold your finger down, you'll see that yellow line in the middle it's going to guide you where you're going. I'm going to stop about there. Now we have the two sides of our A, I just want it to get a little bit smaller. I just need the little bridge in-between. Again, I'm going to go ahead and grab my Rectangle tool and I'll just drag out a small rectangle here. Now, you can set yours up however you'd like. You can do something more like an Art Deco font, you can make both sides heavier like I did here, it's totally up to you, but whatever you do you want to create one shape out of this. Right now I have three rectangles. I'm going to select all three shapes I could have also dragged up. I'll go ahead into my Edit menu and I'll hit ''Add''. It's not only going to combine them into one shape, it's going to convert it to a curve. That's really important for this process because when it comes to releasing some of the flowers that we clip in, we need to be able to use node pools, and the only way you can do that is to have this setup as a curve. That's it for the letter A. I'm done with this. The only thing that I would need to do to get to the next step in the process is go ahead and duplicate this. My top layer here is going to be a mask, and I need it to be invisible. I'm going to go in and I'm going to turn the fill off just by flipping up from the icon here, or you can use the quick color down here. Now if I turn this A off, you can see that the top one is still on. It's just invisible because the fill is off. I have my A all set. I'm just going to go ahead and group these together, and I'll turn that off. Let's take a look at how you can create a letter that has a cutout in it, like the letter P. We're going to start creating some letters that are a little more complex with cutouts and some curved shapes and I'm going to start with the letter P. Just a quick tip here as well, whenever I'm creating letters if I'm not creating a single letter like we are here, but I'm creating a set, I'll take a look at the letters in the alphabet and see which ones I can create first to help me create others. If we take a look at this Art Deco font here, if I use my P and I create that first, I can use that to create my R as well as my B. My C can be used to create my G and my I and T can be used to create one another. Not only does this prevent you from having to do multiple duplications, but you can also form a much more cohesive set that way, so that's just one pointer. Now I've actually gone ahead and saved out a rectangle here for my piece, so I'm going to go ahead and insert that, and I'll just place it where I want it. I don't have a large crescent, so I'm going to go ahead and grab my crescent tool. I want that to be the bump out on the P, and I'm going to make it about that high. Now, one of the things when you're using shapes is, before you convert them to a curve, if you have your shape tool selected on certain shapes, you're going to get these two red dots and they'll help you form other shapes. I'm going to drag this red dot out and get myself a half circle. That's actually the quickest way to create one, and while I'm at it, I'm going to go ahead and save this to my assets. I'm going to keep it selected, tap the "Burger'' menu here on my letter cutouts and tap ''Add Asset'', so that's my larger crescent. I'll go into my transform studio now and I want to flip that. I'll go ahead and drag this up and I want to drag it back a little bit further than the rectangle itself. Now, that is going to create an issue. I have this aligned and you can tell because its snapping is on, and it's giving me that red line. But because the rectangle is sharp and my front part here is curved, I have this little bump-out. I'm not going to worry about that right now because I can actually fix that more easily with the node pool once I have that selected. Now I do want this crescent to be a little bit deeper, so I'm going to drag that out a little bit more and I'll select my two shapes. Now the first geometric operation I want to perform is an add, I'm going to do that before I do my subtract. I'll go ahead and go into my edit menu with a two layer selected tap ''Add'', now not only did it create one large piece, but it also converted to a curve, which means I can use my node pools now, so I'll go up to the top and I'm going to fix this before I do anything else. The easiest way to fix that is to tap on this top one it's because two nodes are stacked, delete it and it flattens it out. I always like to take a look at my letters after I've done my geometric operations. This is a pretty simplistic letter, so I don't have to worry about it here but when you get into others, you want to just work your way around the circumference of the letter zoomed in so you can see if there's anything you need to fix. I'm going to go back into my assets and I'm going to select my smaller crescent here. I'll grab my move tool and I'll just drag it into place, and I'm going to place it right about there. I'll go in and select my two layers. This time I want to do a subtract. So I'll do Edit menu and subtract. Now I've cut that out. Now I don't actually like that because what I wanted was this line to be lined up here. So I'm going to back that out. It's not a problem. I'll grab it. Now I de-selected it let's try that again. I'm just going to pull it backwards. Now, depending on where your item is placed when a canvas is snapping might help you. In this case, it's not actually working really well there for me, but I'm going to go ahead and just eyeball that. Now I'll do my subtract. That looks nice and lined up. Again, I can go ahead and I can add a diagonal rectangle here for my R. I could add another punched out crescent here to make my V-shape. Let's go ahead and take a look at how we can make some more complex shapes and create curved letters. We're going to run through two more letters. We could run through all 26, but it would take a really long time. I'm going to show you how to do some curved letters though, because they're a little bit more complex and certain ones take a few more steps and also involve things like the pen tool. Let's start with the U-shape though, this is actually relatively simple. I'm going to grab my donut and I'm going to drag out a perfect donut. If I hold my finger down, you'll get a perfect circle. Now once again, I have these two little red dots. I'm going to use this one to drag in, so it makes it a lot heavier. I want to drag this one around to give myself a perfect half circle. With snapping on it's going to give you that green line to let you know that's there. Now, I need to have that sitting flat so I'm going to drag it with my move tool and hold my finger down so it just snaps. Now it's nice and flat. But if I start dragging up, it's going to give me a weird shape. I actually want to first change my rotation tool to the top here and I'm going to tap this button here and that just changes the boundary box. But again, if I drag up, I just got this really funny looking U-shape. What I'm going to do instead is use this as the bottom and I'm going to add rectangles to this. I'll grab my rectangle tool and with my snapping on, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to start dragging up. I want to deselect it first. I'll start dragging up a rectangle. It's going to let me know when to stop because it snaps into place. That's one of the wonderful things about snapping. I just want to make sure this is in place here. I want to drag this down a little bit. Now we're going to run into the same issue we had with the P because this is straight and this is curved, but it's not a problem. We'll fix that later. Now I don't need to repeat that process. I can just grab my move tool and do a two-finger tap and drag, and with my snapping on, it's going to guide me again. Now I have my three shapes and I want to combine them into one. I'll go ahead and select the three. Go to my edit menu and tap Add. Now this blue line is showing because I didn't drag this down. If you look really closely, I have that gap there. So I'm just going to two-finger tap to back out of my add. I'll go ahead and select this and I'm just going to drag that down a little bit. I want to make sure that's not too big. Now it's overlapping. I can go ahead and I can do an add. Now again, I have these little bump outs I need to fix, but I can do that easily because now this is a curve, which means I can use my node pool. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to tap on this top one here and hit delete, and that'll smooth it out on that side. I'm going to get the same thing over here, just not quite as bad. Again, I'll go ahead and tap on that top one and that'll smooth it out. I just like to check the middle and have the same thing going on here. Because my curve is out here, I want to I select the inner one this time and again, my curve is out here I want it to follow that curve. So I'll slack the inner one and now I'm all set. I have a nice U-shape that I can work with. If you see anything it's a little off, you can always use your node tool and the handles, but I think this is looking pretty good here. Let's go ahead and create a little bit more complex one. I'm going to show you how to create an S shape. The S shape is a little bit more involved as not only does it involve your shapes, so you're also going to use the pen tool. If it's something that you're not used to using, It's really handy, but it takes a lot of practice to use. I'm going to grab my donut tool and I'm going to drag out a donut just like I did with my U. I want to go ahead and make this a little bit fatter. So I will drag this in. Not going to go too much. I'll make a half circle. We're starting the same way we did with the U. I'll grab my move tool and I'll just drag this around until it's flat, change my bounding box. Now I want to duplicate this shape and flip it up to here. I'll go ahead and with it selected, hit duplicate, go into my transform studio and flip it and then drag it up. Now here's where we're going to use the pen tool. But before we do that, I want to convert these two to curves. I'll select the two donut layers, go into my edit menu and tap convert the curves. Now I can change the curves on these two shapes. I'm going to grab my node tool because I want to see where my nodes are. This is where it gets a little bit tricky. I want to grab my pen tool and I'm going to tap on this node here and then here, anymore you start dragging out. I want this handle to go up. I'm going to give myself a slight curve there. I'm going to hold my finger down and I'm going to drag my handle down. It's going to tell the pen tool which direction I'm going to go. I'll tap again at that corner and I lost my nodes but you know where you're going. I'm just going to drag it out a little bit and then down. I want to go ahead and go diagonally. So I'm going to go ahead and hit here. I'll drag down a little bit. Again I'll hold my finger down and I want to go in this direction. Now I have my shape, I just need to fill it in. I've gone ahead and filled it. Now I'm going to have some gaps here and there and you can see them here. I'm not going to worry about that. I have my node pool. I can go ahead and I can drag this in. I can also use my handles. I'm going to drag this up slightly and make it a little bit bent because I want it to overlap so I don't get any sort of overhang. You can see here I have that gap. So again, I'm going to just drag this into place and then I'm going to start dragging the path in a little bit just so that I don't have any sort of gap in there. I just want to make sure that my handles are where I want them. [NOISE] I'm going to drag this actually upgrade. I want to make this more of a circle shape. I'll drag this handle up. If I go directly up, I get that nice circle there and I can do the same thing here. I'm just going to drag this down. My middle section is going to be a little bit thinner and that's okay. Because really I'll probably click my flowers to here. I'll just deselect and step back and I like how that's looking. Again, it was really involved and it takes practice. I've probably done this S-shape 100 times and I still have to start over again a lot. I'm going to go ahead and select these three. Since I have this nice overhang here, I'm not going to get any sort of gaps. I'll just go ahead and do edit and add and now I have one large shape. If I back out of this a little bit and I de-select it, I can take a look and see if there's any other changes I want to make, but I actually like how this looks. I'm going to call that S done. You want to create your own letters. I recommend for sketching out the type of design that you want to create and then study it and determine what combination of shapes, geometric operations, and maybe even the pen and pencil tool can get you to your final shape. Then just start building a piece by piece. So the beauty of designer is that there is a pixel persona built-in. So I could go ahead and I could rough sketch this S that I want. I can go ahead and put a vector layer on top of it and just start dragging out some shapes that I might want to use. I'll go ahead and convert this to a curve and maybe make these pointed. I can just drag this in to where I have this ellipse in the middle and just start making some changes and building upon this. I can take my donut tool and make a really thin half circle like we did with the original S or I could go ahead and use my pen tool and just start creating a nice little half circle here and adding a nice stroke to it. The beautiful thing about this is I have my nodes that I can work with. So I can grab my node tool and I can start dragging things around. You want to deselect first, you don't complete your circle. Just drag my nodes, use my handles to drag up. The pen tool can be a little bit intimidating when you first start using it and I still have to start over again sometimes. Once you really get the hang of it, it's actually a lot of fun to use and it can be really handy. The other thing about using vectors to create these shapes is I could go ahead and have some real fun with the types of shapes I'm using, as well as duplicate what I create. For example, for the bottom of my S here. Without having to start fresh. If I wanted this to look a little different from the top, I could just go ahead and reset these and start dragging them around. Now this is obviously very rough. I would go ahead and I would continue moving my nodes around. I would go ahead and combine them as one large shape and then continue working it a little bit. But when you do that, you can end up with a nice final result that you can start to build on. So I definitely recommend starting with a sketch because it makes it easiest to determine what combination of tools you can use to get to your final result. In the next section, I'm going to show you how you can convert pre-made fonts, to curves, so that you can use the same process and your designs. I'll see you there. 5. Using Pre-Made Fonts: In the last section, we took a look at how you could use the built-in shapes and the rectangle tool to create your own letters. In this section, I'm going to show you how to prepare pre-made fonts for use in your designs as well. I'm going to go ahead and select my Artistic Text tool, and I'm going to tap twice and then pull up art text, and I'll just tap anywhere on the canvas. I can go ahead and select my font here. I'm going to go ahead and use the zapping font I provided as part of the downloads. Just keep in mind if you select any fonts that you use as part of something you're going to sell, you need to make sure that whatever pre-made fonts you use are commercially licensed. I've selected my Zaftig font. I'm going to tap in here and I'm just going to make sure it's a larger size so that I can see my initial placement. You can either do that with the plus or minus sign or just tap in the middle and select one of the presets or key it in. I'm going to go ahead and place a capital G here, and close out my keyboard. Now whenever you add text, it's immediately a text shape. It's not a curve, which means I can't use my node pools on this and that's really important as part of the process. With it selected, I'll go up here to my edit menu and tap convert to curves. Now I have a curve layer to work with rather than a text layer. Now I'm going to go ahead and grab my move tool and I'm going to size this up. If you hold your finger down again, it will keep the proportions. I want to duplicate this just like we did with the last set of letters we created. With it selected, I'll go to my Edit menu and I'll hit Duplicate. I want to lock this bottom layer and I'm going to go into this top one and turn off the fill. Just like with the last one, if I turn this off with that selected, you can see that that top layer exists. It's just invisible right now because the fill is off. We're all set to start adding our flower and leaf shapes in these letters, and in the next section we're going to do just that. So I'll see you there. 6. Masking Your Florals With Shapes: We're all set with our letters and it doesn't matter which one we use at this point since they're all curves. I'm just going to go ahead and grab my A for this exercise. Now my approach to adding the objects to these letters is to do it enough for the effects, but not so much that it overwhelms a letter and becomes the only focus. I'm going to stick to adding my flowers mostly to the left side here, but I'm willing to bridge some of them across just to really drive home that clipping effect. The first thing I want to do before I start is to take this curve layer and duplicate it because my duplicate is going to become my mask. I'm going to go ahead into my fill and turn that off on that top layer so that it's invisible. If I turn off my bottom layer, you can see it's still there, it's just invisible because the fill is off. We're ready to start clipping our objects. I'm going to go ahead and grab my assets. I'm going to start adding in some of these flowers first. It's adding it at the exact size I saved it, so I'll just pull ahead and re-size down a little bit. I want some of this to hang off because that's part of what I'm going to release when I change my mask. But I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. I'll just drag this down. I want this leaf here hanging off a little bit. I might just tip it a little too. Then I'll add in my pink flower, and I'll go ahead and size that down. I'm going to tip this. I want this tipped here, so it's bridging across the A and some of it is coming into the little cut out there. I might actually flip this orange one, because I feel that leave is getting in the way. I'll go to my transform studio and I'm just going to flip it and rotate it. I like how that's looking. I think I'll just move this up just slightly. I'll go ahead and duplicate this, flip it, and I'm going to drag it over here and just make it a little bit bigger, and rotate it a little bit more. I'm going to drag it down a little though. I want most of these petals coming off the edge. Now I'm going to go ahead and add my leaf shapes. I'll go ahead and insert that and I want this one behind all of them. The first thing I'm going to do is flip it, and I'll drag it down below all of my flowers, rotate it a little bit and just make it a little smaller. I want that peeking out from behind these flower and leaf shapes. I actually want my leaves coming off of here because the way to drive home the clipping effect is to have some of these still clipped while some of these are released. I'll probably end up shifting my entire letter over too so I have more room. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this one, and I'm going to drag it to the top. Because I want that over the top of the leaves, and I'll just flip that, rotate it and make it larger. I'm going to go ahead and bridge that across the A here. I'm actually not going to release any portion of this. I just want to make sure that it's not touching that tiny petal there. I'm going to use this particular one to really drive home the effect. I like how it's slanting and it's going into the other side. Now this looks like a mess. One of the things I actually want to do is just drop the light value of that a little bit, just to differentiate it a little, and I might also do that to the leaves here. This is all hanging out and it looks a little crazy, but that's not a problem. We're going to go ahead and take all of these and we're going to clip it to this invisible layer. I'll tap on the first layer, two-finger tap on the last to select all of them, and I'm going to drag down until it's in the middle of that invisible layer and release. Now everything is inside in my A. Again if I turn this off, you can see that it's starting to form my A shape. That's actually another tip there. If I turn this off, I'm going to turn this one on down here. That's another effect that you could do. If you wanted to do the reverse of that, you could just go ahead and fill up a shape with all of your flower shapes and create the shape out of that. This one is a new number of flower and leaf shapes that make up the A. That's not what we're focusing on this class, but that's just another bonus tip there. Let's go ahead and turn our A back on. We're ready to go ahead and release some of the sections of this while keeping other portions clipped. We're going to go ahead and take a look at how to do that in the next section, so I'll see you there. 7. Using the Pencil Tool and Sculpt Mode: We have all of our flowers placed and we're ready to release certain portions while we keep others clipped. Now, I could just go ahead and I could grab my mask and my node tool and just start dragging out. The problem with that is it's not very precise. I actually want to keep certain sections clipped in here while I release others. I'm going to use the pencil tool on sculpt mode to get a more precise release than I would if I just drag out my node. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to start with the smaller section here. Again, I want to keep these leaves clipped, but I want to release this small petal. I'm just going to go ahead and start small. I'll start on a path and I'll just drag around. I didn't quite get it and that's okay. It also released the connection between these two nodes. I'll grab my node tool and the first thing I'm going to do is close that path. I'll hit, "Close" and I've bridged that. I can drag this down to here. With my node pool I'll just drag this out until it gets past the petal, but not so far that I start seeing the leaf. We're all set there. That's nice. That's hanging out while this remains clipped. Again, I'll grab my pencil tool. Now I want to keep these clipped while I release these. I'll go ahead and select it. I want to go ahead and start right about here and just drag around. I didn't quite get it and that's not a problem. I'm actually going to again bridge my gap there by hitting "Close." With my node tool I'll just start dragging out. Now, I do need to release this leaf here because this pink petal here is overlapping, and that's not a problem. I'm just going to grab my node tool and I'm going to take my node and with my finger down just drag it. It stays on that line, but I can easily drag it down. Now, I've kept these clipped, but I've released that leaf that's being overhang by that petal there. I like how that looks. I have a nice portion hanging outside. I have other portions clipped so you're really driving home the effect. I'm going to call that part of it done. I'm just going to go ahead and change the color of the bottom A. I'll go into my fill and I'm going to select this blue color. I think I'll go ahead and add texture to it. I'll do a place image and I'm going to select this one. Again, I'm going to drag out large and then release it. I can always make it smaller, but you want to start large. Then I'll go ahead and clip it to that A and I want to change the blend mode. I'll go ahead and select "Soft light." Just drop the opacity a little bit. I don't want the texture to be too obvious. I just want it a little bit. You could always go in and you could play around with the fill color on the background layer. I can see what black looks like, I can try other colors and just see what works with the flowers. I'm going to stick with the off-white here. I'm going to go ahead and group all of this though, the two letters. Actually, I don't want to group that background in there, so I'm just going to go ahead and select those two. I'm going to move this over a little bit. I wanted to show you what the final mask layer looks like if we were to turn the fill on so that you can see what we're ultimately doing with the sculpt mode. Right now it's invisible if I were to turn the fill on. You can see that ultimately what we did was take the original A shape and we broke paths in certain spots and just bumped that out. So that's what this sculpt ultimately does. We did it around that leaf or that pile right there and then around these leaves and the flowers. If I were to grab my pencil tool with sculpt on and I wanted to release these leaves I could just do that by doing what we were doing earlier. It's manipulating the shape of the original curve and just adding that in there. You can do it in reverse too. You could go ahead and you could change that to put that back in place if you didn't want that petal out. Sculpt works both ways. Now we don't want this fill on here and we actually want that petal out. I'm going to go ahead and turn that off and I'm going to call that done. Now, in the next section we're going to put all of this together and I'm going to show you how to create a full word piece just like this using all of the processes that we learned in this class. I'll see you there. 8. Putting it All Together: In this final section, I'm going to recreate this hope design that I created using my letters. I'm going to start it out and then I'm going to finish it sped up so that you don't have to watch the entire process, but you can see how I go about creating it. I'm going to turn that off. The first thing that I did here is I created four separate letters on separate curve layers, and I actually need to convert these to two curves. I'm go in here and convert them. That way I can create separate masks out of each one, and I can manipulate each individually rather than having to worry about the entire piece. That also means that I can move them around individually rather than one large piece, but I haven't grouped so that if I do need to move it around I can. I'm just going to go ahead and start with my H here, and again, I'll grab my assets and I'll start adding some of my flowers here and just work way around the entire word. I don't want to make it exactly the same with each letter, so sometimes I'll leave certain flowers off. I'll add two or something but only one to another letter. I just try and mix it up a little bit to make each one a little bit different. I really roughly placed them first just to get them where I want them and then I go ahead and manipulate them more. For example, I would go ahead and start there with my H and maybe with my O, I would bring in this leaf here. I'm going to go ahead and flip that, and I want the O because of that curve to have this leaf bridging across the entire letter. I'm going to keep the entire thing clipped with my final result, but I might let some of it out there. I'm actually going to add in some flowers here to the other side, and I'm going to go ahead and flip this and pivot it. Again, I'm just going to start adding in my different flowers, and so I'm going to go ahead and speed this up at this point just so that you're not sitting here watching me add 100 flowers to some letters. I will meet you on the other side. I have my leaves and my flowers clipped in more, I want them and I'm inevitably may end up moving them around because now that I have these clipped in, I see that those are a little too much the same there. I can go in here and I can grab the E and change that orange flower a little bit just to twist it out maybe this way and change the pink flower to the other direction and maybe flip it. I always go ahead like I said, start with a nice rough placement and then I go ahead and change things out just to give it a little bit more dimension. I think I like how that looks. I'm going to start releasing my masks in each of these letters. I had fallen in while I was clipping everything. I duplicated each layer and again, I turned off the fill, and I also grouped these as I went along just because I was adding so many at the same time and wanted to make sure that I kept them in order. If you saw, I went ahead and I figured out which ones were where and grouped them using the group function up here. That way I can very easily cut them all as one piece to my invisible masks. Now I'm going to go into each letter and I'm going to start pulling out certain aspects, certain parts of the floral arrangement here. I'm going to speed it up again and I will see you at the other side. I'm going to call that done. If you notice that while I was working my way around this, I had to two-finger tap back out and start again on a few occasions. The pencil tool on sculpt mode can be a little bit finicky and it takes some practice. If you're working with us and you have those occasions where you have to back out of it, don't worry about it, just start again, it can be frustrating, but it takes some time and practice and you'll get the hang of it. You can also consider changing the direction that you're going. For example, with this flower, I started up here and work my way down and it was just causing some trouble. So instead I went ahead and I started in this direction and just found it a little bit easier. I'm not really sure why it does that, but sometimes if they just changed direction, it makes it a little bit easier to use a sculpt mode. Also when you're working your way through this, if you need to add nodes as you're using your Node Tool, you can do that. For example, with this E, I wanted to have a node very close to this flower. I'll go ahead and grab that mask so you can see what I'm talking about. This node here was not in the original shape, I actually wanted it to be placed here so that I had a little bit more control when I was moving this, and that way the path wasn't coming up from the E. Also this node was actually originally created as a smooth node. I just converted it and snapped it down to the E. That just gives you a little bit more of a brace when you're using your node tool to move your path around. I usually step back and I'll take a look and see if there's anything that I missed if I need to go back in and adjust any pads. This looks good. I would go ahead from this point and start adding some texture to my background letters and possibly move some of the flowers around and maybe even change the background layer, but I'm going to call this one done. The final result ends up looking like this, so that is the class. I want to thank you for being a part of it, and I hope that you enjoy either creating your own letters using designer, using the assets Apple provided, or using a pre-made font to create your own beautiful floral typography. I can't wait to see what you create. Thank you again.