Create a Vector from a hand-drawn Image in Affinity Designer

1. Welcome!: Welcome to the class. Create a vector from hand-drawn image in Affinity Designer. In this class, we will use a pixel-based image I've drawn, procreate and turn it into a vector in Affinity Designer. If we have met yet. Hi, my name is Maria. I'm an artist and graphic designer and a teacher. I love to draw and turn everything hand-drawn vector art in this class are used to program Affinity Designer for that, we won't trace our kid automatically or manually. And I show you how step-by-step you learned the difference between pixel and vector-based images. And you get to know the pen tool in Affinity Designer. You can apply your new knowledge to any painting you want to vectorize. If you don't have your own image. Now various, you'll find mine in the class so you can start right away. So join me now and let's have some fun together. 2. Vector vs Pixel: In this lesson, we talked about pixel-based and vector-based images. I have opened both now. This one is the pixel-based image, while this is a vector-based image, and I can only see that because when I click to my selection tool here, and I click in here, double-click. You can see the different points here. This is where the magic of vector happens because this means I can change everything here. Just press Command Z to go back here. But this lets you know that we are in a vector-based image. So let's quickly go back to the pixel-based image. So when I zoom in, I can use the magnifier here and just click here in my image. Or I do it with my trackpad. And you see what happens, sinks are getting blurry the more I zoom in, the blurrier it gets. So here you can see that we already have these pixels showing up. We can avoid that. I just do a right-click and say zoom tool, and it's back to normal. So now let's go to the vector-based image and zoom in like we did before. Go to the magnifier, and then just zoom in or I do it with my mouse. And you see, no matter how far I go in, there are no pixels showing up here. That is because we are talking about a vector-based image here. Right-click and zoom to fit. And you don't see any difference right now, if I have them both in this size, but once I zoom in there is difference. And when this is helpful, it actually is when you want to print these cat on a very large piece of whatever, a poster or something like that, then this is important. And beside that, you can also have here, you have here each of the layers you can work on and modify them or change the colors. So just by having all of these layers is very helpful when you want to change the color of your vector or whatever. So you usually save this file as an Affinity Designer file because then you have all these layers and can change whatever is needed. It's very important when we have an image in PNG or JPEG format, we have these pixel showing up. While we don't have that when we have a vector here. And we can change this as well. So it's a very important difference here. And that's why we want to create a vector-based image now and use our cat, which I have drawn in procreate as a basis. And then we go from there and try to trace it in the next lesson. 3. Let's trace the Cat in Affinity Designer: In this lesson, we're going to trace a cat. So click on File and then click Place. And then we pick the file from our computer. Just click on it bottom right-click Open and click into your document to have it right here. Now you can center it in your document and then click apply and you have it there. So now lock your file. You do that by going to your layers palette. And then you click on the right, on the key. And it's locked so you cannot change anything here anymore except the capacity to do so we go over the word opacity and just drag it to the left so you can easily make your cat less appear. And that's important because we want to trace over her. So we need her in the background, but we don't need her to prominence so we can see what we're doing. Now we create a new layer. Just click in your layers palette on that. And I zoom in with Command Plus, or you can do that on your mouse or your trackpad. And then we start tracing. First, go to stroke and turn it up until 3.5. If you don't have the palette there, go to View and then studio. And then you can find it here in the drop-down. And somewhere it's a stroke and you can open your palate. Now we start by clicking on the Pen tool or just click P. You can see it in your toolbar. And when you have, go over your, your cat with your pantry, you see I have to draw curve right now. So I click twice and drag the mouse with the left mouse key pressed to the bottom. So I have the curve. It takes a little bit of exercise to do so, but I promise once you're used to it, it's pretty easy. So just go over the odd strokes and make them appear on your document. We trace a kid to have it in vector. And having it in vector means in this case, that you can make it as large as you want. Vectorizing means it's, yeah, it's like a scientific result of a file. So you can make it as big as you like. That's pretty interesting. It depends on what you are creating, but it can't be wrong to have it in vector. So let's see, Just, I go over and when I have to change direction, I press the Alt key to do so. And then I can just keep clicking here and go around my cat. In this case, the outer lines here follow along would be the best because you have some tricky edges. So if you follow just long press Pause, and then you can do what I'm doing. And then we follow along. As I said, once you have a little bit of practice, you can completely do that on your own with whatever document or whatever painting you have. But I guess for the first time, we might do it together. So you have all these edges perfectly traced. Whenever you change the direction, don't forget to press the Alt key and then just keep clicking. Here you can see I have a pretty large area because this is just a little like a circle or half circle. So I just click on both sides and drag it to the bottom. So the curve adapts to what I need here. Once again, I can go over a larger area. You do it like this. It gets pretty smooth. And now we won't draw the rounds here of her face at one, so we just click over it and do it in a second step. I'm going to show you how in just a few minutes. But for now, I just make sure that I have enough anchors here. So I keep clicking here. Follow along with me because you all need all these little anchors to do that. What I'm doing later. Hey, if I'm wrong, I just press Command D. Go back and start all over. We're nearly there. We can close our shape right here. So you see, now I'm gone all around the cat and have a black stroke here. And now we're going to adapt it a little bit by pressing, by going to the not too far, pressing N on my keyboard so I can adapt the little knots here, the anchors a little bit to make them fit perfectly to my cat. Just go around if everything is correct and if not, just modify it a little, drag your anchor to wherever you need it, and just keep going. Just check if everything is correct and when you are on the feed, yeah. Then we can start actually getting the feet done. So for that, because we have two anchors is pretty easy. We just need to drag it down, but I'm going to show that to you in a second. Here you go. Let's zoom in. And now I just drag it in the middle to the bottom. And here you go. You have a perfect feed. Do that for each of these points. For each of her feet. Actually. Click on the rounding tool to have it a bit rounder here, makes your life easier. Okay, just go around here and see there's a little bit of an edge, so I just make it a bit rounder. The better you have it right now, the better it is for your entire cat. Otherwise, might look a little bit strange. So make sure you have the lines set perfectly. Okay, Let's zoom out and have a first look. You see the outer edges aren't perfect. We can fill it quickly so to see if everything is correct. And yes, it looks good. And now I'm going to turn that off again because we need to see through. So we have our cat there. Make sure you click on the layer. You can turn off the background color. So we're back to the pen tool. Just click P on your keyboard or in your toolbar. And then we need to keep going. So this automatically gets onto a new layer now. But later on, we need to put the rest of these little black edges or her for it actually is. So we need to get them all on one layer so we can change the color all at once. So I'm going to show you that in a second when we have rounded this first one, don't vary if you go over the edge now with your stroke, we're going to fix that in a second as well if it doesn't fit hundred per cent. So you have no duplicate strokes here, we're going to clip that. We take the layer and drag and drop it in. So you see it's clipped and nothing happens when you go over the outer edge. Now make sure you click that, Add new curve to select the curves object. And then happens what I just said, you just keep going on the same layer so we can change later all the colors at once. So make sure you go around here again. We don't need a filling, so let me turn that off. But I keep going with it, a stroke here. Some of the elements will be on their own layer like our whiskers. We take care of them later. For now, I just make the little for areas, black areas here and trade them. You see there are no more layers in the Layers palette. We just keep to have the one where all these little areas are. I can here will apply the clipping mask. So in case you go over the edge, don't worry, we clipped it. You see, I just do for areas, our lives a little thing out for now. Change to the natural. Drag it down a bit. And adapted. Always have to close the shape. That's why I always need to look for a start point and an endpoint and see how it goes then because I need to go around, as I said, I need a complete shape, then need to close it. Okay. Closing the shape once again, you see a try to be online on the line. But if not, it's clipping, so it doesn't matter too much. We can always check if everything is right by just filling the entire area with the color. And you see, it works just great. So we can keep going. Change to the right layer and turn off the filling. And we can go. No worries if things are not 100%, we're going to fix that. Just when we have close to shape. Again, when I change direction, I press the Alt key and it's pretty easy. Okay, shape is closed. Now we need to fix the arrows here with another tool. So press N on p and go into your toolbar. And then we can adapt this. So at the last two stripes in her first, let's go over that again. Whoops. Command Z. To get rid of it. Looks like we have close to shape yet. Let's try that again. Okay. And how we keep tracing our ears so they are close. That's why they look like this. I guess it can go on that layer as well because they are all filled with one color. Let's add her shin on flow to that layer before we get into the face. Okay, let's try that. Go into that layer and fill it with black. So we see everything is correct. You see on that separate layer her shin by mistake, but it doesn't really matter just to we can merge that down or whatever or just leave it as it is. It, it really doesn't matter. Just make sure that whatever you need to be black is close together or better even on one layer. Turn off the filling again. You see the advantage to have everything on one layer. So we don't need to click on each one. So now we go ahead and do the whiskers again with a pen tool. But that gets a little bit more tricky because we need it thin on the inner side and a little bit wider on the outer. So this white, they have to go on a separate layer. See the tools I click. Didn't work. So let's go back and do it again. Okay, all whiskers on one layer. And now see where it go. I go to stroke and then go here to pressure and drag it down. So you see what happens as getting sin on the one side and wider on the other. Now we do the feed. You see there's not much left to do so we just need to go along the line. Okay, now let's do the nose pretty quick. So we just need to go around here and add the little triangle or her nose. Put it again on one layer. For that area we increase the stroke. So you see what happens? There's a little bit of space left on her nose, but not that much. In best-case, we would turn that little left area white. Thing is you won't see that because her body is white anyway. But for now, I think it looks much better. Somehow just my perfection, perfectionism actually. Okay. Let's keep going. Looks pretty good. Now. The ears and the mouth is left. And then we're done. I turn everything off and show you zoom in again. Go to the pen tool and start creating our triangle, which is the ear. And when you have created the triangle, you just need to fill it with a color. So this is something new you learn here. Just go round and close the shape. Once you have done that, you need to pick the color from the original layer in best-case, in full opacity. First to pose, It's easier to fill them both at once. Just you know, where I'm coming from. So I just click on everything which should be right now, my cat. So I turn on the layer, the original layer again, pick the color, and then I go back to my layer, back the opacity of the cat, go back to my original layer, and then I fill it with a color I just picked. Okay. I need to turn on again later on. For now, I just get her mouth. You see, can happen. That doesn't go perfectly. So we just change. What do we create the entire path and adapted to our lines. What you are learning right here is pretty powerful because now you can turn whatever graphic into a vector a, you need a much larger, it's, you know, it's work. Yes. But it's well worth it. So and then you can just make sure you have your pixel-based image into a vector. Again, we pick the color from her mouth. Go back to the right layer. Bit tricky because now we have some more. I helped myself by turning them off and on. I know I'm on the right layer. Okay. Can you see that now? The layer of the tongue is under the layer of the mouth. Now, we need to drag it over in just a second. Otherwise you won't see her tongue anymore. Okay, just turning off on the colors. Now. Let's see how it goes. We add some more details here, as you can see on her tail. Okay, Let's kill the cat with her colors. Okay, now you can see the anti kitten is ready. I have turned off the other layer, that one. We don't need that anymore because our kidneys ready now. And now we can just exported that, go to File and then click Export. And make sure it's on PNG. And you can now choose the whole document or just selected area. Doesn't matter, really recurse. Maybe you choose selected area because it's as big as a cat is another SPS document. Now click export, and you can save it on your desktop just as cat or whatever name you choose here. 4. Saving your File: So let's dive into another lesson about exporting your document. I said before that you save it as a PNG. But if you do, you are losing the vector capability, which means that in the end, you save in pixel-based image and that's not what we want. So you can do that based on the project you're working on. But you should also know that it is always a good idea to have your layers here. That means you need to save it as an affinity file. So you can always pull it up again and half your layers. And with a layers, you can easily change the colors or modify. Or if I just make up my mind and say I want to change the tone or the eye or whatever. I click on my layer and I go here into my node tool and then start changing the notes here, or change the colors or whatever I want. And then I can, I can export it that way so I can change the entire cat and color and form if I want to. But for that, I need to save as an affinity file. So you just go here, click Save as and when you pick it as, you just save the document and say, Okay, Teresa care with affinities. I know that's my name. You name it however you want, and then you just click Save. And please have an IEE on that. Here's a little asterix, a little star. And when I'm going to save it now this will disappear because when the document is saved, so let me do that. So you can see it has disappeared and I have now my affinity File Save. Once you have done that, you can go back to export. Let's go here. We talked about PNG format because then you have a transparent background. You can use your cat for a lot of projects. So yes, it's pretty big, so it might be enough for most of your projects. That's why we save it as a PNG. But if you want to keep the capability of a vector file, you should change it to SVG and save it as SVG. Then you are losing your layers as well. So that's why we always save it as an affinity file as well. And then we can easily export it in whatever format we want. So just make sure you have that correctly. And I usually use 300 DPI just in case. Then you can hear. Choose if you want to export the whole documents selected area or the selection only which you can do later on right now I would just export my tongue. So that's of course not what I want. So I would just pick SVG and click export and save it to my computer. 5. Your Project: So now let's get to the project. You can imagine that I want you to trace something no matter how you get it into your computer, whether you draw it on paper or you draw it in Procreate or whatever you do, just get it into your computers. Can it take a picture of it and start tracing? You can, of course, go to my website and download the kitten from there. I have added it to the designer's toolbox. Actually, you can download all the files you need and start tracing your image. So once you have your material, whether my cat or whatever you've drawn, start tracing your project. So go ahead and use the pen tool and just go around whatever you have drawn and start tracing it. And once you have done that, please upload your file to our project gallery so we can all see what you have done. I'm really looking forward to see your steps forward to your vector design.