Creating a Retro Travel Poster in Affinity Publisher Using StudioLink

1. Introduction: Hi and welcome to this course on creating retro travel posters using affinity publisher with studio like I'm super excited for you to come on this course with me. We're gonna have a ton of fun making a retro travel poster of one of our favorite places. If you're like me, you love that look of retro travel posters that vintage feel that makes you feel like you really want to go to the place that is showing. I'm super excited to show you how I make posters that have that vintage feel. And this is all enabled because of affinity, publisher and that studio link that allows us to use the features of affinity designer and , if any photo all together in one cohesive package. This is how we're able to create vectors and rast er's and text altogether in one seamless document that really allows us to put forward that idea of the vintage travel poster. So for this class, you do need to have affinity publisher, famed designer and affinity photo all downloaded and installed on your computers. Each of those air just a single purchase license for $50 apiece, or you can download the freight trials and just try them out while we're going through this course together. Affinity publishers where we'll be doing the work because that's where Studio Link exists and allows us to use the features of all three programs together and in tandem. So I hope you're excited to dive in and have create retro travel posters using Infinity publisher with Studio. 2. Project: The project for this course is to create a retro travel poster with a vintage feel to it. You'll do this using affinity publisher, but you'll also be using features from a funny photo and Finney designer using this studio leg portion of the Infinity publisher application. So the first thing that you need to do to complete this project is choose one of your favorite places that you have photos of that you want to create a retro travel poster for throughout the course. I'll show you the steps you need to go through to create your vengeance travel poster. And if you follow along and do all the steps that I'm doing at the end, you will have a completed Vigen travel poster that you can then export as a JPEG and upload to the class project portion of this course. I really hope that you'll take the time and put in the effort to actually complete the project and to upload it to the course. I know a lot of times we want to complete the project and then not show them to anyone because we feel self conscious about the work that we've created. But the only way to get better is to get feedback. So please, once you've taken the time to create something as you follow the steps in this course, please also take the time to export it and put it up for your fellow classmates and me to see that we can all give feedback to each other and learn together forward to seeing the products that you're about to produce. I'm sure they will be beautiful posters of places that are meaningful to you in the next video, we're going to jump in and learn what studio is all about. 3. Introduction to StudioLink: So for this course on creating a retro travel poster and a famed publisher, we are going to be using studio link in order to access all of the features of Unity, publisher of famed designer and affinity photo all in one place. Now, in order to do this, you do need to own all three of those programs. You could create a poster like this with just one those programs, that it is so much easier when you have all three of them and you're able to harness them together. This is where a fitting publisher becomes so powerful. So, in this video, we're just going to go over what studio link is and how to use it. We aren't going to go through the whole interface. If you want an introduction to the whole interface of a funny publisher, please watch my introduction to affinity Publisher that will take you through the interface and kind of teach you where everything is at. But the part of the interface that we're going to focus on is this part up here. So this is the studio link personas area of the toolbar, and you can see we are in the orange one, which is publisher right now. So we have all of our publisher tools. This is the way that we would handle text and lay out. But if we come over here, we get the designer persona, which is the blue one. And this is where it gets really amazing. Because when I click here, as long as I own affinity designer and have it installed on this computer than I can cook over here, and I can get all of my designer features as well. So then I get all of my designer tools on the left, and that is amazing. So this is where we will handle a lot of the vector work that we're going to do for this poster, though, if I go over here to my layers panel, you can see that there are lots of different layers of vector artwork. So these are all created using the pencil, and we will be going into that length. We can do that because it has the power of both, if any, publisher and affinity designer. And so we get access to all of those tools that we need, and then the next persona is affinity photo persona, The purple one. We'll just click over there and you can see we get all of the photo tools and this is where becomes really super useful because a lot of the vector features cross between publisher and designer. But a lot of the raster features Joan Cross into publisher and so, having photo available to us, it's crucial especially for this type of project, where we're going to be adding texture so you can see I've got all of these texture layers for different types of textures, and I can turn those on and off. And those can all be handled from here in the photo persona. And so we're able to do that without opening in a different program. We can just add the texture right here, and this is what I think is super powerful. So you do need to own all three of these programs publisher, designer and photo altogether at full price. Those cost you about $150. So it's not that big an investment, considering that this is software you'll be able to use forever. It's really exciting to have this. We're gonna be using all three of these personas to do this work throughout this class. So go ahead and make sure that you have studio links set up. If you just go up here and click on one of these buttons, if any publisher will walk you through setting up studio like since I already have it set up, I can't actually show you how to set it. And in the next video, we will be talking about how to choose a photo for your retro travel poster. 4. Selecting an Image: Oh, okay, So now that we understand what Studio Link is, one of the first things that we need to do in order to create a retro travel poster is to choose the image that we will use as a base and a guide for our travel poster. So the idea is that will take an image of a place that people would want to travel to, and we will create a poster based on that picture. And throughout this course, we are going to be using two posters to demonstrate things were going to be using this experience Big Thunder Mountain poster, which is already completed to demonstrate things that I have already done on a poster. And then we're going to be doing a new poster of the Disney World Cinderella's Castle so that you can see me go through the design process while I am doing it. So first, let's look at the picture that I chose for the experience. Big Thunder Mountain poster. If I go over here to my layers on the right hand side and I hold down option on my keyboard or Altana PC, then I can just click on that layer and it will actually show us just that layer. So option click will show just a single layer. So this is the image that I chose from Big Thunder Mountain. There are two things that you really want to think about when you are choosing an image. The 1st 1 is, Does that image represent the place that you want to show off in the travel poster? Well, so you can see in this image of Big Thunder Mountain the mountain is the main feature. You can easily see it. But one of the most important things about Big Thunder Mountain is the trait that you write in. And so I really want to choose one of my pictures of Big Thunder Mountain. I had tons of pictures of Big Thunder Mountain, but I want to choose one that had the train in it so that I could represent that as well. So we've got that We've got the feature of the bridge and the track running underneath the bottom in the underpass here, and so that really represents the whole kind of vibe of Big Thunder Mountain. And so this was a great image for that as like the angle and what the image is showing because it doesn't really matter if the image gets pixelated. When you expand it to the size of your poster because you aren't going to using anything from that image in your actual poster, you're just going to be using it as a guide. And so it's more important that the image represent what you want to show that it is that the image be high quality or that it be properly edited or exposed, or anything like that. As long as you can get the detail from it that you want to show in the poster. That is the important thing. And of course, the better the image, the more detailed that it would probably have in it. But always take the image that best represents the place rather than what one is actually the best image. Another great thing in something that you want to consider when you're choosing whether or not the images, the right image for you is how much space there is to place text. So a lot of times a travel poster, we'll have have text at the top and then sometimes at the bottom. So if there's kind of empty space that's not showing detail. That's a great place to be able to put the title or a little description of the place. So here I have experienced Big Thunder Mountain. We'll be talking more about text in a later video, but you kind of want to have space. So either there should be empty space like there is in this image in the sky or there should be space. That's not important for you to add detail into. So maybe there is something there in the sky, but you aren't going to put it into the image. But they can also be like something like grass or fields, depending on the place that you're going, that it falls at the bottom of the poster were just a place where you feel like you can obscure the detail in order to put your text OK, so now let's talk about the second thing when choosing an image. The second thing that's important is you need to own the rights to that image, so you need Teoh have taken the picture yourself or have purchased the rights to that picture, or be using a copyright free picture from a site like unspool, ash or picks. Obey something that you can use because even though you aren't going to be using the image itself, you are still going to be making a representation of that image. And you don't want to be violating another artist's rights when you do that. So it's often best if you've just taken the image yourself. And having actually been to the place that you create a travel poster about gives you a better feeling for what's there. So you're able to put Mawr of that into your work when you are creating the travel posters . So let's go and see what we're going to choose for. Our poster of the Disney World. Cinderella Castle just jumped over here into my max finer so that I could look at my images and I have a few pictures of the Disneyworld Castle, so this is a pretty good one. You can also hit space bar on the Mac to see the full image or document that you're looking at and this image while it's not a great picture. Like I was saying, it does have all of the things that I need in a picture for a travel poster. So it's got a very bright sky, which we don't have to use the white color of the sky. We can just make it whatever blue we want and it's got the castle and its showing it, and there's some water running through here. It's a nice representation of the castle. If we were to trace this, let's look at a couple others. So this one looks like I took this with a high dynamic range. And so there's a little bit more detail in the sky, and that's something that I might want to pull out clouds or popular in a lot of travel posters I might be cool to have, but it is darker down below. But I think there's enough here that I could easily pull it out, and I might want to leave that space down there rather un detailed so that it can add text in. There isn't a lot of space for text up in the sky because this spire goes all the way to almost the top of the image. But we could definitely just add more sky in okay, so this is a different angle of the castle still at the water running past. Okay, I think we go this 1 41 72 because I like the way that I have this space in the front that I can use or text if I don't have enough space in the sky. So I think this is the one that I'm going to go with. I think I can pull out enough detail and probably adding some clouds based on this image. So that's the one that I'm going to go with to start off this process. So going to make sure that the image you choose is a good representation of the place that you want to show, and that doesn't mean it has to be the standard image of that place. Sometimes and unique angle is better because it gives something new to your poster. So, for example, this image of the Disneyworld castle is not taken from the front, which is theatric dish inal view of the castle. But I think that having it from a side angle, getting the river in there will give a little bit more personality two D image than just the standard front of the castle image. And so That's what I want to use for my travel poster. You want to give people an idea of what they will be seeing. They're kind of something unique that they will feel. And then the same thing to remember is, Do you own the rights to the image? Just because you find a really cool image doesn't mean that you can use it as a base for your travel poster. You need to own the rights to that image if you're going to be tracing it. All right, so now we will be working with on this image, you create our travel poster, and so we will talk about that in the next video. 5. Choosing Retro Colors: next we're going talk about the colors that we're going to use in our retro travel poster, and so color is really important in your retro travel poster in order to give the vibe that you want to get across in it. And so one of the things that I've really started doing is limiting myself in the color palette that I use. When I first started doing retro travel posters, I used to use a bunch of colors and a bunch of different shades in them, and that was okay. My posters turned out looking fine, but they didn't look as retro as I wanted them to. And as I studied a lot of retro travel posters, I found that they used a very, very limited color palette, normally only three or four colors. And so I've now started to limit myself to just three colors. And then I will also use whites and blacks for shadows and highlights. So that gives my poster much more of a retro feel to have that really limited color palette . And so I would really encourage you to do that as well. There's a couple different ways to get that color palette one way that is popular is to actually grab your eyedropper tool on the top right here in your swatches panel or your color panel. Just grab that eyedropper tool. You just have to hold on it and then drag, and then you can pick up any color on the screen. So let's say we really wanted to get one of these greens. Just click on that, and that's then in our eyedropper tool, and if we click on it, it will add it to our fill or to our stroke, whichever one's in front. Now we double click on that. We can then find our hex, RGB, etcetera. And so that's one way where you can actually pull the colors from the image itself. I am not going to use that way on this image. This image is pretty dark, and so the colors are not super accurate to what I would want it to be if I were going for accuracy. But often in a retro travel poster, we aren't going for accuracy anyway. We're going for feeling we're going for VIPs, so another way to get your retro colors is to find a theme online that feels retro chief. I've just jump over here to color dot adobe dot com, which is a place where I love to get my color themes from, Even if I'm not using Adobe software and I'm just going click on explore and in the search tab on one type in retro. And here we'll find a lot of pallets that a bunch of artists have made off of different images that show us different retro styles. So this is a great way to get Aton of different color palettes and really look through and see retro means a lot of different things to a lot of from people because it can depend on what time period you're coming from. We're really going for kind of that WP a period where things you know in the 19 thirties 19 forties, that's what we're going for with the retro travel poster. So we're looking more for something along those lines, more past Ellie than like neon vibrance of like the seventies or eighties and so you can choose one of these, and I've gone into detail. In my other course. The introduction to if any publisher on how to get a color pot and there. We also do a retro vibe on our menu, and so I'm not going to go into all the details here of making a palette. But this is where you can find one and choose it, and then you can get the numbers, the hex numbers from it and then bring them into affinity. Publisher. I already have a color palette that I like someone that I used in the last course. I just have it here under my palettes retro colors. And so I've saved that as a system pallet. That's why there's an apple next to it so I can use that pallet anywhere. And so that's the one that I am going to use now. The pallet comes with five colors. As I create the poster, I will choose the three of them to use. I won't go any higher than three colors and then, oh, use white and black as well for the shadows and highlights. So go ahead and determine what your color palettes gonna be. It's okay if there's more than three colors at the beginning, but as we go into creating the poster, we won't use any more than three colors on it. And I know that can be hard to limit yourself to something like that. But that can really help you to express your vibe better by having a limited color pot instead of just leaving the whole world open to you. So go ahead and get your palate all set up so that we're ready to go. And then in the next video, we will talk about managing our layers. 6. Setting Up the Document: the so the next thing that we need to do is to set up our new document to work on our travel poster. So I'm going go up to the file menu, and I'm just going to choose new from the top, right? So now we have a new document and we're just going to set this up now again, I'm not going to be going into a ton of the interface details and stuff in F any publisher , because I've done all of that in my previous course that does an introduction to a famed publisher. So if you are unfamiliar with just the interface and the basic symphony publisher, you might want to step back for a moment, take my introductory course on that and then come back to this course to learn some of the more advanced techniques using studio link. But we're basically just going to set this up. This is going to be a print. I always put these posters up for sale as principles, so people print these out on their own home printers. Generally, they could take them to a professional print if they want to, but generally people just want to print them out on their own home printers to put them up in their house. And then we can choose a page preset here. We want letter because that is generally what people have available to print on in their home. You do want to make things that you're printing, especially thinks that you're using raster graphics like we're gonna be using raster textures on this poster. So we want to make sure that we created at this size that we intend for it to be printed at . And so in this case, thes air just intended to be printed small on letter size paper. They are intended to be huge things. But if you were creating a travel poster for, like, an agency or something, these might be really big posters, and you would want to create them at that size because the raster graphics that you use will get really pixelated when they become huge. So we're gonna work on letter. At this point, I'm going keep my documented inches because that's what I'm familiar with. Working with. You can change it to whatever you like or whatever it is based on the country that you're working in or the industry that you're working in the image placement policy we're just going go with prefer embedded because we don't want to have to link the image in. So we're going with embedded at this point because this is just document with a single image in, as opposed to a multi page mini part document that would have many images. We just want to opt out here to our margins on a poster like this. I just want to have 1/4 age margin 0.25 in just on. I want to turn on my link so that I can link them all together and then put in 0.25 inches there. Now we have the margins, and then we'll go to our bleed and I'm going to add a 0.25 inch bleed as well. The bleed helps. We know how far out to put things like on a travel poster. I'll generally put the border out into the bleed so that if things are a little bit off in printing, it will still look right. That really only applies, of course, if you are printing with a professional printer, but in the case that this might be. Maybe I want to sell physical copies of this someday. Use a professional printer. I'm gonna put a bleed in there, just in case. I want that in the future. And then I'm going. Go ahead and I am going to click. OK? And now I get this new document here with a blank page that I am ready to work in. And so in the next video, we will be placing theme image that we chose in the last video onto this document so that we can start creating our travel poster. 7. Placing the Image: way. So now that we have our documents set up, it's time for us to place our image. We're just going go up to the file menu in the top left, and we are going to choose place. We'll just grab our image here and click open. That loads up our cursor with our image, and we're just going to click in the top left corner, see how I get the snap there. That will only happen if you have snapping, turned on. Which is this magnet up here? Get the top of corner and then I'm going to drag out. And it looks like for some reason, this particular images placing rotated 90 degrees. So we're just going, Go ahead and we're going to rotate that back, going up to the top handle here. Just click and drag hold down shift to keep it on 15 degree angles, little reposition that snap it into place, and we'll keep dragging it out until we get the whole thing and I'm gonna drag past until I get the entire page felt So there's a little bit that's being cut off there, but that's fine. We don't need that particular information. Okay, So now we have placed the image, and in the next few we're going talk about choosing and creating a color palette for our retro. 8. Managing Layers: throughout this project, we will need to be managing our layers, and the first thing that we want to do in later management is actually to block our image layer so that we don't accidentally draw or work on that later when we don't intend to. So I'm going to go over to my layers panel on the right hand side and slept might image layer and then click the lock icon in the right hand corner of that panel. Was it locked? We won't be able to do anything on it. If we try to draw on it, we'll just get another layer. You can see we get another layer there. Go ahead and delete that shape, and so it's locked in. It's safe and we can work from there. I'm going to jump back over to the Big Thunder poster so you can see more about layer management. Here. Layers can get really messy, and it's important that the layers be able to be in the location that they need to be to give the proper effect on the poster. And so it's good to try. Entitle your layers as much as possible. You can see that I have layers in groups here, and I try to title all of my layers so that I know what they're doing. As we work through this, we add a lot of different layers. So, for example, if I open up my base colors group, you could see there are tons of different layers in here. And then there are even groups within it, and I try and name these groups so that I know what each is doing. So, for example, here's the track shadows. If I turn those off, you can see that the shadows on the track disappear. So trying to keep your layers group just really important. You can group players by clicking on one holy downshift, clicking on another and then hitting command G on your keyboard that will put them in a group were already commands because I don't want those in the group, but you can see I try and name my layers, things that make sense to me. Lots of people have complicated naming conventions that work for them. I just use fairly simple ones to name my layers or my groups, so this could be really good when you're working with different textures. You can see I have different types of textures here that I can turn off and on, and so I can know which one is doing what and moved back and forth between them. Another thing to know about layers is that you can easily view just one layer by holding down option on your keyboard and clicking on that layer in the layers panel. So I just want to see my background there. Well done. Option. Click on it. Then, if I want to see all of my layers again, I just click on one of my layers, and all the layers that are currently checked come back into view. Any layer that's unchecked will not be viewed. And within a group you can also turn off individual layers without turning off the whole group. But if you do on throughout the whole group, you just uncheck that and then you can't see any of the layers. Within that group, you can see I groupthink square into type. You can't always group things according to type, because sometimes a shadow needs to be within the base layer. Group took fall where it needs to be, so we'll work through that all together as we go about making 9. Creating the Base Vectors: a lot, right? So now we're finally ready to start laying down our base vector shapes. The base vectors are the shapes that make up the largest parts of your image. So you can see that here on Big Thunder Mountain within my group that I call base colors, I have a bunch of different shapes. So, for example, the sky here is the back most shape, and I turn that off. You can see the picture behind us reveal. And so these base vectors are generally the large parts of the shape. And of course, we come in and we add smaller shapes later. So you can see that I've even included some of my shadows and my highlights in here in order to put them in the proper stacking order for the entire poster. But we start with just these big ones like the mountain, this guy and the bridge. So these big chunks of color that we see that's what we're aiming for. So if we jump back over to our Disneyland Castle, we can look for these big chunks and we're going to actually trace thes with the pen tool. Now we are using Studio Lincare so we can use the pentacle and either the affinity publisher persona or they feign designer person because I'm already in the Infinity publisher persona. I'm just going Go ahead and use the pen tool here because the pencil works exactly the same in both personas. So we go ahead and hit P on a keyboard. It will select the pencil, or we can click the pen tool Over here. The pen tool will be the major tool that we use in laying out our vector shapes. It's just the best way to be able to trace around things on our image. So we're gonna start with just the back the sky so that one's easy. We just click, click and doesn't need to be exact because a bunch of this will be hidden by other vectors . Do that and then we want to go ahead, and we want to choose a color for this. We can always change the color later, but from our palate, we're gonna go with the thing that we think will work best here for the sky. Now here's the green. That's what I used for the sky on Big Thunder. But I'm not feeling it for this one, so we can only use three of these colors. And I think the green is going to be for the grassy parts. We're trying the beige for the sky. I can always come back and change this later. Sometimes you find out that things don't work the way you were planning, but that's what we're going to go with. For now. Go ahead and click the check mark here to turn off that layer and grab my selection tool. I'll just click on the canvas to get away from it. And now we're going. Go ahead and we're going to start laying down another vector shape. Let's start with our green like hillside here. If he's wanted, zoom in. You just do option scroll on your keyboard and you just want to trace around. Now, the closer you get in, the more detail you'll be able tohave and the more kind of realistic it will look. Of course, we're not going for realism here, and then there might be some things that, as you're tracing your vectors, you don't really want. So, for example, there's a deck in here. I don't really need that duck. He's not bringing anything to the image. I think right now, maybe later I'll want him, I don't know, but I'm just going to go ahead and trace around him. I can't see exactly what's going on because it's so shadowy. But that's okay. We don't need specifics. We're really just going more for the general idea. But the image helps us to know exactly what we're going for. You could see this is going to be a pretty lengthy process. We go ahead and speed this up. You can watch me do it, but in a faster way. - Okay , so you can see that this is a pretty tedious process. This is the pretty tedious part of the whole creating a retro travel poster. But it's important that you take the time to go ahead and make your shapes. A lot of your base vectors will actually go to the edge of the page. Once you get to the edge, you don't have to put in any detail. You can just go around the edge like this and connect it back. Let's go ahead and we'll fill that with our greenish brown color, and now we've got kind of our trees and grass, and we have our sky, and both of these still have their black outline on them, so much like both of them by holding down shift and go to the outline in my swatches panel and click, see no outline, no one outline around our shapes, All right, so now we go ahead and turn those off and because it's gonna be a different color and it's just kind of a different object. But I'm not worried about this fence being a different color because it's all kind of part of the same object here. But each person will feel kind of differently about that, depend on what they're trying to bring out in their poster. There's a lot of back and forth in this just about finding the right balance of detail and abstract nous. And so a lot of times I'll have to come back, and I'll add things in later that I left off on the first time through. And there's nothing wrong with that. These were just like subsequent drafts of the same thing, which is keep going and over again. Good example is like vegetation. Sometimes you won't start putting all the vegetation in at the beginning, you might start with just a big chunk of it. And then you my ad vegetation in later as you go along and find that you need it to kind of conveyed the right feel of the place that you're trying to show off I decided to do here is to do one shape. That's this more Graystone. And then I'll do another shape. That's gonna be this more white stone. I'll just have to come back and put that shape behind this Graystone shape, allowing me to control the color at that level. I think we'll give me more of the feel that I want to have come out of this castle. - Well , okay, So now, just to keep everything straight, I'm gonna go ahead and give my layers names, just like we talked about before. We want to keep everything as organized as we can. Someone go ahead and call this the foreground brush. Okay. So those names would just help me to keep track of things as we get. - Don't . It's 10. More Base Vectors (Optional): No. Well, don't, - but well, - I got 11. Finishing Base Vectors: Okay, so at this point, I have most of my base vectors done. And at this point, I'm thinking that I might need to go look for a new color scheme like this one's working. Okay, But I think I'm a look for a different one, like the color scheme. But it's not working great for this poster, so I'm probably go look for some new retro colors. The last thing that I want to do here is figure out if I need to put in this little house on the right hand side or if I can leave that out. And so in order to figure that out, I need to add my frame that I'm gonna have around my poster so that I can see how much space that's taking up. And so I am going to go grab a shape coming here to my shift tool, have the rectangle tool. We're just going make a rectangle around the whole thing. Then up here in the swatches panel where the colors are, we're just going to reverse the fill on the stroke so that we get that on the stroke and then go to the stroke panel. We're going to raise up the wit on that till we feel like it's in a good spot. Okay, then we'll go ahead and we'll turn back on all of our vector layers. Click off and we'll see how this space on the right looks doesn't look too empty. Does it need me to put that house in? I feel like it doesn't need the house and they're so that's just gonna be extra detail that we don't really need. So I'm gonna leave it off for now. We can always come back and that in later nothing is saying Stone here will be adjusting things as we go along. And you might look at what you have right now and be like OK, like, this does not look great. This is not what I was wanting. It doesn't look bad, but it doesn't look as great as what we wanted. Well, a lot of the information in these travel posters comes from highlights and the shadows. And so they're things that might not look super great, like there isn't a lot of detail in the castle here, and you can see where some of these roofs are. We could delete those roofs that would probably find. But maybe when we add in the shadows and highlights, they'll actually look better, and they look like they should be there and add some extra detail and dimension to this poster. So I think I'm going look for some other colors, and then the next thing that we're going to to add details were actually going to punch out holes in some of these shapes. So especially in shapes like the trees and fencing and detail in the work around the castle , we want to punch holds out through our shape in order to give some detail to those. 12. Changing Colors: All right, So we're gonna go ahead and real quickly, we're going to color our work with some different colors. So I went ahead, went back to colored adobe dot com and found some other retro colors that I like and that I think might work well for this particular project. And so the first thing I'm going to do is duplicate my page because I do not want to make a bunch of changes and then wish that I had gone back. So I'm just going duplicate the page by going over into the pages panel on the left, right, clicking it and choosing duplicate. Now I have two pages that are the same. And so we're gonna go ahead and we're going turn on players on page one here and we're going go ahead and re color this guy. So let's start with the sky. I decided that it wanted a blue color, a pinkish color and a greenish color. So let's recollect the sky blue. If we come to page two, we still have are Yellow Sky. Let's come back to page one. There's going work through and re color this guy. Make that pinkish affinity products are missing some features that if you've worked with Adobe a lot, you might be used to those features or things like select all of the same color or re color artwork. Those type of features would make this process a little bit easier, but in my opinion, it's worth it to do this in F Any publisher because of Studio Link and some of the features that we're going get to later on. Going multi select to several of these were actually lost a couple of our roofs there. So left to fix that in a second, going to make those blue, these guys in front. And when you decide to make a color change, it doesn't have to be a 1 to 1. So here I'm going to change some of things that were kind of are gray green before I'm trading some two blue and some I'll change to our new greenish color. Okay, so I feel like I'm much happier with that color scheme. Jump down here, turn on my colors again, like I like this new one love better. I feel like that is getting the vibe better of what we want. Now I am cheating a little bit because I am using this gray. But I think all we will just use that gray for my shadows instead of black. And if I leave black off, then I think I'll still be within the amount of colors that I want to have in this thing. So we'll play with that as we go along. I could make these things that are great black, but if you like, that's going to be a bit much. And grades whites, blacks are all pretty neutral colors and so they don't stand out as much as the color. So you have a little bit more leeway playing with them. But I am going to try and keep it to. If I'm using this, great, then I'm going to try not to use black. We'll see how that works with some of our shadows as we go along here. Obviously, we've kind of lost our rock here, so I have a little bit of playing around to do. But we will keep trying at this, so that is changing the colors in your document and in the next video we're going to go ahead and we would want to learn more about punching out the holes in our shapes so that we can get more detail and dimension in our picture. 13. Subtracting Shapes: So now we're going talk about punching out shapes or subtracting shapes from other shapes. And this is just to create a window effect in our shapes so that we get a little bit more detail into what's going on. This is really useful with fences and trees and intricate work. It's just a useful technique to know in general when you're designing, because it can help you to achieve effects that you can't do very well. Otherwise we go through this. I'm gonna go ahead and select my layers. In term, off we look for places where there's something showing through another thing, and the trees are kind of an obvious spot for this. So there are areas of the trees that are really thin, but we didn't go around them and we can go ahead and we can punch through on those Now. It's important to know that in order to do this, it needs to be another shape behind the shape that you are punching out so that something can show through. If you show through just the J Peg picture from below, that's not going to look good and wouldn't really be what we're going for it all. So there needs to be something else behind this. Generally that's going to be like Sky or Earth or building. And before I do this, just because going be doing a lot and we would want like to be able to get back to our originals if we need to go ahead and duplicate my page again, right click on it. Duplicate. Now I have to have the same here and you go ahead and we can get started in order to make this easy. I'm just going to group these together by hitting command G on my keyboard will have them selected and then naming that group based vectors melodies Help me with turning them on and off. So let's start with the tree on the left. Grab our pen tool just like women created. The other ones were just going trace around an area, and we'll do a couple of these. They don't need to have any color to them because we're just gonna be subtracting from our original shape. Like with most things in this project, the more of this that we do, the more detailed it's gonna be. You can decide on how much detail you want to have in your image doesn't have to be as much as I do, or it could be even more than I do. I'm obviously I'm not going. Go through every single piece of where the clouds are showing through. On these trees, you can choose how much you want to do, based on what you think looks good in your project, and you can always come back and do more. We need these curves to be in our group so that we can subtract them. So let's grab these curves, drag them down right before our trees left, put them right in front of that and then holding down command will also select trees left. So then we'll switch over to the affinity designer persona, and this gives us the full range of vector tools to work with. And what we're looking for is the subtract option right here. So once we cook that it's gonna pull those out, creating one shape with the empty spaces in it. So if we go ahead and then turn on our base vectors of and you can see, we've now got these empty spaces inside of our big shape and it's much easier to do this subtraction like this than to try and do it when you're first making the base vector shapes . So basically, I'm just going go through and find the different areas where I want to subtract something from Do that. So you're welcome to go ahead and watch me do this a few times and see how this goes again . This is another one of those processes that take some time to get through. It's detail work, but it really makes your image look a lot better in the end. Okay, as I do these, I'm getting some weird things from the snapping, some just going turn snapping off by going up to the magnetic tool, the top. Turn that off and I won't get any more of that snapping super useful. But once in a while it will try and line up things that you don't want lined up and you can just turn it off. - What ? - No . Okay, so that is how you go ahead and punch out or subtract from shapes. There might be more or less of that that you want to do to depend on what picture you're doing. So For example, if we don't back to Big Thunder Mountain and we go find the fence, you can actually see that I punched out a lot of shapes on this, but that was much easier than trying to create the shape with those holes in it, which would probably have been impossible. And so sometimes you need to punch out a lot of shapes to get the detail that you want, and that's okay, just takes a little bit of time and effort. And so that's where you want something to be showing through. In the next video, we're going talk about adding the highlights and the shadows, and and that's where we can start adding even more detail, but where we don't necessarily want something showing through. But we want there to be more detail about what the light is doing in this space, so we're gonna go ahead and do that in the next video 14. Drawing the Highlights: I think we're going be talking about adding the highlights to our pans to show you what the highlights are like. We're just going jump over to the big Thunder poster here. And if we go over here in to our layers panel, you can see where I have added highlights to the mountain. So I've got mounting highlights group here in effect, turn that off. You'll see these white places disappear and those air just giving the added Dad. That would be in a picture where the sun is actually glinting off of something or something is brighter. And so that just helps out in the next video. We'll also be talking about shadows, which also helped to add a lot of depth to your photos. At least two things work together to add the depth that you need. So we're gonna go ahead and jump back into our castle poster here. And what we're looking for is places that are brighter or lighter or Glyn T. And this photo is a little bit dark, so it might be a little bit harder to find these in here, but we just want to find those things and a lot of times will be almost white, and we're gonna add those in, and they don't have to be very big. I did find it when I first started doing travel posters that I would lots of times add bigger areas of highlight that I really should have. Shadows are often bigger, but highlights are often pretty small, and so we'll just go in and add a few of these now. So I know right away that the water needs a highlight on it, and a lot of this is highlighted. But I'm going to start and see what it looks like if I just do this shape right here, just like we have before it's going, going in, trace around, and this shape might be too big. We'll see once we finish. If it looks too big in the final, competent water's often in place where they will be highlights or whitecaps that you can use. This highlights. Add in some of these smaller shapes down here and see how that looks. - So highlights are often often found on the edges of things. So, for example, these rocks on edge here, and so you want to go in and put those in because those will add the dimension that you're looking for. And just like we do with the base factors, we can, of course, come in. And we can punch out windows in here. So I'm gonna punch out a window to do this crack to give more dimension to the highlight. Just if crack along here. 15. More Highlights (Optional): so that will wrap up the highlights portion of this. There might be other highlights that we add as we go along as we come across more details that we need. But in the next video, we're going to move on, and we're going to start doing thes shadow portion of this poster. And as we had the shadows, you'll see even more detail coming in to the poster. 16. Drawing the Shadows: way Alright, so now we're going to go and start adding shadows. Shadows are really important for giving depth to the poster, and often times they will take up larger portions of the image. Then the highlights well, so you can see if I come to this group on the big Thunder Mountain poster that called mountain Shadows and turned them off. The depth of the image really goes away. When I turn off those shadows, you just can't tell us much about what's going on with the mountain. And of course, we don't add in every highlight and every shadow, but we're doing enough to give an idea to the viewer what is going on in there? I have other shadows inside of my base layers in here because they need to be behind other things. But you can see some of these shadows are quite large, so the shadows dealing with the tunnel and the train tracks. There's some big ones of those in the train itself and the train tracks, so there's just a lot of detail that comes with the shadows, and so we want to use the shadows to preserve detail in the image so we'll jump back here to our castle poster and we'll start making shadows on it. So just like with the highlights, we can turn our base vectors. Okay? First place I notice is that this little archway here is really dark. So we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna add that in Now we are using our gray for our primary shadow color. But in places where we're trying to add shadows to the grey, I think will probably using the green. Okay. And this is one of those that we need to move into the base vectors to get it behind turn elements. So we need to get that behind our foreground brush. Let's go ahead and grab that and pull that behind course. We won't want to use the green here because it's up against screen. And so the great works well as our shadow. So especially places where there just doesn't seem like there's enough detail. That's where we really want to focus in. It was not necessarily a shadow per se, but it is a darker part of the image that I want to capture here because I feel like that tower could use more definition Oh, and of course, we can't use great there. Alright, and here's where I said, we have to go back and add highlights. Looks like I missed a highlight here. Give some definition to this tower. Just going to fill in these narrow holes here. Some shadows air big and some shadows air small these once or just little. But I hope that they'll give enough definition what we're trying to do here. And it looks like thes ended up in the highlights group because I had dragged the other one down into the highlights. Let's move him out. And a great place for some of these are these windows, So help give a little definition here. And so, just like with the other ones that we go ahead and work through these, it will take some time, so I'll be speeding it up. You should go along and fill in your own shadows as well 17. More Shadows (Optional): thing that I really want to do is make sure that there is enough definition in the details of the castle to give the right idea. This is a really detailed piece of work, and we aren't going to add in all of the details that exist here because that's not the idea in one of these retro travel posters. But we need to give enough detail that the audience can understand that it is a detailed piece of work. And so one place where I'm noticing when I turned the base vectors on that we're losing a lot of detail is in the towers. There's just not much there to convey how much there. So I went zoom in on this tower and I'm going to try and add some shadowing in to just give the idea of what is actually going on here. So just be going through and adding in as many of these details as I think we need to get the idea across what so don't really 18. Adding Text: all right now that we've mostly got our poster taking care of its time for us to go ahead and add text, we want to add text before we add texture because we want the text to be textured as well as the rest of the poster. So we're going. Go ahead and do this. Make sure that you are in the affinity publisher persona up in the top of left because text is really the point in Affinity Publisher, that's what it excels at. Dealing with text in Designer was always a bit clunky, didn't work too well, but affinity publishers all about tech, so it's much better to deal with now. And even affinity designer has really improved in how it handles text sense. If any publisher came out So we're going, go ahead and we can grab either to text, frame tool or the artistic textile. I'm gonna grab the artistic textile going. Drag that out and we can try and choose the size. Of course, we can adjust this later that I'm going type out my text. I can change things along the top, so I'm going to go ahead and change this to be centered and of course, will be genuine. The font. I'm gonna go ahead and just grab my selection tool, though, and drag this over. Now the Disney font is copyrighted, so we don't want to use the Disney front. There are a lot of knockoff fonts on that, but we're going toe. Just try some different fonts here and see what works nicely with this. We want to be, you know, careful what we're doing somewhere. Scale this down because it's the artistic ticks tool. It automatically scales it's font size. When I turned snapping back on so I can easily center this and now we're going Go ahead and look at the front. So we want to use a font that's a little bit more old and retro here. There were a number of retro fonts that actually came with affinity publisher when you purchased it. If you purchased it at the beginning, I'm not sure how long they kept handing out those sponsor if they still are. But when I bought it came with a number of retro font. So we're gonna go ahead and look for some of those 1st 1 that I'm going to choose here is greasy spoon. That's a fun one that might be one. The ones I used a big thunder. Let's go like a big thunder and see what we're using here, like we are using greasy spoon on Big Thunder and one called Wildfire on the experience and mounted back here to the castle poster so greasy spoon we can go ahead and make that larger , much smaller font size, pulling down command on my keyboard so that I could scale from the middle. Keep it centered, so I don't mind how that fault looks. It would go well in theme with my Big Thunder one, but I want to have some others. Let's try out that Wildfire one. Well, that one is a much larger font, so let's try scaling that down. So look here at it. Just has a normal option. That's it. So that was kind of fun, but I think I like the greasy spoon one better So on, called Unlucky, actually looks rather Disney ish. It's firebox is another one that came within any publisher. Let's see how that one looks. These ones are considered retrofits to kind of look old timing. Of course, retro can mean a lot of different things to pay and what period you're trying to be retro to. That's okay, but not totally in love with it. I think I'm gonna go back to greasy Spoon here, so I like that one. Is that the marae using it in one of the other posters? It would be nice to be on the theme. Okay, so we're going position that their trial some different colors, are too many color options for us because it's overlapping with so many things we do blue. We're going lose half of it to pink. It's gonna blend in with the tower. Of course, we could read it down. So text positioning in these posters is normally at the top or the bottom and we could go for the bottom here. I feel like it like the top more. Let's try Gray. Okay. We'll leave it grey for now and then we'll go ahead and we'll add in another Mister Ghanem will say Come to you. Try the wildfire one on here. Then we'll take another one. Doubt here to the corner. I won't make that one right justified. We'll make this wouldn't left justified just other where they should be. Let's make this one white. Let's making the same size consistency. Okay, I'm like in that. And then often we want to put something down at the bottom of the poster as well. Go ahead and let's drag down another one. And I'm just going to put the established year here. Established years. They're always kind of a popular one to put on. And I didn't put any thing on the bottom of the Big Thunder poster because there's a lot of the poster detail that it's happening down at the bottom of the poster. There's not a lot of room for it, but in this case we have a nice kind of empty space here, the castle. So I'm gonna go ahead and put that in. It was established in 1965 just trying out some different colors here. I think I might want to try some rules next to this one. So we just drew a line with the pen. It'll just a straight line now, on the stroke of that line, I'm going to make that are pink color and gonna go over here and scale my stroke way down. I changed my cap your score, cap. Yeah, that looks okay. The last thing that I want to try with the text is to actually put it behind the tower. Let's go ahead and one group of these guys all together, just so I know that got the date, then I would grab my Disneyworld text. I'm actually going to drag that down into my base layers to get it behind my tower. Go all the way down. We found the castle. Put it behind it as you see how that looks, Francie, To undo that, we're going to try and see what happens if we just drag it off center here, Put the tower right there. I actually think that looks better than having it centered over the tower or behind the tower. When tragedy in that text to just say Florida, I like how that's looking quite a bit. Okay, So I am feeling pretty happy with where we're at with this poster. The next thing that it really needs to add that retro flair to it is some texture. So in the next video, we're going be talking about adding texture to this poster 19. Adding Texture Using Brushes: way have our poster the way we want it. It's time to go ahead and add texture to this poster to give it that vintage feel and to make it look like it's actually on paper or was printed with ink, even if it's going to be digital, although often these will be printed out and hung on a wall or something. But we want to give it that vintage feel. And so there are a couple different ways that we can add texture. The best way to do texture is with raster graphics, and so we're going to be doing this work inside of the photo persona. So just the third persona at the top going jump over and the first way that we're going, Teoh adds, Some texture is with a brush, so we can just come over to the left and choose our paint brush tool and then on the right hand side in our studios, we have the Brushes studio. We're gonna go ahead and go to the list of brushes where it says basic and let's look at texture and if we don't like anything in texture, we can look under spray paint or effects too. So often The best way to do this is just to try out some different things and looks like I didn't group everything together here. So we still want to You go ahead and make some groups which will be helpful in going ahead and adding texture. Let's go ahead and grab my selection tool so I can see what I'm doing with my groups. One of things we need to change, how a brush act is to double click on the brush itself and then we could make adjustments to it. Normally we want to duplicate the brush so that we don't back the old one and then we can adjust different things about the brush as we go along. When would you try and adjust some of the jitters and maybe the nozzles available here just to give us a little bit more randomness? Just one thing and it will try it. Do what happens. I want to bump my scatter up. Ah, whole bunch. So give me more randomness as I'm going through. Okay, so this is one way that you can go about adding texture and you can add it in different ways. But that can give your poster a different kind of feel, and then once you've run in and you added the texture like that, you can then come and you can switch your foreground in your background. Color can come and you can make your foreground white, and that will actually then erase some of your texture. If you feel like there's too much and you don't want as much of that, and you can imply different textures at the same time so we can turn our other one back on , and by adding a lot of different textures in, you can get just the type of feel that you're going for. You can always turn one off as well. And so that's how you can add a texture. Using brushes. There's a lot to brush is there's a lot that goes on with them. You can adjust a lot of the different features in them to make them work in different ways , and so that is a good way to add some texture into your document. But in the next video, we're going talk about another way to add them, and that is by adding a texture, image 20. Adding Texture Using a Raster Image: Now it's time to add texture, using an image that we make into a mask. So if you can see here on Big Thunder, we actually have this raster texture medium turned on. We turn that off, you can see what it is affected. You can see there's a bunch of texture being added. There. We could make different levels of texture. I also have this light texture, which has a lot less in it and then just the raster texture itself, which is very heavy. So depending on with looks that you're going for, you can have different ones. I chose to go with the medium size texture on this one. Okay, come back to our castle poster and we want to go ahead and get a texture from online. So I went to free stock textures dot com, and I just searched for paper and I chose this old paper blank page texture, and we're going to try that and see how it goes. So I just downloaded that and it's in my downloads. So just go ahead and grab that and drag it and and it looks like it dragged it and where it was so right above the base factors. But we're just gonna go ahead and pull that up to the top, and we want to always have a copy. So let's duplicate that right click and choose duplicate. I will work on this other one turning off the one beneath. Let's give it a name, original, texture and then texture for now. Okay, so the next thing that we want to do is actually apply an effect to this texture. So we want to add an adjustment layer, and this is where it gets really powerful, that we have all the tools of photo available to us as well as having the brushes. We can also add adjustment layers. We're looking for a threshold adjustment link, and this is going to change our image to black and white and allows to adjust the threshold for what it's black and white. But we can drag the threshold and it becomes more white or drag up, and it becomes more black. So we want a fair amount of texture, but not too much. What I found is that normally more comes out than what you see in this mode. So I'm gonna try about 58% for now and then going back to our layers panel, we're gonna go ahead and we want duplicated again because we want to save that one before we change this one to a mask. So let's drag this down to our base vectors. Then we'll right click on it and we'll choose. Rast arise to mask, and we need to turn off our top one so that we aren't seeing that anymore. And now we can see the mask underneath. So if we turn it off and back on again, we can see where it's coming from. And you could see this is mostly showing up in the clouds that showing through our base rectangle just like it was before. And so there's a couple different things that we can do with this. 1st 1 is we can always rotate it or expand it to see different ways of looking at it so you can see the texture moves around its We do that and if we make it bigger, we make the texture bigger that I just what it looks like a swell so you can just make adjustments that you go. The other thing we can dio is, we can actually try and mask different parts of the layer. We go ahead and duplicate this mask and then if I come and I actually take my foreground brush and I make this a mask on the foreground brush. Then if I moved that texture, we can get different types of texture here as well. And the nice thing about applying to an individual vector shaped like that is that you will be able Teoh see what is behind that vector shape. So if there's different colors like the blue here, you can see that that is coming through in this shape where it should be. So that could be fun and give it more of a riel appeal there because you would expect that that ink was actually behind there and would show through like that so we could make a bunch of different adjustments with our texture, and we can choose different amounts toe have on each one. So I'm going to go ahead and grabbing my still live layer. I would call this live texture. I can adjust the threshold again, and as I just a threshold, I can bring mawr in or out. So I want to bring in more on this one and then, of course, duplicate it. I would call this one text texture when dragon in to my text group turn off my life texture and then we're going to rast, arise it to a mask and that then will apply texture just to our text. So you can see we can turn not often on. And that gives our text of more rial feeling there. You can see as I zoom in, I'm actually seen a lot more texture here. So at one of thing is, as you add more and more raster graphics, your computer has to work harder and harder to render them. And so some things might not show at certain zoom levels for actually feel like the texture on my bushes is getting really heavy. There are two textures going on on it, so I want to thin that out a little bit so slightly. My texture mask. We can you just what we did before with our brush and we can actually come and we can paint out some of that texture. We want to be on white. We're on the mask. We can paint some of that out on. Then we can go Teoh the texture that we applied just to that foreground bush, and we can paint out a little bit of that, too. It's nice to do this with a textured brush so that it still looks a little texture. You, when you're painting it, I will try painting out. Some of this is well, we just don't want to have quite this much texture going on here. No one place you can see that you can't really see. Texture is the pink of the castle, so we're going to want to go ahead and apply another texture layer. Just to that, of course, this is all very subjective. What you choose to do here, it's really up to you. If you ever want to see the mask, you can just option click on it and you'll see the whole mask, right? So let's go ahead and let's apply another one of our textures. Teoh our castle. When grab my texture and duplicate it member going go and we're just going to apply it just to the castle. We can rotate it. You can see the white coming through from the clouds behind. That's not bad. So now let's look at the Texas, see how much we have going on on the text. It's quite a bit there. Our date didn't get into our text groups. Let's drag that down and now we have more there. Grab our brush tool. We'll brush out a little bit of this so there isn't quite so much going on. Take a brush smaller. Okay, come up here from a brush brush brush over some of this so that it's not quite so texture. All right, so that's how we go about adding raster textures to our document. This is kind of the final step on our way to a finished document. And remember, you can have different types of textures. You could even combine brush and non brush textures. Together. You can add in as many different. We will only use one type of texture, but you could have different images that make up the texture of your document. There's a lot of different things you can do. Uh, there's different ways you can add a texture as a mask, but I really like the threshold adjustment layer. That one just seems to work really well for me. So that's basically going to wrap up creating the poster. You can, of course, tinker with the texture as much as you want. I think I'm happy with where mine is at going. Switch back to publisher persona. Go ahead and hit command one which will give me a one toe one or as close to a 1 to 1 as it can do on this screen. And I'm thinking that that's looking pretty good looking pretty much the way that I wanted . The only thing looks like I might be missing is some texture in this other pink area. I don't think that's looking too bad, so I think we're going to go with this for now. In the next video, we're going talk about exporting the poster as a Pdf or as a JPEG so you can take it different places 21. Exporting the Poster: way finally made it to the end of this project, and the last thing that we need to do now is export our poster. We're going to go ahead and export now. Normally, I will export thes as a PdF, and that's how I put them up on at sea for sale. But we will also want to export as age apex so that you can upload your class project to the class project area here because we all want to be able to see each other's. And the best way to do that is through a JPEG. So we're going. Look at how we would export this. First, we're going to use file and export, and it will calculate the size eventually. It's just taking a second. Think that means well, it looks like 7.77 megabytes. That's not too large, but that might be too big for skill share. So let's try lowering our quality just a little bit. Here, try going down to 90. Okay, that is below three. I think we want to be between three and five. That's probably good for what we need for the product for this course and how many pages. Do I want just my current page? I've got a bunch of different iterations, but I only want my current page, the finished product, the others air just things that I can go back to if I want to be able to get back to an original point in my document. So let's go ahead and choose export. Then we'll be able to save it, just like we would normally save a flat. And when we open that up, we get the image in preview because I'm on a Mac of what our poster is going to look like. I really think that's looking nice. That's looking just like I want it to. So this is exciting. We're going. Go ahead now and let's do it as a PdF back in Infinity publisher file Export, Just like before. But instead of J. Peg were when she's PdF, Generally, I will choose PdF for print because that's what I'm planning to do that we get raster of 300 dp I so that when it rast rises are vectors, it's at a good print quality. We can't include the bleed, but in this case I'm not going to because I'm not sending it to a professional printer going to be selling it as a printable. In this case, we can actually leave on the preview export one complete, so it will let us see the pdf. You swan a slight current page again, and it's going to calculate out the size here. All right, just 209 megabytes on that. So that's great. And let's go ahead and click Export that it will run through Exporting into pdf in just a moment it will open up for us, all right, And there is our beautiful poster. So that's how you going, export from if any publisher to JPEG or PdF, please do export a J peg of your project and upload that in the class project section of this course. I really want to see what everyone's been able to create. If you haven't been following along, please go back through the videos and follow along with this process. I know that it can take a while to do, but it's really rewarding. You going creates something that is a unique memory for you from a place that you've been. So please go ahead and do that. I think you have a lot of fun, and I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone's projects and what they're able to create with this amazing program. That's all for this course. Remember, I do have a lot of other courses on affinity products and other alternative software, so go ahead and check those out if you haven't already, hopefully you'll learn something new and amazing, and I will see you in the next course.