Affinity Designer V2 | Stained Glass Vector Heart Shape

1. Welcome to Class!: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Affinity in 15, where we're going to create quick projects together in designer, photo or publisher. In this installment, I'll show you how to make the stained glass vector heart shape in designer that can be used in both print and digital projects. We're going to focus on the gradient tool, appearance panel, and knife tool, but we'll also be using a few others. Now, I am in the desktop version of designer version two, but you can easily follow along on the iPad as long as you know where the tools are located. This class is big anderFriendly, but it does assume some familiarity with the layout of designer as I'm not going to go through the user interface. Are you ready? Let's get started. 2. Creating the Stained Glass Heart in Designer: Created a 4,000 by 4,000 pixel Canvas set to 300 DPI. That allows me to print it large or use it smaller. Now, because I'm using textures, I can always scale down without issue, but scaling up is always risky, so I want to make sure I'm thinking ahead as to how I might use it. I'm going to use a built in shape to create my initial heart, and on the desktop version, I can hold Command Down Mami keyboard. Tap on the canvas, and it's going to give me this dialogue box. Now, 3,600 by 3,600 pixels is just fine, so I'll click Okay, I'm going to use the knife tool to cut this up into several shapes that are going to become the stained glass pieces. And this tool works two ways. If I select my shape and hover over the path between nodes and click, it's going to cut the path between those two points. This case, what I want to do is slice this into multiple pieces. So instead, I'm going to hover outside of the path, and you can see that I have the knife icon. And when I drag it across, it slices it into two pieces, which you can see here in my layers panel. Whatever shapes are selected are candidates for the knife tool. In other words, if I slice this into a third piece and I only want to further slice these two, I can select them, leaving the third one deselected. And when I run the knife tool through it, it's only going to impact those shapes, not the one I didn't select. If I miscalculate and want to recombine a shape, I can select both the shapes, go up to the top and choose Add and recombine them. So I'm going to start with a few big swipes with a knife tool and then drill down to get smaller pieces by selecting certain shapes. I'm going to speed it up, and I'll save on the other side. Now that my multiple pieces are in place, I want to change some of the colors. And I've provided the palette I'll be using for the project in the downloads, along with instructions on how to import it. I'm going to select groups of shapes and add them together. The benefit of that is not just that I only have to work with one single curve, but I only have to add the same texture to a single curve rather than multiples, and that keeps my file size lower. So I'm going to start selecting this guy, hold Shift down, and select these two, and I'll click on AD at the top. I'll select this one, this one. And this one. And again, hit Add. And I'm just going to keep doing this until I only have groups and no single shapes. So I'm going to start here, and with my swatch palette, I'll add this darker red gradient. I want to make sure it's on the fill and not the stroke. Try this one instead. Alright, so I can always grab my gradient tool and I can drag it back out, reposition it if I want. I can even change the handle here. I can add color points. I'm going to leave this as is because usually I come back in once I've added the texture to see if I need to change anything. So with this one, I'm going to change it to this lighter red. For this one, I want to go with the pink solid. I'm going to create sort of a milky, opaque texture. And then finally, this is going to be this lighter sort of off white gradient. Alright, with all of that in place, I'm ready to move on to adding the soldering lines that would hold all of this together. I've selected all my shapes, and I'm going to add a stroke to all of them. I want this to have a copper color, so I'll select this copper gradient here in the swatch pellet. Now, ultimately, I want this to set on top of all of the individual shapes as one large curve so that I can add texture and effects to them without having them bleed into the jointed areas because they're separated. So with that selected, I'll go up to the top and choose layer and go down to expand stroke. That's going to create fills out of these. While I still have the selected, I'll add them together here in the contextual menu and then move to the left and choose move to front. Now, this is fine, but it's a little too perfect. Soldered copper is not going to be perfect, and I want this to look a little bit more realistic. So I'm going to break up that perfect line a little bit two ways. First is that I want to add a stroke back in. So I'm going to make sure my stroke is selected and just hit that copper color. So the next thing I want to do is go to my brushes, and I have a brush set by TruGrit Texture Supply called Bezier buddy. It's one of my go tos for adding a bit of realistic feel to vectors that I create just to make them look a little bit more realistic. You can choose any vector brush to give you that same effect. I'm going to choose this monoline large. Now, it's going to change the stroke's size. Me zoom in so that you can see what's happening here. You can see that it's a nice wobbly line, but I want to bring the stroke size down to about five again. And this is a good start, but my corners are still a little too perfect. So what I'm going to do is grab my pencil tool and I'm going to use the sculpt mode. So I want to make sure sculpt is on here at the top. And I just want to go to my corners and push the line out a little bit. So I'm hovering over my path, and I'm just going to sort of draw sort of a wonky line there. That's cutting the path and pushing it out, so it's breaking up that perfect V shape in the corners. I'm just going to run around the entire thing, and I'm going to do that off camera because it'll take a little bit of time, and then I'll come back and we'll move on to adding our texture. With everything in place, I'm ready to start adding my texture and effects, and I'm going to start with the soldering wines. I want to maintain the gradient, but add a metallic texture on top. Could use the appearance panel to add a second fill, something I'll be doing with these other pieces. But in this case, I want to be able to control the opacity of the texture. And that's something that you can't do with Bitmap fills when you're using the appearance panel. You can only adjust the blend mode. So instead, I'm going to pull in a copy of the texture and use a copy of the hard shape as a vector clipping mask. I'm going to select that layer and hit duplicate so that I have a second one, I'll go ahead and grab my rectangle tool, and I'm just going to drag a rectangle out over the heart shape. I'll select my gradient tool, and I'm going to go to my stock studio where I've keyed in metal. And there's a particular one that I like here in pexels. So I'm going to tap on that one. It's obviously scaled very large, so I'll go to the top and just choose reset. I like where this is placed, but if I wanted to, I can move it around, scale it up a little bit, but I'm going to leave this as is. What I want to do is go back to the layers panel. And with that duplicate heart shape, I'm going to drag it up over the thumbnail of that layer. I don't want to drag it to the right. That's a regular clipping mask. I'm going to drag it to the left until the thumbnail lights up, release it, and you can see that it's clipped everything away outside of those shapes. Next, I'll select the entire layer, and I want to change the blend mode to overlay. I like how that looks, but you could play around with the blend mode. And I'm going to change the opacity to maybe about 75. Can always adjust this later if I need it. The next thing I want to do is add some drop shadows and a three D effect to give it a bit more dimension. But before I do that, I want to group these two layers up. So I've selected both of them, and I'm going to command G on my keyboard and hit group. So with that selected, I'll go down to the FX panel here, and I'm going to start with the outer shadow. So I'll click and then tap to make sure I have the contextual menu. Whenever you're adding shadows, you need to think about two things. The first is which direction is your light coming from? In this case, that's totally up to me, and I'm going to have it come from the top left, which means my deepest shadows are going to fall down into the right. The second thing you want to think about is what is the depth of the object in real life? In this case, soldering lines would be raised a few millimeters from the surface of the glass. So I don't need a deep shadow, but I want it enough that it sets the lines up from the glass. So I'm going to bring my offset to about 12 pixels, and I'll bring my radius up a little higher than that. I do want a slight shadow on the other side because it wouldn't be perfectly flat if you were looking at this top down. So what I'm going to do is hit this plus sign that's going to duplicate the initial shadow, and I'm just going to rotate the angle over to the other side. I want to pull the offset in a little bit because, again, this wouldn't be as deep as the other, and I'll just pull the radius in a little, as well. While I'm thinking about it, I also want to turn on scale with object. That way, if I scale this up and down, the shadows are going to scale with the overall object. So this is great so far, but I want to add a three D effect. So while I still have this open, I'm going to click to turn on three D and tap to get the contextual menu. And the first thing that you're going to notice is that it's added highlights to the right sides of all of my lines. Remember, my light is coming from the top left, which means my shadows fall down onto the right. And that means my highlights should be up into the left. And that's Azimuth down here in the contextual menu. So right now it's showing 45 degrees, so it's sending it to the right. What I want to do is click and drag until it's 145, you could also key it in if you'd like. I'm also going to make a few other adjustments, like, bringing up the soften a little bit, and I'm going to play with the radius a little. I don't want it to be so rounded it looks like bubbles. But I want it to be a little less flat than it is. This is all non destructive, so I can always come back in and change it if I need it. But I'm going to leave this as is for now and I'll click Close. Alright, with the soldering lines done, I'm going to start adding the texture to my glass pieces. Now, instead of using vector clipping masks, I'm going to use the appearance panel to add a second fill so I can have a solid color on the bottom and a bitmap gradient in the fill above it. If you feel you need to change the opacity of your textures, just follow the same steps as we did with the soldering lines and create vector masks. I'm using a set of textures I've pulled from texture labs as well as on Splash. I've grouped them together and provided them in the downloads. You can also pull directly from the stock Studio if you'd like. I'm going to start with this top layer. You can see here in the appearance panel, it's showing that initial gradient fill. I want to tap on AddFll and make sure that second new fill is selected. You can see the dots next to it. With my gradient tool selected, I'm going to go up to the top and under type choose Bitmap. It's going to take me to my files. And I think I'm going to start with this guy right here. Click open. And it's going to place it. Now, I can use these handles to scale up a little bit. One thing I want to make sure of is I don't have seams like this because I am spanning non contiguous shapes. I just want to move this over. I'll go to my blend mode here in my appearance panel, and I'm just going to see what works best. Kind of, like, overlay is a little too bright. I'm gonna go with soft light in this particular case, but I always recommend just playing around with different blend modes to see what works best for the color and texture that you're using. So I'm going to go to this red layer. I'll do the same thing, add a fill, select it. With my gradient tool, I'll go to Bitmap. And I'm just going to speed this up until I get to the final one where I'm going to create an opaque shape. So I've added the glass texture to all of these. For this final one, this pink one, I actually want to create sort of a milky texture. With a lot of stained glass, you'll always see sort of an opaque one that's in with the more translucent ones. It usually has a marble texture, and that's exactly what I'm going to use to create this, a marble texture. I want to follow the same steps and add a fill. And this time, I'm going to choose this marble texture that I have and just drag it out. Again, I want to make sure there's no seams. Just bring it right to about there. And then I'm going to change the blend mode to overlay. And you can see, unlike these that have some light points coming through it, this doesn't. It's a little bit more opaque. And I actually like that. I think it breaks it up a little bit and adds a little bit more dimension. Before I finish this up, I want to step back and see if there's anything that I need to change. So if I do want to change something, I can just go to the appearance panel. Let's say I want to adjust my fill here. So if I want to move this around a little bit, maybe add another color point, I could do that, bring that down or up maybe. And same thing here. I'm just going to choose this one and maybe bring this down I can also change the type of gradient if I'd like. And maybe bring this red down a little bit. One final thing I need to do is adjust my texture here because you can see some lines. I'll just bring that up. I like how that's looking. I'm going to call that done. One final thing that I want to do is select all of my layers, including the soldering lines. I'm going to do one final group, and I'm going to add a larger drop shadow down into the right, so I'll hit FX. Now, there's already a little bit of a drop shadow from when I added it to the soldering lines, but I'll just add a little bit more. Go to outer shadow. And again, I want this to be little deeper than the others. I'm gonna bring the opacity down just a touch, though, and bring the radius up. And again, I want to scale with object and hit close. And that's it. I can use this in something as large as an illustration or a printable greeting card, or even scale it down and use it as a motif in a surface pattern design or as a digital sticker in my planner. If you have any questions about what you've learned, feel free to reach out to me. I'd love to see what you create from this class, so please consider sharing your project in the projects and resources section. Thanks so much for joining me in Happy creating, and I'll see you in the next affinity in 15.