Draw Simple Landscape Vector Art Illustration in Affinity Designer for Beginners

1. Intro: Hello. My name is Mark. In this short class, we're going to create this vector landscape from scratch. We are not going to trace any existing photo, we're just going to grab a pencil tool and doodle a few shapes here and there and turn it into a very simple vector illustration. This is a perfect project for totally beginners. This can be even your very first project in Affinity designer. I'm going to limit myself to just few tools. Pencil to note two, shape two, and that's really it. We are going to avoid hard to use tools like a pen tool, right, there'll be no pen tool in this tutorial, simple tools, put together, add few colors, rearrange, and we are done with the very first vector landscape in around 30 minutes. All right, please join me and let's get started. 2. Create a New Document: Let's start by creating new document. As you can see here, I select the default preset for A for paper, but I modify margins. I don't want any margins in this one, so I switch this off. I did not set up any bleeds as I'm not sure I'm going to print this out ever. That's why I also stick with GB cool mode for now. Let's create here at the bottom right and you will see your Adboard your paper, you could say. Don't worry about the stuff that going to pop up a bit outside. It will be trimmed by default. We don't need to try to make it exactly as it is in the Adboard whatever pops outside this page will be trim while we are exporting a final image. Alright. What I like to do is I like to look at some photos first to kind of inspire myself before making a vector landscape. Don't get me wrong. I don't plan to stick a reference layer here and just trace what someone else already captured in nature. No, that's not the goal here. I still want to create my own original image, but I think it's not a bad idea to, like, spend a moment before you start, maybe find three interesting images so you can set up kind of the mood for your own picture. And here are my three images that caught my attention while I was doing my little inspirational research. As you can see, all of them feature mountains. Two of them got some trees as well and some body of water. But I want you to focus on how the layers are structured, because that would be very important for us as we're going to turn this into shapes that is kind of stuck on the top of each other. So look at this one here. It's a photo, but we can kind of see this layer here of the sky, mountains far away, one belt of mountains closer, this chain is closer, and then finally we got detail dark mountains close to us with somebody or something here as well, that kind of attention and we see that this color always gradually moving towards the sky color being more and more pinkish and yellow at the very end, interesting graduation of color. This one is very detail, and our goal in vector graphics here in this landscape, we not to recreate very detailed photo like that. No, we want to kind of turn this into shapes that tell the story, send the message, right? So we need to think about clever way how we can do it. And I really like this one over here because it's opening here between those two massive mountains with sun kind of popping up. And you see those trees far away in the very beautiful blue color, and then we got those trees closer to us already green. All right, so that's how the color will work for us. Items farther away will be kind of faded into sky almost. All right. So we took a moment to look into photos to inspire ourselves as we are sitting in front of a computer inside the room, I'm guessing not looking at those mountains right now, so it's good step to take to just admire those mountains for a moment before we even start. All right. As I mentioned, I don't want to keep looking at them working on it. I don't want to start just copy and paste nature that somebody already capture. I want to creating my own unique work, so I'm going to delete all of that right now. All right, we're going to start with pencil to over here. Pencil to will simply help us to draw lines. We can turn on stabilized option and we feel like you're pulling the card behind your car. Take a look. I'm pulling something on the line, and that's why this line is smooth. I think this little line between my cursor and the tool is a bit too long, so I can make it shorter here. I will go with 20. I will use Auto close feature as I plan to draw closed shapes, not just lines. All right. Let's get rid of that, and I will try to draw a kind of massive here on this left side. Then try to go close to the beginning of your line. You see, it's snapped. And when I release my mouse, I got my very first shape. I will not need a stroke color around the shape, so I switch this off. And for now on, I will use like temporary gray color inside the shape as I don't know exactly what colors I want to go for yet. Alright I'm going to draw another thing just in front of it. Again, I go back to the beginning, this red area and it snaps. This one will be closer to me, so it will be darker. All right. I want to do something similar here on the right side. Press and hold while you're drawing, don't release your mouse until you back to the very beginning until it snaps like this. That's the way how you can make a closed shape. All right, I will use this quick color picker to change the color to this previous color I choose before. Okay. And I will draw something here in front of it, as well. Nice. I try to use different shades of gray so I can see my shapes. And then I will probably have some kind of body of water here that will give us nice reflection later on. But now I want to focus on the note two. The note two is this white selection tool here on the list on the left. The note two will help us to move or even add new notes. So that's almost like a cheating in the art class, huh? Even you draw it already. Now you can add new nodes or move the old one around and reshape your shapes, in our case, our mountains. I can click here, add a brand new node, and also change how curvy this area is. This node tool is great. This node tool guarantee that we will have exactly the effect as we want as we can always go back. If you got enough time and patience, we can go back. And reshape those mountains, those shapes into exactly what we need. I hope you manage to draw one, two, three, four similar gray shapes here on the horizon, making some blocks of mountains. Don't need to copy me one to one. You can just go with the flow as you feel like it, as you can see, we got this great tool call, no tool to our disposal so we can always add more notes. We can move them around. If you feel like you don't need this note anymore, hit delete on your keyboard. It's gone. I can add two more nodes to replace that one. And if you pull the line directly without adding node, you can change how curve it is. Okay. I think I will add a few more notes here, make it a bit rough. Okay. It was a bit too smooth for me, so why change it? We got nice setup. We create a new document and start drawing shades with the pencil too. Let's continue on in the next one. We'll add more elements to our little landscape vector art. 3. Use Node Tool: Let's continue on by adding color for the sky. We just can use our rectangle tool here on the left. Draw a rectangle. Let's give it some kind of pinkish color for now. I plan to do it with this color if you plan to have your sky yellow or blue, go with that. All right. And as you can see now, this rectangle is a brand new shape, so it's all the way in front. Let's reorder this to the back. Let's reorder this here on the right side in the layer panel, pull it all the way down below other shapes and then scale it and then scale it to match with the size of your arboard. We got some color at the top of this arbod already. Let's continue with the bottom part. I want something in the foreground here. Again, pencil two, and I think I will have something a little island maybe or something like that, popping out on this side and again go to the beginning. It's snap, you close the shape nicely. And this free area here I want this to be some body of water. Again, I will use rectangle tool just to fill it in with the color. This time, I will go some blue temporary, maybe I will change it later and again, move it at the bottom here in the layer panel. All right we setting up some basic composition for our illustration. I still got one area missing here, so I will need to grab a pencil to once more and I would need something to finish up here. I can use the color picker tool. Why the shape is still selected, take at still highlight is brand new shape. I can use the color picker to pick the color from another shape that is already in the picture. Here it is. Okay. If you got two shapes of the same color overlapping and you want to join them together into one shape, you can do it as well. Just select both. In my case, I'm going to hold Shift, click on this one and this one, both are selected and I can click Add at the top, and now they became just one shape. You see how it's popping up outside this page? That's fine. As I mentioned at the beginning, it will be trimmed. As you may notice, my rocks, mountains are rather rounded everywhere. What if we need a very sharp turning point? Let's try to add one here. I add the node, and it's the rounded one again. But I can click here, sharp node, and I will end up with a very sharp turn, let me zoom in a bit. I use common plus to zoom in and you can see this node a sharp one. Now I'm going to inspect my illustration and I will try to add few sharp nodes. We don't have many because I use the stabilized pencil, the one that is super easy to draw with, but we end up with very curvy shape, so I need to add few sharp nodes around. When you already zoom in like that, you can press and hold space bar to drag yourself around the picture. You don't need to zoom in and out all the time. Changing this shape as you can see, I draw it once, but I can still change it as much as I want. That's the beauty of the vector art. All right about here. A bit stronger shape. Extra node. If you want a smooth line, avoid adding multiple nodes. You got one or two will be enough here. If you want a more rough detailed line, add more nodes close to each other to give more texture like feel. Okay. That's nice. I think I will need one more mountain like shape in the backdrop, very far away. I will draw it again with the pencil to here. Go to the very beginning to close the shape. This way we can fill it with color. All right. I will pick the color from the sky, present hold to pick the color, and then I will make it just a bit darker than the sky. As you can see, I also need to manage in the layer panel to be sure that it's in the correct position. Okay. All right, so we got this illusive mountain somewhere very far away. We are not focusing on it. It's almost same color as the sky indicating it's far from us. We don't need to worry about. Okay. Not bad. All right, so we push our little illustration forward. We got several layers now and we are almost ready to start adding the actual colors that we want. For now, I've been using kind of temporary colours that are not nicely matched to each other, but let's start recoloring and adding details in the next video. 4. Add More Details: This was one of the images that inspire my artwork. I put it back here because I plan to use some colors from it. Let me try to click here on the sky and literally use the color picket to pick the color from that image. Press and hold on the quick color picker and I will pick this color here from the top. What is cool about this sky in the original image is showing that there this yellow glow here like the sun going to rise or going down, we don't really know, but it's give us this mystery, nice reflection on the water as well. I'm going to do the same thing using a gradient. Let me hide this image. To hide the layer temporary just click on this dot and it's hidden now. I'm going to use the gradient on this sky rectangle. By the way, if you are confused by many layers in your project, you can double tap on the layer. Type. Custom names for them sky. Okay. Let's grab the gradient tool on the left. By default, you got solid color. I want a radial gradient coming from here in between those mountains like that. One color will be this original one I choose and this one here should be something yellow like, something like that. Alright, we got this nice glow behind mountains. Next, we will make our mountains all bluish kind of. So I hold shift to select all of those shapes, and I will give them the same colour at first. Something like that. And now I will change field cool photos mountains to be gradients as well, except this one very far away. I don't need this one, so I can click on it again to deselect. Gradient two this time, linear gradient like that from the top to the bottom. And we want more saturated blue color this time. Something like this will do. But we need to go now one by one and try to apply the gradient way that you can see separate shapes. The gradient is already there, we just need to reapply it by clicking with the mouse so we can get those kind of separate shapes out of that. And for this last one, we need to make it closer to the color of the sky to give this far away vibe. Okay. We are working vectors, so don't worry about stretching them or moving stuff around. It's all scalable up and down without losing any quality. That's a big advantage for us. I think those colors look way better. Let's look at the original picture. We will have a bit of green here, like dark green here and here. We got also forest. We don't want to recreate that in one to one. We need to decide what details we want to preserve. Let's try with this line of trees. How can we draw them easily? I'm grabbing the pencil tool again, and I will try to sketch very simple ugly tree. Important part is to go back to the beginning so we can close the shape. All right? It looked terrible, but don't forget about the no to. Now I grab the no tool and modify it the way I want this to. Look. It's need to look a bit chaotic because it's from nature, so we don't want, like perfect symmetrical Christmas tree here going on. Feel free to zoom in if you need comment plus always helpful. Again, don't fall into the trap of making this into perfect Christmas tree. We need something more organic, just like that. Now I'm going to make several copies of this tree, and then I will modify it and make several copies of that modified version and then modify it again until I got some kind of forest going on here. So let's go with pressing command or control on your keyboard and moving this. When the button is pressed, instead of moving this around, you will make a copy of it. So again, the trick is to present hold command on MAC or control on Windows while you try to move the tree so you can make a copy instead. Feel free to use horizontal flip to make more like randomized trees. Alright now it's time to make some modification to it to zoom in again. Grab the node tool and I will make some changes to this tree. Alright, we got another alternative version of it, and now I can make a few more copies of it. I think we will need at least two more versions to create our little forest. Don't forget, try to add a bit of rotation, scale them up and down. Okay, let's make another version of it. So I zoom in again. No two. And this new version will again help us to make more trees around across this landscape. Here one more flip, scale up and down, rotate. You can have some fun with them. As I mentioned, the most important part is to not go, like, into much detail and try to make them, like, super beautiful Christmas trees. That's because that's not the style we're aiming for here today. All right. I think just more, one more and we will be good to go with this little forest. Again, copy of this and now I try to modify it to create alternative version of this pine tree. The note to is so handy during this part as we can modify existing shapes, making alternative versions of them instead of drawing everything from scratch again and again. Okay, next step is to now change the color of this land here too much the color of the trees. I will pick the same color. Okay, now I cannot see my trees. Let's apply the gradient. Just like that from the tree colour to something just a bit bright. That's more like it. Okay. Now we reach the water here. As you can see, the color of the water will be not exactly solid because we have reflection from the sun, the sun is yellow here, so we need to have something like that. The water will be way darker. Okay, something like this, but I need to make a radio gradient again. I hope you still remember that one over here, and for the centerfan we will put some kind of yellow color. Alright, now this rock here in front, I'll make it a bit lower. And in the color of this coastal line, just a bit darker than that because it's closer to us. All right. Take a look. We are ready managed to sketch this little picture using just pencil tool, no tool, and adding a few gradients here and there. All right. I hope you are ready to add even more details, finalize this simple vector landscape and export us a JPEG that can be printed out or shared easily. All right, see you in the next video and we're going to finish up our picture. 5. Finishing Touches: It's time to add a few more details here and there and then export our artwork as a JPEG. Keep in mind, we don't want to over detail one area of this image. The whole style of it is a flat layer like vector based landscape. If we now start working with just one aspect of this image and add more details, textures and stuff like that, it will look really odd and weird and ruin the whole picture. The artist to balance this. We want to add a few more details here and there, but we don't want to turn it into realistic illustration, especially like half baked one. Let's try our best to add few more details here and there and then export this as a nice JPEG or PNG. To do that, I will zoom in again comment plus all contro plans on Windows. There are several different ways of zooming in. I'm sure you already got your favorite way. Again, no tool and small adjustments. It's a bit tempting to introduce the second current for those mountains to give it more like treed like loop, but I try to not do that, so we can maintain this in this flat style. Alright, and then we got this chain of mountains a bit closer to us. We doodle everything using pencil tool, and I also add stabilize to it. So now I'm kind of picking some areas that I want to add those sharp notes for more like sharp lines around. Okay, and our forest. Now we can randomize it even further. All right, you know what? I think I will need one more tree design to make it finishing touches. So let me just make a copy of this and as we did in the previous video, I'm going to randomize it a bit. I need one extra tree with a bit wider top like that. Okay. And now let's use that to make this forest even thicker. All right, this one needs to be a bit smaller and a bit more detailed to match the rest of it. Remember, you can just hold command while dragging existing objects to make copies very quickly. All right, now I got more irregular structure of this forest, and also I use some copies to get rid of the lights between some certain trees. Okay. That's nice. That's better. I plan to make the actual shape of the sun to a bit more detail here. It's a bit empty, so I use the Oval two, as you can see. All right. And now we will need to hide it behind the mountain. So again, yes let's use the layer panel for that. Just drag it all the way down. Nice, now we can readjust our gradient feel on the sky a bit, I think. How strong you want this? Maybe like that. Okay. The transition between yellow and blue is always a bit tricky, but I think we got a really good result here. We could make some additional glows on those mountains, but as I mentioned, we must be careful. We don't want to over diesel just one aspect of this. So let's try to do it and see how it will look. I'm grabbing pencil to again and draw a random shape here just like that. Now I will try to pick the color from here and mix it a bit with the yellow. So maybe all the way to the sky hot better, and now I will need to make this shape to be cropped inside another shape. How can we do it? We call this a child shape. This is this curve here, let's name it rock. Okay. And this one, let's place it on it directly. Let's search for this layer called rock and not above, not below, but on it. Take a look. And this way, this new shape is trimmed inside that existing shape. I can reduce opacity a bit to 20%, maybe 25. And we still see the whole shape is there, which just cannot see that area that outside. So what we did is a child layer here. All right, so we got a bit more detail here like this. Part of this mountain is a bit more brighter because of the sun like enough ing through it. We need to make it rough to be sure that it look more like a mountain, not just a piece of paper. That's why using multiple sharp curves this time. Okay, so it's climbing here, and we see it's not regular line, it's not smooth. It's like the sun is kind of divided between different rocks, bumps. All of that. Okay. That's way nicer, huh? Alright, so we add a bit more details in this empty area. We add the sun, as the oval, and a bit of glow on this mountain. Now I want to fix my water. It's way too dark, I think I will literally pick the color of the sky first. Nice. Make it a bit darker and then use the gradient, the radio one we did before. From here, and our color there will be the sun color. More like that. Okay. We got this island close to us in the very foreground. So what I want to do here, I don't want to put any trees to obscure the view, I want to put the grass. So I'm going to grab some simple shape, like, let's say, triangle. So I'm using the built in shape to. I make triangle in the color of this little island in front, and I'm going to maybe duplicate this triangle around until I got more texture like area here. We could do it with the duplicates, but I really want this human touch to it that you need to move it every time. You need to scale it up rotation. Just give us this randomness. Okay. This will be our finishing touch, you can say, a bit of texture edge to this foreground island. No trees this time, just more like a grasping. Can make it a bit longer. Yeah. So again, the whole trick gets to hold, command or control, and then whenever you move it, you make a new copy of it. As I promised, we limit ourselves to simple tools, shape tool, pencil, no two, and that was it really. Alright, so this will give us this nice contrast because everything is a bit rough. We got the smooth mountains, and in front, you will get this like hairy almost like texture of the grass. Okay, just a few more here and there. Again, we are not doing any photorealistic stuff today. It's more like artistic landscape illustration. Everybody can do it. Just a few tools require, a bit of patience. And then as we know already, there is a no tool for you to fix any mistake you made. So if you're patient enough, you can do this piece even with zero experience with computer graphics, with vector R, zero experience with affinity designer. You can still have your very first picture today. Okay, almost done. All right, so I add those kind of grass like shapes, and also I'm going to modify the main shape for this one, as well. So I will make it a bit less smoother by adding more points, more nodes to it, so we can This is close to us, right? So we can see more details on it. It's close to the viewer, it's close to our eyes. The mountains are far away, so they appear smooth. But this island, this violin is the closest object. So we need to be sure it's rather Rugh as the nature create objects that are really not perfectly symmetric, so we want to have some randomization here. Okay, a few more points. And that would be it, I think. All right, let's zoom out. And here it is our very simple vector landscape. We got some sun between two mountains. There's a forest and a bit of reflection on the water, and we observing this from other side of this river or lake because we can still see there's land on this side as well. And you know what? If you don't like it, the best part is, it's all in vectors so we can literally group this whole thing. Common G or right click in the layer panel, group switch of the visibility of your group and take a look. It's a bit different picture now. All right, so here it is. I hope you managed to create your own image as well. Let's summarize everything we have learned so far in the last video. 6. Export and Summary: All right, it's time to export our artwork. First, I would suggest to save the project file in case you want to make some changes in the future. Click File, Save and save this as the affinity designer file for yourself. Then we're going to click Export and save it as the image that we can share, print, post online, whatever we like. Let's select PNG. You can see the preview of your image over here, click Export and we are done. Now we can open this new image file from the drive. Here it is a little Vctaillustration, little Vctor landscape that everybody can really do without any experience or prior knowledge of Vctor arts. I hope this was fun. I hope you managed to finish your illustration. Please post it in the project section. Thank you for today. See you in the next class.