Drawing Vector Houses in Affinity Designer: Illustrate With Gradients

1. Winter Cottage Illustration in Affinity Designer: Welcome to this series of fun project based courses designed to help you learn fast. I'm Veronica, a children's book Illustrator and affinity designer expert. And in this tutorial, I will show you how to create a charming winter cottage illustration using simple vector techniques. This class is perfect for beginners and anyone who wants to level up their vector skills in affinity designer. You will learn how to use essential vector tools while focusing on two powerful features, the gradient tool and the transparency tool. By the end of this class, you will feel confident adding depth and lighting effects to your vector illustrations, making them more dynamic and polished. To make things even easier, I've included free color palette resources so you can jump straight into the creative process without worrying about the color choices. So grab your iPad, open affinity designer, and let's get started. O 2. Getting Started: Hello, everybody, and welcome to class. To get started with this course, all that you will need is, as usual, your affinity designer software and your drawing pencil. I am recording this course in February 2025, and my affinity designer version is 2.6 0.0. I'll be showing my demonstration as usual in Affinity Designer Version two on my iPad. However, you can definitely follow along regardless of your version. Or you might even want to draw on your desktop version. Please bear in mind, I'm a big fan of drawing on the iPad. So in this course, I'm teaching you as usual, a lot of useful hand gestures for the iPad, and I think this will be one thing which unfortunately won't be able to replicate on your desktop version. The goal of this course is to offer you a fast and fun project. To speed up your learning so that you can become really proficient in illustrating in affinity designer. Your task is to create at least one winter cottage illustration in affinity designer and to share it with our community. You can use any version of affinity designer, and for an extra personal touch, you might even want to consider illustrating a real house, maybe your own family house. We want to solidify your knowledge of the most important vector tools in affinity designer, and we also want to get confident using gradients and transparencies. So in this course, we will be adding in more depth into our flat vector illustration by practicing using the gradient tool and the transparency tool. If you're taking this class on skill share, please upload a picture of your beautiful final Winter Cottage illustration. You can do that in the project gallery. Just remember you cannot do it through the app. It's better just to do it on your computer. And you can also simply just screenshot your whole Affinity interface, and feel free as always to share with us any of your work in progress because we always love to see those. And if you're taking this course on GAM road, you could share your final work and ask for feedback in our Facebook group. So that's one option, or you can post your work on Instagram where we can leave a comment under. Just don't forget on Instagram to always include hash tag in your caption, magical vectors so that I can keep track and find your beautiful final work. If you're looking for further practice in illustrating with affinity, I highly, highly recommend my big, actually, my huge affinity and Fresco mustard class in Botanical Illustration, which is nearly 6 hours of learning material, so you have to brace yourself. Or if you would like to continue with a faster and a lighter illustration project, something that will help you draw more with the pencil tool and also use vector brushes for more vector based texture. Then I really recommend my children's book cover design course. This course is not just for kid lit artists. It simply offers a fun and light project to do with me step by step so that you can get more comfortable using infinity designer. That's it. So we are now in the affinity designer for the iPad interface, and I quickly wanted to show you what we will be doing together step by step. We'll be creating this Winter Cottage illustration. I will show you how I go about my messy sketch and how I import it into the document. And you will also have in the class resources a color palette that you can use and you can create your own winter cottage, not exactly the same one. I would like to kindly ask you not to copy it exactly unless it's just for the purpose of this exercise, and then you will not share it as your own work. But when you're feeling more confident, you can draw your own cottage, and you're more than welcome to use this color palette. It will be available in the class resources for download. And you probably know it from my previous course the Botanical Illustration Muster class. I like sharing color palettes as Vctor assets, so this is a Vctor asset that you can save up to your asset studio library and this will be available as a downloadable resource which you can totally use when you're creating your own illustration. We will be also working in grayscale. I will be teaching you my efficiency technique when illustrating for general illustration, not just for patterns. I tend to start with gray scale, and I will also explain why. And then we will be turning this gray scale illustration into a colored illustration. So I will be showing you my techniques to color in fast. And remember that a big focus of this course is to use gradients and the transparency tool, which you can find here on the left. When you click on the gradient tool, you have the option to stay within the gradient tool or use the transparent tool, the transparency tool. So the smoke that is coming out of this chimney, this is one example of using the transparency tool. We start with the white color and then it fades out into transparent part of this element. We'll be also refreshing our knowledge of using the Gaussian blur or the Gaussian blur on the smoon Sun. And we will be using gradients, gradients. There will be blocks of color that turn from one color to another or from lighter version of this color to a darker version of this color on those trees. We'll be learning that together as well. And then as usual, we will be practicing using the rectangle tool. We will be creating all those shapes as vector shapes, and we'll be refreshing all the other vector tools that are super super basic and very important to use. So we will be using, for example, the Shape Builder, and we will be refreshing using Boolean operations to merge shapes, for example. Then on top of that, we'll be also refreshing how to use the corner tool to change the corners of our vector objects. I will also show you how I work with layers, how I like to organize my groups so that my illustrations and then my files for the clients, for example, are neat and tidy and they're not cluttered. Okay, really cool. I'm very, very excited that you join me in this course. In the next lesson, we will be talking about my messy sketch, how to prepare your sketch, and where to find sources of inspiration for your sketch. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Sketching & References: In this lesson, we will be talking about preparing the sketch of your winter cottage, where to find inspiration, how to use reference photos to your advantage, and also how to improve the composition of your illustration. So right here, most of you will recognize I am Procreate. I like using Procreate as my digital sketchbook these days, only because I have my favorite brushes here, I have this waxy dance pencil that I bought. I think now years ago that I really enjoy using, it feels like a real pencil and you can smudge it, and the whole experience is quite nice. And I like also separating my final affinity designer work from my sketches because sometimes sketches tend to get out of place. You get a lot of them. And then I use basically Procreate to store all my sketches and to keep everything tidy. So here in Procreate, I drew some ideas for my winter cottages. This is the very first idea that I selected for our fun project. But you will see here, I also explored other shapes of buildings. So this one is definitely more like this traditional classic winter cottage that has those triangular elements in its construction. This one is a little bit more classic. It could be maybe not in the mountains, but in the city. And I think I have cottage number three, another one also like a classic little house that could be somewhere in the mountains or in the forest, covered in snow. So I prepared my sketches in Procreate. Each of the ideas is on a separate layer. And then when you're done with your sketch over here, for example, if you're using Procreate, you can just go to Export and share export it as JPEC, save it to your camera roll so then you can import it to affinity. You can also sketch your house in a physical sketchbook, it could be even just, like, doesn't have to be a proper sketchbook, just a sheet of paper, and then you can snap a photo, and then you can also bring it to affinity. Or you can use any other software of your choice. There's also an option to do everything directly in affinity designer. I will show you that in a minute. But I also wanted to tell you how I found the inspiration for this exact cottage shape because we have to be really careful not to infringe anyone's copyright when we're using reference photos. So one thing that you can do is to search for inspiration on Pinterest. Over here, you can also use with Procreate split screen so you can drag your Pinterest icon and you can put it, for example, to the left. Here on Pinterest, you can add some keywords to search for your reference photos. For example, I typed in Winter Cottage and specifically mountains, and you have to be very mindful because Pinterest, it's a visual search engine, and will also give you final illustrations of other artists. So it's really important not to look at the work of other people so that we are not tempted to copy it. I would highly recommend to look for real photos. For example, I yeah, that was similar. I think I looked at this photo and then this is still someone's intellectual property. So I would also recommend not to copy, not to reference the entire photo, but only to take some elements. So, for example, from this photo, I think I was using quite a few reference photos here, and I was just taking small bits from every photo to build together, like, a completely new cottage that doesn't exist on any other photo. Like over here, I liked this triangular roof, for example. And then when you scroll down, you will get other reference photos that are somehow similar. We see a lot of cottages here also have this rectangular shape. On this photo, for example, I like the positioning of the roof and that I can have a chimney with the smoke coming out of it. I already had an idea, aha. This will be great to use the transparency tool for the smoke. And I also like this line of you might not recognize it on my sketch, but this is a line of trees in the forest. And then in the background, we have some mountains. At first, I had a moon here, but then I thought, Okay, it might be a full moon depending on what color palette I'm going to choose. I wasn't sure at the beginning if my sky will be dark or light. So instead of the semi moon, I just drew a circle here to leave it open for interpretation, whether it's a sun or a moon. And then a dog I haven't even noticed, but yeah, feel free to add in animals if you want to. I added in the fence and be very careful because you will be also seeing work of other illustrators. You might also want to use a search engine. You can go to Google Images, for example. You can also use split screen here with Pinterest. You can go, for example, to Google Chrome or whatever browser you're using. Then go to images and type in something like winter cottage, maybe snow, maybe mountains, maybe try searching in your own language. I could have also typed in Polish keywords in my own mother tongue and then just scroll through and take whatever inspires you, for example, mix up the shape of the roof, have another shape of your chimney, see what kind of windows you can draw. I really like I don't even know where I saw that. But for example, here, this is a very interesting shape of a window. It's like a hybrid of a rectangle with what's it called? With a triangle. So you can take inspiration from that and then take bits from various photos so that you come up with a hybrid of something unique. Pinterest number one and Google images and be careful not to copy the entire photo at the same time. Now, there's also an option to work directly in Affinity Designer and to get reference photos there. And it's actually quite safe because over here, there's an icon, photos tacked together. And those are free stock photos. You have pixels and you have Pixabay. So you could experiment with some keywords, winter house, winter village. Let's type in Winter Cottage and see what you're going to find there. And unfortunately, this view is a little bit small, but if there's something that you might like, then you got to press and hold and drag it into your document. Oh, sheep. Go to the Move tool and maybe put in a few reference photos that are they can be used for free. We have, for example, this cottage looks interesting. You can put them directly here into your interface. I like or I prefer to delete them when I'm done with them because they might make the size of your file a little bit too big. When I'm not needing those anymore, I just remove them by pressing this trash icon. I get rid of it. If you screenshot something that you like from Pinterest or from Google Images, you can also place it directly here around. So this is my Canvas actually here. You see the selection. You can place it around your canvas for inspiration when you're still in the sketching phase. To place a reference photo that you screenshot to your device storage, for example, to your Photos app, you go to the Hamburger menu and then you select Place, and then place from photos. Over here, I have a few reference photos that I screenshot. For example, this is the one from Pinterest. You can still scan them, whichever you want, and then by taking them, you get this blue selection symbol that they will be selected and then you go to click Add. And you just type anywhere on your canvas, sometimes they get imported in a very weird way, but you can still from the move to you can resize them. I like this reference photo because it was just a reminder that I can make it a little bit more festive. I could go, for example, to my Christmas themed assets and maybe turn my illustration, not just to a winter cottage illustration, but to a Christmas cottage illustration and add in some festive elements. This one obviously I like because of this strong triangular shape. And I like the overall composition that there's a fence in the front, there's door, two windows on the sides, and one windows balcony on top. So this is about reference photos, and now just some words about composition. Going to group those reference photos. If I don't need them, I can just delete the whole folder. Now, to talk just a little bit about your composition, I would just leave you with this general advice. Your cottage will be in the middle, so this is the composition that I am suggesting here for our fun project. The middle plane will be your cottage. Then there will be a sort of a fence that could be on either side or just on one side, and this fence will split your middle plane into the front lane also. So the front lane it can have botanical elements. It can have some bushes. It can have some twigs, maybe there's an animal in front of your cottage. So this is the front plane, the middle plane, and then far away we will have our background. By focusing to populate nicely all those three planes front, middle, and background, our illustration will be, so to say, rich enough. I lost it somewhere. It's here. This is our gray scale illustration. So again, we will have the front plane. You can add in even more details in this front plane. You can add in some berries, small animals, maybe a hedgehog, maybe a bunny is peeking from behind this bush. You can make it more narrative. This is more of a minimalistic approach here that I'm offering you here because we will have a fast project step by step so that we can learn in a fast way. It's a quick project, but feel free to develop your illustration further. Maybe add it into your professional portfolio. Perhaps you have an idea to make a poster out of it and print it out. Or maybe you would like to turn it into a postcard or even include it into your licensing portfolio. Maybe greeting cards, postcards for winter holidays or Christmas holidays, you can definitely turn this cottage into a Christmas cottage. So you can start with a very basic project, a basic idea, and you can keep developing it so that you are efficient and you save time in creating useful things for your portfolio. And this is what I wanted to leave you with regarding the sketch and the composition. Just a side note, you don't have to sketch in a sketchbook and procreate. You can sketch directly in affinity designer. We go to the Layers panel, we hit the plus symbol and we add a new pixel layer. This is now Pixel. It also has a small pixel or raster symbol to the left like a checkerboard, and by default, it's called pixel. Over here in the upper left corner, you can switch between the vector or the designer persona to the pixel persona. Then the toolbar over here to the left will change and will give you pixel brushes or they're called paint brushes. You can access different brushes through this icon here on the right. And I also made some dedicated folders with my favorite brushes, but I always recommend going for starters to the acrylics folder, and for sketching, I like to use acrylic brushes. I'm going to mark everything here, group it, make it invisible, and now we will be on our pixel layer. This is where you make your brush bigger here in this lower left corner. Color studio. We can stay on the stroke site. I'll choose whatever color I had here. And you can just test it out here, make it smaller, maybe choose a lighter color and then start sketching what we were talking about. Start with a lighter color, establish that this is the front plane. Somewhere here will be our middle and this will be the background. Then you can still create a new pixel layer if you would like to divide it. This will be just my grid for the composition with the three planes. Then on a new pixel layer with a new color, something different, something blue, you can start very roughly. To sketch your composition. For example, this will be the fence, here will be the S bush, maybe twigs. Maybe there's an animal here. It's just a placeholder. It doesn't have to be very elaborate. I will bring back the visibility of my references, for example. Okay. There they are. Back to my pixel layer, and very roughly, you are establishing your composition. Maybe you have, like, a bigger tree here. Then with another color, maybe there's like a line of trees here. Some mountains. You can start from the front plane, then you can go to add in more details on your middle plane. Maybe there's a chimney on this side, there's a smoke. This is very rough because I don't know. I think that you don't have to waste too much time in refining your sketch. You can go on and vectorize everything and refine everything as you go without wasting too much time on your sketch. Maybe here I want the moon, so then you can again start developing. This is snow by the way. Then you can start developing the background. Then when you're ready to switch back to the designer persona, you can switch from the normal blending mode to multiply three dots and also lower the opacity and this will be it. This will be the sketch that you can use. So you don't have to use Procreate. I think this is a really fast method if you stick to using affinity from the very beginning. So at this point, you have to probably pause this course and head either to Procreate or to affinity interface or to your sketchbook and prepare your sketch. In the next lesson, I will show you how to prepare our basic document for the illustration and also how to input your sketch, set up your color palette and prepare everything for vectorizing. So see you in the next lesson. 4. Setting Up Canvas: In this lesson, we will be setting up the canvas for our winter cottage illustration. So we are back from the document view to our main homepage, which is called Live Docs. This was my original illustration document. This is our exercise sheet. But I wanted also to show you how I set up this document from scratch. To create a new document, we just hit New new document, and you might already have a few presets from some previous projects. We will create a new document from scratch. Over here, you can set up your dimensions and I recommend that for this illustration, we set up a document of 3,500 pixels. This will be the width, and we keep the page height with 4,000 pixels. It will be not square format. It will be more of a rectangular format. This will be also very useful for Instagram because with the new update, we don't have a square grid anymore. And also, you can turn this illustration into a poster into a postcard and they tend to be rectangular rather than square. We keep the DPA at at least 300. I like to work with pixels. This is what you're going to see in most of my projects. And because I will want to showcase this illustration, specifically in my online portfolio, I keep the color format RGB as RGB. But if you already know that you would like to turn this illustration into a postcard or a poster that you will print out, then I do recommend that you switch to CMYK eight. But since it's going to be for screens and for my online portfolio, I'm sticking to RGB. Now, I like to head now to margins and bleed. This is not selected, so the margins are not set. We're interested in the bleed. Right now, it is set at zero, but I would recommend that you set a bleed of at least ten pixels. It can be also 20. Let me show you how 20 is going to look like. Because you will prevent any white lines on the edges and will also be safer to have at least some bleed when you want to print out your illustration. So let's maybe see how 20 will look. So we have a bleed of 20 margins is not selected, and we do not create any artboards so that we can also position all our references, our color palette, anything that we might need around our working canvas rather than placing them on dedicated artboards. And then we hit Okay. We are creating a new document, and I start right away by going to the rectangle tool over here. The very first shape is a rectangle and we create our background layer. Then from the move tool, we have to see in which mode we are. So this is the icon for the preview mode. Our bleed was hidden, we unhide our bleed by selecting the preview mode, and this is where it comes handy to set up our bleed. This original light gray line is the actual line of our canvas, this a little bit of extra space, this will be our bleed. You will not see it a lot when you zoom out. But when you start zooming in, for example, to the other edge, you will see, uh huh, Okay, this white space is my canvas, so this will be the actual cropped illustration or what you will be printing out or exporting. And this thin blue line will be our bleed. And this is what I do for all my client work. Depending on the client specifications, I sometimes set up an even bigger bleed. But for personal projects, I go with at least ten or 20 pixels extra bleed in the document setup. I think 20 is quite nice because you can still see it. If it was ten, that means it's half of it, it would be still doable, but you can give yourself a little bit more comfort by creating this bleed a little bit on the bigger side. Okay, so this is our background layer, swipe to the right, rename layer, and we can rename it as background. And if you do not want right now to manipulate this background layer, we don't have to right now change its color. We can just set it as it is. Then we can also lock it. But first, every default shape when we go to the color studio, we will see it will have a default fill, the color that is inside of this shape, and it will also have a default stroke. I select the stroke, the empty circle, and I flip it up to get rid of the stroke. That's another advantage of setting up a bleed because even if you forgot about the stroke and you had a thin one pixel black line, it wouldn't be a deal breaker. But the bleed will also protect you from such small mistakes. So now we only have fill. We have no stroke. We renamed our background layer, and when we swipe again to the left, we can lock it so that it's not moving around. And this will be the basic setup of our document. Again, 3,500 pixels with 4,000 pixels height. Next, we need to import our sketch. You either took a photograph of your sketch or if you were a drawing directly in affinity, it's already here. He created a new pixel layer and your sketch is right there. I need to import my sketch from Procreate and I saved it basically to the internal storage of my iPad. To place your sketch, we go to the Hamburger menu here in the upper left corner, place from photos. Here is my sketch. But I can already select my original illustration because I will be using it as my reference so that I do not forget anything as I'm teaching this class, and maybe, maybe, maybe I like those two reference photos. I will include them as well. So I'm going to select now those four photos so that they get important into my interface, add and you can do the same because affinity doesn't have the same split screen option like Procreate and it can be a challenge or something to get used to. And then making sure that you're on the move tool, we can position. So maybe I'm going to position my reference photos, the real photos somewhere above. I'm going to group those two because later on, I might just want to delete the entire group if I don't need it. And now the sketch you can resize it. So I just noticed that I was using a slightly different dimension, but it doesn't really matter. In case this sketch is somewhere all over the place, you can make sure that the sketch is selected, and then we can go to the alignment tool over here and select a line center, a line middle, and it will be positioned perfectly in the middle of our canvas. Okay, I'm going to have this colored version on the other side. You can also drag it somewhere at the bottom. We have our background layer. You can also rename this layer to sketch, and then I like to change the blending mode to multiply over here, and then three that's menu and lower the opacity. You can also swipe to the left and lock it if you want to, but it's not obligatory, so to say. Because this sketch layer will be always on top. So if we want to select something, we will be hitting the sketch layer anyway. So if we want to manipulate any other layers, we'll have to go manually to the Layers panel and then search for the layer that we would like to edit. The other thing that is missing is maybe the color palette. Since I already created this illustration before, I will be able to use the color picker directly from this illustration. You can also use from the Swatches panel here in the color studio, any other winter themed color palettes that you like that you created before? For example, here I have my own winter palette with some swatches that are good for Christmas illustrations, and this is the winter cottage palettes that I created when I was doing this illustration over here. So you can either position all your swatches in a color palette in the swatches panel in the color studio, or you can make use of the vector asset that I created for you that will be available in the resources section. This is one way to save up your color palette. Those are basically it's a vector object. It's composed of vector shapes, squares and circles or semicircles. To create such a color palette library of assets, you have to go to the main hamburger menu, and then you have to add new category, then you can rename this category, for example, to color palettes, and then you always need a subcategory. So I have two big courses about vector assets specifically. I will try not to repeat myself too much, but it's a little bit of a refresher, all the other in depth information about vector assets using vector assets you can find in the other courses. And then by adding a subcategory, you can create different subfolders. For example, here I have summer color palettes, here I have winter color palettes, and remember that was actually a small issue that my students had before. They forgot that I'm sharing my color palettes as vector assets, and they weren't sure how to import it. So when you find the download for the color palette, you have to go to the main hamburger menu, the Asset Studio one more time is over here on the right, the main Hamburger menu, and then you have to import your category of assets. And to import it, it has to be saved either in your Cloud storage or in your device storage. And then you hit Import category, and then depending where you saved your assets, they will have this file extension file extension point AF assets. You just have to click on it and will get imported. And then you will have your color palette as an asset, basically. So this is the color palette that I want to use. You can either long press and drop it onto your Canvas or you can click on it and you can click Insert, and then it's going to be inserted into your document. And then you can place it somewhere on the side of your canvas. So this is our basic setup. We have our references and our color palette, our sketch is also ready. And in the next lesson, we will be laying the base of our illustration. We'll be vectorizing it. 5. Vectorizing The Base in Greyscale: In this lesson, we will start victorizing our winter cottage illustration. The general advice that I can give here is to start drawing your illustration by tackling the biggest elements first. That would mean that we need to draw this field or this snow space in the front, we have to establish the front plane. Then we can establish the middle plane by blocking in the most important shapes of the cottage itself, for example, the walls and the roof and the chimney and so on. Then we can move on to the background, for example, and start victorizing the mountains, maybe the sun or the moon. And in this way, we will have a good start to then continue going much more into detail and victorizing the more detailed parts. So let's establish the front plane first. We will be using for that the pencil tool, which you can find here. So we click the Pencil tool. And with the new affinity update, which was in February 2025, the contextual menu for the Pencil tool changed a little bit because there are new AutoClose options. So in here, I will show you the AutoClose options that I like using for the Pencil tool. And before I start using it, you know what from my previous courses, I like to make a test blob that will help me to figure out the settings for the pencil tool. I also mentioned that before I color in my illustration, I like to work in gray scale. I also have the gray scale variation of my illustration, and this is what I will be using. If I didn't have this reference photo, the way I would go about it would be as follows. I would go to the color studio and then away from swatches. Normally, when I work on an RGB color mode illustration, I stick to HSL sliders, hue saturation, I think, luminosity. But because I will be first drawing in gray scale, I will find here the gray sliders. And this is how I created this gray scale variation of my winter illustration. What are the advantages of working in gray scale first? Sometimes we're not sure about our color palette, and we would like to figure out the values of our illustration. We would like to see where the brightest elements or parts of our illustrations are and whether it has a good balance between those brightest part parts of the illustration and the darkest parts of the illustration. I knew that I want, for example, the details on the cottage to be a little bit darker. And I wanted also the foreground to be a little bit brighter and the background to be a little bit brighter and to have all those botanical elements, the bushes and the trees to be darker and then working on gray scale would give me this very first idea of how I want the values on my illustration. Then the biggest advantage for me personally, the more detailed your illustration is, it is way better to work in gray scale at the beginning because then coloring in will be really a breeze, and you have an excuse not to think about colors yet, and it will gain you more efficiency. It will gain you more speed if you don't have to think about the colors. Trust me on that. If this is a new approach for you, I will be very interested to know how you found this approach if you really felt that you're able to work faster by drawing in gray scale first. So this is what we will do in this course. Now, the new pencil tool, 2.6, what you need to know is that we have a new smoothness slider over here. So by default, it will be set somewhere at 50%. But if you would like to have more of a hand drawn feeling, draw more organically, so to say, then I would recommend that you go down with the smoothness. Here, as usual, we have stabilization. I don't want any stabilizer right now. And over here we have new Auto close options. Auto close is the possibility to automatically close your shapes. Your victor shapes should always be closed so that you can prevent any future mistakes. Also when you're drawing or changing your illustration to have stroke, for example. So stroke means the outline. My personal favorite is to either choose close always or close far. I also have a dedicated video about those recent pencil tool updates on my YouTube channel. Close near is not close enough for me and close off, I don't use autoclose if I'm drawing with stroke only. Stroke meaning just lines and not closed shapes with fill or filling inside. Over here, you can also, let's have a look at this question, Mark. This empty circle implies that this will be the settings for using the outlines the stroke. It is called use line. We will not be using lines. It will be a flat illustration with no outlines. This has to be deselected. Then we have to keep the selection of use fill. That will mean that there will be no outline, but there will be a filled color inside. The best way to start is to start drawing and I can already see that the fill is not on. I'm going to go to the color studio and on the fill side, this full circle, I will select any gray. Auto close is off. That's why this shape is drawn and we see that the starting node did not connect with the end node. But with all those shapes in this illustration, we want all of them to be closed. We choose, for example, close always. This will mean that our shape will snap into be enclosed wherever we are. Let's demonstrate that. I will delete the shape that I just created. I will start drawing this front plane. And if I finished this shape over here and then let it go, it's very, very fast, but it snapped into getting closed. So it connected this first red note with the last note that I created. But I have to delete it and I have to make sure that the shape that I want is on the entire canvas, so I'm going to go outside of the shape. And making sure that everything here is filled where I want it to be filled, then I'm going to let go and it will snap into closing. If this close always is too much for you, if you would like to see better where the shape will be closed, then I recommend that you test if you close far more. I'm going to draw a hard shape and demonstrate that with this, you still have to come a little bit closer to your starting note, and then you will see this red marking will show you okay, it's safe now to let go and the shape will close itself. Let's go back again to close always. If this was enough to close the shape, I would just let go, and it would close itself. For me, personally, clothes always is the most efficient one. That's why I will stick to clothes always. And again, I will start drawing the ground in front of the cottage. Let go. With this dropper tool, I'm going to select this other gray, and then to polish it off a little bit, I will select this new curve that I just created and my background layer and go to the shape studio. From the shape tool, not the shape studio, but the shape tool, I want to get rid of some of those unnecessary elements that stick outside of the canvas. I will select the minus, and then I will minus the shape that I don't want. I'll also go to the background layer. And change it to this darker color. But if you're on the gray sliders, you can do it directly over here so that you have good contrast between your front plane and your background. Then the next big shape that I would like to draw are the mountains that you can see in the background. I will position again myself on the background. Go to the pencil tool. It doesn't matter what color I am using unless you want to see things right away. You can make a test block and then from the gray slighter, you can change the color. Then when you delete this shape, it will remember that color. So I can still look at my original illustration as a reference, but I can also freestyle a little bit. And if this is too wobbly, by the way, you can also choose to use a stabilizer. I personally like to use the rope stabilizer, and to make it a little bit more smooth, you have to go to the slider over here to establish a bigger length of this stabilization. For me, personally, if I switch it to 21 on this strange scale, this is enough. Now, I hit delete and I draw my mountains again and you see that there's a little tail that follows my pencil tool. And my line is less wobbly. Having this selected, not deselecting, I'll go to my gray lighters and I'll make it a little bit brighter so that it doesn't merge too much with my front plane. Then I will select again this new mountains curve with the background layer, shape tool, the minus settings where remembered, so I don't have to change anything and I will minus this. And this shape on the left side so that everything is polished, and it will be all cut to our bleed. So you see this very light gray line is our actual illustration, our actual canvas. But this is why we're also setting up the bleed so that we have a little bit more wiggle room. And even this cosmetic cutting out of the unnecessary bits of shapes will be better if there's a little bit of bleed to give us this wiggle room if it makes sense. And now another no brainer shape would be to go to the rectangle tool, to the ellipse tool and to draw our moon. If we would like a perfect circle, we have to hold one finger on the screen, and it will snap into a perfect moon shape. And then we can change it all the way on the gray sliders to 100% and make it white. Okay, then our next main shape will be the shape of the cottage. So we can do that also by using the rectangle tool. The way I see the shape of this cottage is that we have over here, a rectangle base, and then we have a triangle on top. So I'm going to first select the rectangle. You can always drag it underneath your sketch. You can also go to the color studio to the gray lighters, make it maybe a little bit darker so that we really focus on evaluating the shape of this cottage well. Then we need a triangle. We take the triangle tool. And we move right away to the move tool. We will be creating a completely new shape out of those two shapes using the shape builder tool, and to really cut it properly, it's good with this new shape. It's good to create them in such a way so that they go outside of the shape that is underneath. This triangle shouldn't stop somewhere inside of this rectangle. It should actually go more outside so that the line of this rectangle will be able to cut this new shape in a better way without any mistakes if it makes sense. You will see that in action in a minute. Then I am looking at my sketch very roughly. My magnetic snapping is on, so I can see this green guiding line showing me that those objects, the rectangle and the triangle are stuck together perfectly. But in case you want to be super duper sure, it's enough to select the triangle and the rectangle. And then go to the alignment tool and select align center. Now those shapes will be aligned perfectly in the center. Then keeping the selection of those two shapes, we can go here to the Shape Builder tool. We're still on the minus, so it does remember our previous settings, and we just cut out all those bits that we don't need. That's why it was important that one shape overlapping the other, it also sticks out a bit more on the outside so that we can make a better cut without making any mistakes. Then I like to go to the move tool Boolean operations over here and then add. Now if you go to the node tool, you only see the sharp nodes of this one shape. Everything merged into a curve, which is just a single layer and this is the shape of our house. Those are our mountains. I will also rename them. So that I can recognize things better, especially now in gray scale, I don't see things too well just yet. This is the moon, this is our front. One way, is to put our house shape behind this front plane. This will be option number one. If you know that, this is my house shape, you will not be editing it further. Then you can also go to the three dots menu, hit Duplicate, select one of the front layers together with the house, go to the Move tool bullying operations and subtract. And just to demonstrate, we will see that we cut the bottom of the house with the unique shape of the snow that will be in front of the cottage. But sometimes it's just enough to make sure that the layers are positioned properly. I might still want to move this house around a little bit. Maybe I would like to position it later on a little bit more to the center, so I will not be cutting anything out for me. It's enough that first, we have the front plane and then the house is behind it. Okay, let's bring back the sketch. Now we will create the roof. We will go to the rectangle tool and choose the rounded rectangle tool. Maybe to see things better. I'll make sure that I'm on the right layer, but everything is good. So I'm just going to draw one rounded rectangle shape and make it even darker so that I can see things better. And then from the move tool, I'm going to use this handle over here to rotate it. And to double check just to eye it to see how it would look good. Again, I will be building a unique shape, so I will make this top part of the roop a little bit longer, and the part that is at the bottom, I will position it where I want it to be. So I think this is actually looking quite good. We can also bring back our references. So in my original illustration, this sticks out a little bit more. Doesn't really matter. It's just a rough reference. You can also make the roof a little bit thicker over here. You can manipulate those handles here from the move tool. And now that I'm happy with it, I will go to the three dots, duplicate, and then I will flip it from this sub menu here. I will flip it horizontally. And I will position it on the other side. I have magnetic snapping on and I see those guiding lines show me that they're on the same level. I will still select those two shapes and see that they're really positioned in the middle. The best way also to do that is to group them, and then to select again our house shape, alignment tool over here, and then align center. And now everything is perfectly centered. Next, we have the two parts of the roof and we go to the Shape Builder, and you probably already guessed it. We are cutting out the bits that we don't want. The rest doesn't matter. I could still make the tip of this roof maybe a little bit rounder, but it will be covered in snow so we don't have to focus on that. Then on the entire group level from the move tool, Bolling operations, I hit at so that we have one single shape. Before we draw any further details, let's just make the chimney. We will draw one rectangle. At this point, I'm going to select the gray from my reference. I will position it behind the house, so to say. Make it a little bit more narrow. And then I would like the top of my chimney to be a bit more rounded. So instead of playing around with the corner tool, I will go directly to the rounded rectangle tool again, and I will create this rounded shape, go to the move tool, and you see the guiding lines showing me that everything is aligned in the middle. But I will also group it and rename it to chimney. So we have the chimney. We have, let's name it, the walls and we have the roof. We can also group the roof, the walls, and the chimney together, and rename it into cottage. Then all the other elements of the house, like the windows and the doors, they can go right into this cottage folder. The moon, the mountains, they're part of the background, so they're in the right placement. Then when we switch off to sketch, you can see that we already have a nice base of our house. I'm going to make this chimney. Now that it's grouped, I can do everything simultaneously. I'm going to change its shape a little bit. So it's good to keep those two elements separate because we can still edit them separately, making sure that they really aligned. I'm going to grab the base of the chimney and make it a little bit longer so that it resembles a little bit more something that I have on the other side. And then grabbing the stop part where all the time in the gray slider section, this is really, really handy. And when you're getting used to this process, it's like sutta ta, ta, ta, you're building your gray scale illustration in no time. Okay, so this is our base, and the main tip that I can give you here is to always start from the biggest elements, namely the elements of the background and the most important object in our illustration, which is our cottage. So now that the base is ready, we can continue working on the details of our illustration. 6. Vectorizing The House: This lesson, we will be adding in more detail into our illustration. So we still need to work on all the windows, the doors, the paths. We will build the fence and also the elements of the background and the foreground. So let's start with getting back to our sketch and then drawing our windows. So we will start with this basic window over here. I decided that this window will have a rounded corner. For the windows, you can either use the rectangle tool or the rounded rectangle tool. The rounded rectangle tool will help me save a little bit more time. Since I'm on the gray sliders, I can go in right away and also change the value of this gray color to something a little bit darker so I can see things better. I can also drag this first window inside of the cottage folder. Because we still have the rounded rectangle setup. You see this little icon here. There's a square circle triangle. It implies that it's not a curve like this roof, but it's still a shape with the properties of the shape. All the shapes can be created through the rectangle tool. And before we convert them into curves, they still retain some of the properties from this rectangle tool menu. We also talked about it at length in my Botanical Illustration master class. So right now, this rounded rectangle tool, it still has the option to be editable further. Namely, you see this little red point over here. You can manipulate this point and either increase the roundness of the corners or make it a little bit less prominent. And then always to be on the safe side, what I would recommend is to convert your geometric shape into curve. And you can do that by going to the three dots menu and choosing the option convert to curves. And you can observe what will happen here on the side of this symbol. Convert to curves. Now it's not called rounded rectangle anymore on the layers panel, and also the little symbol next to it change and now it's a curve. Which means that when we go to the node tool, we can access its nodes. And before it was a geometric shape, the nodes were not accessible in the same way. So there are pluses and minuses of both. If you feel that the shapes that you're using, you would still like to keep them more edited bow, then you can keep them as a geometric shape. But if you like the shape, you think it's going to stay this way, then I would recommend that you go again to three dots and convert it to curves. Next, I would like to use, again, the rounded rectangle tool to create the middle so you're not going to see that. That's why I will draw outside for now. You can keep it a perfect rounded square by keeping one finger on the screen. That's what I'm going to do. Then I will also make it a little bit brighter, go to the move tool and position it on my window. Next, two fingers on my screen, I will make a quick copy, making sure that they're on the same level. I will select those two elements, position them in the middle more or less in the second, and then I want to create one more pair underneath and you can also use a power duplicate here. Without deselecting, you can go to three dots, hit Duplicate, and the system will remember the previous operation that you did. So you created a copy of this pair, and it will also retain the same distance with the previous pair. So that's something that can help you save time. Now, I hope that you remember also the gesture shortcut that I'm using here. You can have one layer selected and then with two fingers, you're tapping on the top layer, and in this way, you're selecting everything without having to manually select every single layer. So that also helps us to save some time. Grouping. Now we can select our glass elements of the window and the window itself. Go to the move tool, alignment, align center, and line middle, and we have a window. Does it look the same? Yeah, it looks more or less the same. We can group it and you can still from the move tool, you can still edit everything together. So you can make still, for example, the window wider, but I'm going to keep it the way it was. Go back by tapping with two fingers twice on the screen. Before I copy this window over, I would like to finish everything that belongs to this window. So I would also like to draw those shutters and this little window sill. The window sill, I built it from a bunch of rounded rectangles and my shutters are just sharp rectangles without any roundness to it. But feel free to stylize your windows as you like. First, we will build the window sill. Roughly following the sketch. This will be my window sill and now another rounded rectangle that will be a little bit darker, that will be also underneath. I'm going to place it over here two fingers on my iPad screen. I'm going to move it to the other side. Group those two elements, select those two elements, and again from the alignment tool, align center, and then group everything and this will be I'm making an abbreviation window sill. Group the window sill or select the window sill with the window itself and also line center to make sure that it is perfectly centered, but I can see it is. And then from the rectangle tool Copela it has to open, and then I'm choosing just a normal rectangle, and I'm building the shutters very roughly following my sketch. And then I'm creating another Okay. Another longer rectangle. I'm going to make it a little bit darker, and I will clip it into this window shutter space. Clipping means that it will be inside. There's a little arrow that showed up and now this clipped darker rectangle is in the middle of this other shape. Now I can also make a copy, position this one first, make a copy, and maybe use a power duplicate to create another copy, which will be exactly at the same distance. I am grouping those rectangles and placing them more or less in the middle. You can also collectively make them a little bit more narrow and again place it in the middle. Zoom in Zoom out to see if you like it. Looking good. Now we will create another one on the other side. We see the green and the red guiding lines that showed us that the distance is the same. Everything is symmetrical, Oki dooki then we need to select the shutters, the window itself, and the window sill, group it. From the move tool, then collectively, you can also make everything a little bit smaller. We will see if our door will be fitting. So we can still resize everything. That's why till I know the size of my door, I'm going to leave this window waiting for me, and I will leave it for a second and do the door. I also want the door to be with rounded corners. That's why I will use the rounded rectangle tool. Make it less rounded. And then another rounded rectangle. This one will be also like a perfect square, so one finger on the screen from the color studio selecting the sar gray or you can do it directly from the sliders here, back to the move tool and I would like to position it more or less here, make another copy. And I wanted to have a mini window here and like a door, a wooden part area at the bottom. So first, let's select those two rounded rectangles, make a copy to fingers on the screen, dragging everything down. Okay. That looks good. Let's group it and also bring it to the folder where they belong. We can still make them smaller or bigger, select those glass elements together with the door, alignment tool, align center because it was a little bit off and I didn't quite see it. Then we go to the rectangle tool and we draw this other element. And from the gray slider, we can make it less prominent. So we're just testing out the values here. Of course, everything will be recolored later, selecting all the elements of the door, alignment tool, making sure that everything is aligned in center, keeping the selection, I am grouping everything and we have our door. Now that I'm thinking about it, I didn't create a door handle here. How bizarre. So see, I'm going to improve this illustration. I'm going to go to the Ellipse tool and draw a perfect circle one finger on the screen, going to draw a doorknob so that we can enter our cottage. Everything is really in the details, and I'm going to drag it into the right group. This is my door. This is my window. I'm just swiping quickly to the left to rename my layer. Now definitely I can make this temporarily invisible, this window, focus on the door. I want it really in the middle. So it's enough for me just to use the move tool and see if the guiding line is showing me that the door is really in the middle. You can also zoom in, make everything else around invisible and see if you like the size of the door. That looks good. Let's bring back the other window and now we can see that it's a good distance. Now with two fingers, we can make another copy of the window and place it on the other side to make sure that the set of windows is also centered, we can group them and again, search for a guiding line to see that everything is nicely in the middle. This is a minimalistic and also symmetrical illustration. But if you're not into symmetry, then feel free to stylize your cottage however you want. Now we can just recycle one of the window sills. This one, two fingers, make a copy. We can drag it outside and we can see if we can recycle this element over here. We also want it in the middle of our cottage. I think I would like to fix those elements. I'm going to start a new delete one of them. Make this one a little bit smaller. It's easier to delete one of them and just to make an exact copy of the other one. That looks good. Making sure that everything is in the middle and maybe going to this element, making it a little bit more narrow. Yeah, that looks great. So we recycled something. Now, with the rectangles, we always have two options. We can have a rectangle with sharp corners and we can already have a pre made rounded rectangle tool. This is very handy. It's different with the triangle and all the other shapes. So when I'm creating this other window, the window on top that has this triangular shape, you can either keep it as a triangle with sharp corners, but what I preferred and this is also something that we can practice together so that we learn more about affinity design, we can practice turning that sharp corner triangle into a triangle with rounded corners. Right now, if we switched to the node tool, we cannot access the nodes, and if we cannot access the nodes, then we cannot use the corner tool. See? This menu is blocked. We see the sharp nodes but they're not editable. So having this extra triangle that will be our triangular window selected, you remember it right. We have to go to the three dots menu, convert to curves so that our geometric shape shifts itself in its nature into a curve. Now we can go to the corner tool, select everything. You see through the selection, the sharp nodes turned from white into blue. And now we can drag one of the corners and you will see that the other corners will follow and we can make them more round. Then because there might be some resizing issues, once you're happy with the rounding of the corners, I would again recommend you go to the three dots menu, convert to curves and see everything baked itself, so to say. Now I want the glass elements on the window also to be triangles and to be rounded. We select the rectangle tool. First before we convert it into curves, we need the properties of this triangle from the rectangle tool. By the way, this rectangle tool, for me personally, right now, it's called the rectangle tool. I think the name of this tool comes from the fact that when you open the menu, the very first shape is the rectangle tool. When you hit this question mark to see the names of those sub menus, you will see that by default, over here, there is a rectangle tool. It's a little bit confusing because we know that when we open it, there are different shapes, different geometric shapes that are included in this menu. Anyway, through this rectangle tool or the shape tool, you can still manipulate and adjust the properties of this rectangle because you can probably see that there's this red dot that will give you a hint, ah, I can edit this further. And we want to shift the upper corner of this triangle to either of the sides. So we have a 90 degrees triangle, and then we want to go to the three dots menu and convert it to curves so that we get access to the nodes, which then in turn, we can round in the corner too. So you can either select it with this blue selection by dragging somewhere outside of this shape and selecting it like this, or two to two. Let's find it again. Or you can just select it takes a little bit more time. You can select one of the corners, and then one finger on the screen. You can keep selecting them manually one by one, and you will recognize that everything is selected because it changed from white to blue. So this is my preferred method. And by default, the first corner alteration will be that you get a rounded corner. Of course, you can go into the menu and you can explore other corner manipulation options. For example, this is a straight change concave, cut out, but we will go back to the rounded one. And then we bake it. So we go to the three dots menu, convert to curves because now that we have the move tool, and this shape will resize properly together with those new rounded corners. If we didn't bake it, if we didn't convert it into curves, there might be some scaling problems. So let's make it a little bit lighter. And from the move tool, let's position everything into our new window. Oh, that looks nice, but we need the other half of this window so that we can position everything nicely in the middle. So duplicate and then flip horizontal. We can also go and see if we can space it better. Let's group it, open the group. Now we have to go to our guiding lines to make sure that everything is spaced properly. Then from this group level, now we can position everything or resize it in the middle, just zooming in and out, trying to figure out if this is what we want. It doesn't have to be exactly like in my reference photo here, plus you will be styling your own cottage in your own way. Anyway, you can always go in, by the way, and maybe reduce the distance between the two triangles. And if you want everything to be aligned perfectly in the center, then you have to make sure you select everything together. Go to the alignment tool and choose a line center and then group it. And one last thing that we have to do on the house before we switch to the pencil tool in the next lesson, we have to draw those wooden elements of the house. So I'm going to switch off the sketch, and I will do it a little bit more spontaneously. I'm going to draw one rectangle and also go to the gray sliders and make it a little bit brighter. And I will make sure that I'm clipping it inside. And here, I don't want it to be perfectly symmetrical, so I'm using this handle to rotate it at a very Unexpected angle so that it looks quite random and then two fingers on the screen, I'm making a copy, dragging it up, and also changing the angle so that it looks more interesting. That's it. Another copy to fingers on the screen, rotating it the other way around. I think this will look good. Another copy, rotating, also checking that everything looks good, better not to cut it at those tangent points. Another copy, dragging it up, and one more copy dragging it up, and I think that looks good. I am grouping everything because we can change the color very easily on the group level. Now let's draw the bricks that will be part of our chimney. If you want to select something very fast, then my recommendation is to go to the node tool and to select this shape from the node tool. Then we're going to the rectangle tool, rounded rectangle tool, and we're drawing our first brick, which is essentially a rounded rectangle. Then we're dragging it inside of the chimney, the base of the chimney. And from the move tool, we can create a few copies fingers on the screen to make a quick copy. So that we have a few bricks on this chimney and grouping everything so that it's easier to recolor. I also forgot the stairs that are in the front of our door. They will be also in front of this snow area. What does it mean? Let's first close our cottage group. Choose a simple rectangle, draw it somewhere here from the gray scale, make it darker, right now, you cannot see it because it landed randomly in the cottage folder. But even now, you cannot see it because it's behind this front snow layer. We have to drag it to the front and this will be a stair element or a step element. Maybe that's the proper word that will not be part of the cottage folder because it has to be in the front. Okay, now this looks good. So our cottage is here. The front snow area is over here, and right on top, we have our step. So this already looks quite nice, especially when you switch off the sketch. You can always switch it on and off and also zoom in and zoom out and position your cottage and the cottage element to your liking. We will split this lesson into another one, and in the next video, we will be vectorizing the remaining detail elements on our illustration, the fence, the paths, all the bushes, parts of the mountain, and the trees that are also part of the background, and the smoke on the chimney. 7. Vectorizing The Details & Assets: In this video, we will be vectorizing the remaining details of our illustration. I would like to still stick to the rectangle tool and draw this fence. I drew here in my example illustration, a very traditional fence that is built from a rectangle paired together with a triangle. To build this shape, it's enough to draw this rectangle with the triangle, just like with the base of our house. And then you can just go to the shape tool. And first of all, make sure that the shapes are overlapping so that you can cut them properly so that parts of this rectangle will be sticking out. Can select it again, go to the Shape Builder. It still remembers that we were on the minus and we can just minus out the elements that we don't need, and then we can also switch to the plus and connect the remaining elements to merge everything into one shape. We can, for example, use this shape to be our fence. On top of that, you can also round the top part of the fence. I hope that you can see that. Let me maybe drag it underneath. And then let's go to the corner tool. This time we are not manipulating all the corners of this shape. That's why we only have to select this one. And then by default, the very first corner manipulation will be the rounded option. Right away, before we forget, we go to the three dots menu, convert to curves. And now we have a building block for our fence. So let's bring it over here to the front. We can also change on the gray scale, the value of this great color just so that we can see better. Also, I think this roof is a little bit in your face. The reason to have it a little bit darker is to see the shape better. But once everything is good, you can also change it down so that it doesn't hurt your eyes. Back to this fence area. Or this fence element and back to the sketch. From the move tool, we will be building our fence. I also don't want it to be perfectly symmetrical, standing straight. That's why I'll be making copies of this fence and I will be changing their angle every now and then. And I will create a few more elements than in my sketch. My sketch is only a rough guideline, but I don't have to follow it blindly, so to say. Then it's always a good idea to switch off the sketch and use the preview mode exactly to see if everything looks nice. For example, this is cut in an awkward way. I'm going to select everything together. A group it because I really like how it looks. And make sure that it's positioned in a nice way. Then the other part of the fence will be just to create a normal rectangle. Let me just see how I did it here. It can be either in the front or at the back. It might also look interesting at the back, especially if you maybe make it a little bit darker. Then you will see what I mean. If it's a little bit more dark, it adds a little bit more depth. But it can be also in the front. That's also a nice effect. But I like the other one, so I'm going to drag it underneath and then I will make another copy. I already see that I have to change something on the width, I will position it at the distance that I like, but then I'm going to select everything together and I will make it a little bit more narrow. I want still to change the distance, but I want it to be the same width. This is the element that I need. I will group it and play with it a little bit further till I like this fence. Next, I'm grouping everything together. The reason why this is in a separate group and this is in a separate group is that recoloring will be much easier later on. This is our fence and from the move to we can still I don't like how this snow line was cut, so I'm dragging it a little bit more down so that I'm not cutting this snow area here and I'm making sure that it's also cut on one of the edges of the illustration in a flattering way. To say, it's all very subjective though. If you want to, of course, you can follow the sketch, but you can freestyle and you can even make a copy of this fence, flip it and put it on the other side. It can be also positioned in a different way. It could be more below or even here. Oh, that actually looks nice. Just a suggestion that your sketch is nothing that is set in stone. Okay. And let me see. I think that was the last thing that I wanted to create with the rectangle tool, and now we will be switching to the pencil tool. So for example, we have to go in between this step area and let me actually rename it to front snow because front, if it's just front then it's not clear what exactly it is. And in between, I would like to create my path. So it should also remember the settings that I had on the previous pencil tool action. But you can always make a test first. I'm going to draw a path. And as auto closes, I have close always, so it will snap close itself in a very easy way. And then I use rope stabilizer so that it's not too wobbly. You can do the same. I usually have my stabilization at about 20. From the gray sliders, I make it a little bit lighter, and you can still go to the node tool. I'm going to select this unnecessary node and delete it. And you can still manipulate the nodes and the handles to see if you like the shape of your path. So you can also switch off the sketch. Okay. This looks a little bit weird. I would like to change it. That's why it's very handy that it's all vector based. Ah, okay. That looks great. And because I'm a perfectionist, I want to select this new path with the background, go to the Shape Builder minus and cut out this unnecessary bit and then rename it to pass. Now, to create this Bosch element, or botanical element, I would like to show you how I like to use the pencil tool together with sculpt. We will be drawing this Bosch over here. I also want to focus. That's why I will switch off the preview of what is outside of my canvas, and then I will go to the Pencil tool. You can also double check from the question mark what options you have in this contextual menu, and there's a sculpt option that you see over here. Right now it's deselected because it's on a light gray background. But we will select it. So from the pencil tool, I would recommend that you switch off the auto close. So you select close off and then sculpts on. So we will be sculpting our Bush shape, but then we will have to close it manual but it's not a problem at all. So we start drawing our Bush and then from the last note, we keep creating our shape. And here again, from the last note, we create our shape further. And then here here and now we need to close it manually. Node two, last node, we connected with the first note. And if you're again, a perfectionist, you can also select this new Bosch element with the background, go to the Shape Builder and cut out this unnecessary shape. Now, there is another bosch in here, but I will show you a little trick. If you've been using affinity for a longer time, you might have some, for example, botanical elements that are already pre saved in your assets library. Let's go, for example, to my assets Library. I have a whole category of assets called greenery, and this is where the magic starts. When you're using infinity designer for a longer time, you start building your own unique vector assets and you will notice that with time, you're gaining speed and you're creating illustrations in a faster way. For example, over here, I had this bush that I created for one of the books. For one client and I already have a bush shape that is also nicely cut at the bottom. I can just change it to this gray scale so that everything is nice and neat and I can recycle this vector acid. If I needed to draw it from the start, I would probably do something like this. I would keep using sculpt keep building the front or the upper part of this bush, then I would just close it manually, and then I would get the rectangle tool, get the rectangle, and from the move tool position everything at the bottom. I'm going to change the color so that you can see better. Go to the note tool, bring this note down, fix any shape that needs fixing. For example, here I want a little bit more round. Here it looks good. Then having those two shapes selected, you could, for example, go to the Shape Builder, make sure there is a minus and just get rid of the bottom part. And you have this Busch shape that you can use in your illustration. So yeah, you can even position it here or you can add it into your assets library. I'm going to delete it. So I recycled something that was already in my library. You can either create elements from scratch, but it did take a little bit of time to create this fence. So right now, you could consider selecting this fence element, go to the asset studio. And for example, I also have a category. So I've been illustrating a lot lot to lot with affinity. That's why. I have a lot of groups do not feel intimidated. This comes with time. I also have a category called buildings, and I already have a fence. But I don't know, this one looks nice, so I could add asset from selection and add in another one. From one farm themed book, I created, for example, this fence. This is also a very basic fence. It's basically just what's it called rectangles? So I could just quickly recycle this fence from a previous project. Let's actually see what it would look like. Pa. See, that's also very, very interesting. I'm gaining speed because I am recycling something that was already created before. You can also keep it invisible, keep the original fans, and when you're finalizing your illustration, you can make up your mind which of the assets you would like the most. I'm going to keep this one. This bush can also go here as part of our foreground and then those two bushes going to make them a little bit darker so that they're not the same color like the path. It's just for the visibility, I'm going to group them. 8. Vectorizing The Details: Pen & Pencil Magic: It's just for the visibility, I'm going to group them. Bringing back the sketch. Now we can draw a very rough shape outline of the trees that are or could be in the background. For that, to keep this very organic line, I'm going to go to this mountains layer, switch off everything else, and then prepare my pencil tool. So from the pencil tool, I would like to keep sculpting. That's why my auto clothes will be off. And then I don't want to use any stabilization because I want my shapes to be a little bit more rough. I just make a test block just somewhere here to see if I like the color. The most important thing is that you can see better. That's why it's okay to temporarily increase the saturation of this grade to make it a little bit deeper so that you only see the shape and then you can still change the color. Go to remove it. And now I will start drawing like a rough shape of the trees Usually, the very last note is a red note. That's where you will recognize, uh, I have to draw from there. Then we have to close this shape, but going all the way to the back node tool because we disabled Autoclose and we have to snap it together. It turned yellow for a second and now it's all snapped. Now we have this dark shape, we can go back to the pencil tool and sculpt is still on, so we can keep S over here, we can keep refining this shape. If something looks weird, we can keep refining those shapes. Apala this way is just to grab a note that already exists and just to keep drawing there. That looks good. This one could be a little bit more pointy and sculpting those shapes. Here, there's too much space, I would like to add in some extra shapes, and now we can go back and change it to this original gray or just go to the gray sliders and adjust the color as well. But actually maybe it looks better if it's a little bit darker. The gray scale is also there to help you see things better. Now we will draw the snowy tops of those mountains. And for that, we can use the Pentl. But first, we can go to those mountains and change them to lighter gray. Then we go to the Pentl first of all, we can make a test blob. I like to go then to the color studio and change everything to white. Then I'm deleting my test blob and I will be randomly creating whoops from the pentil I go back to the mountains. I will be randomly creating those top snowy parts of the mountain. And then I'm clipping it into this mountain shape. Now, everything is already clipped so I can just keep going. I make sure to close my shape. Now everything is closed. When it is closed, then I can just make a new note and it will be a new shape. I'm going to follow my reference here. Okay. That looks good. I can still group it in case I want to recolor it. Next, we will be drawing the snow, for example, here, the snow that lays on this roof and the snow that is here on the windows. I have a quick look at my reference illustration and then I will just switch it off from the preview tool and I will simply freestyle, so to say. I'm going to kick out this fence, go to the pencil tool. First, I'm going to make a test blob. For starters, I would like to change the auto close to close far, for example, is good for that and I don't want any stabilization. I already remembers my previous settings that I want only fill, which is white. You see here on the gray sliders, we have 100% white and I don't want any stroke. First, I'm going to create some snow as if it was lying over here on the window. There was a lot of snowfall at night and now it's on the window. You see auto close is working, but I still have to come relatively close so that the shape is closed. I can already select this snow over here and group it, and then open this folder, select any of those elements that are within the folder. If I draw anything new, for example, this, it will already be inside of this whole group. Let's imagine there's snow over here on this wooden element of the cottage. Let's of course, draw the snow on the roof. There's also snow on this little stair area. You can always double check your references. There's a big cape of snow. Can I say it like this? That is definitely on the roofs. What else? On the window sills. Let's also not forget the fence and maybe the bushes as well. By all means, have a look at your reference photos and keep adding in the snow. Maybe over here. Right now I'm basically improvising. I also notice I think those elements of the fans are sticking out a little bit too much. I'm going to find the fence and make this not sticking out so much. That looks much better. Back to my original group, I can rename it into snow and you will know what I mean. I open the folder, I click any layer that is inside, back to the pencil tool and I keep drawing. For example, let's draw some more snow on this bush over here. And I would also like to draw a little bit more snow that will cover this fence area. See what I mean? This looks a little bit more flattering as if this fence was really sitting deep in the snow, so to say. And you can also add in the snow here on those trees. And here, and I'm missing also those windows here. And maybe a little bit on the chimney. And since we have this white color pre selected, we can also go underneath our cottage and with a little bit of rope stabilization, we can also draw with this white color the smoke that will be coming out of the chimney. Okay. Then the last thing that we got to draw is the actual snow. This is snow that drop that has fallen and is on the trees and on the house. And now we go and we create right on top of everything else our snow drops. This will be just a perfect circle. That's why one finger here. We keep creating copies using the gesture with two fingers. Right now, I will focus only on one size of this snowdrop. Right now, I create a lot of circles and I need to group everything together so that our layers do not explode. Then I select the topmost circle, for example, I make a copy out of it and keeping one finger on the screen, I keep this perfect circle, but I make it a little bit smaller. I add in a little bit of size variation here. You will see that I'm keeping two fingers on the screen all the time and I'm just creating copies of the same circle. So now I can also move the sketch to the side because I don't need it really anymore. And I can just double check if I have everything that I want to have in my illustration, and everything is pretty much in there. So right now, this is our gray scale illustration. It was still a lot of choices to make. We focused on, for example, the shapes of the windows. We focused on what fence we prefer. We focused a little bit on the composition. We made sure that we populate this front plane, the middle plane, and the background plane properly. Over here from the node, I feel I would like to add an extra node and also to change the shape of the mountain. So that it feels a little bit more natural, and we were able to focus on all those decisions without messing around with the color. So now that the whole base is ready, we added in all the details. Now we are ready for the next step, which is the coloring. And when you have your color palette ready, this will be really a breeze. Alternatively, perhaps you have another winter illustration of yours from your own portfolio. You can also import it here. So that you can use the color picker and you can recycle the colors that used previously for some other illustration of yours. That's another strategy that I like to use over and over again. So we're ready with the base. In the next lesson, we will be coloring in our illustration. 9. Coloring In & Color Palettes: In this video, we will be coloring in the base of our winter cottage illustration. So I think this is really where the fun starts. So far, we were working on the grayscale version of our illustration. So when we have a look at all the layers here, they are all in grayscale. Just as a reminder, you can work in gray scale very easily by exiting the swatches in the color studio in affinity. And over here, we already are in the gray sliders section. There's a sub menu of different color modes, RGB sliders, HSL sliders. You can also use the color wheel it's super handy to start working first with the gray sliders when creating your illustration, especially regarding the number of details. The more detailed illustration is, you don't have to decide on the color palette first. You can draw your detailed illustration in gray scale first. This will save you actually a lot of time because you will not get blocked thinking about colors and the value of your colors and the overall color palette. So for me, this strategy has proven to be the most efficient, and I'm quite fast creating my illustrations using this technique. But now this is where the fun starts. Like I said, we will be coloring in our illustration. And I prepared for you a few color palettes that are inspired by winter. I will be making those color palettes available in the downloadable resources. You can work with color palettes through the color studio. When you go to the color studio, you go to Swatches, and this is where I also have my winter cottage color palette saved up directly to my swatches. I created this color palette as an application palette so that it is accessible across all the documents. In my affinity designer for the iPad. If I wanted to have this color palette on my desktop version, I would have to export this palette and then import it because this sharing of color palettes is within just one given software. So within the iPad, for example, and then separately for the desktop version. So this is option number one. You can save up your swatches here or you can save up your color palettes as assets. So here in the Assets studio, I prepared a new color palettes winter color palettes assets category. I will make it available for you. You can download it, and then you can use any of those color palettes to create your illustration. To create a new assets studio category, you go to the main Hamburger menu and then you have to either import a category or just add a category if you would like to create it from scratch. In our case, I wanted to show you, since I will be making those color palettes available, I wanted to show you how I would import them. I am going to go ahead and delete it. Again, through the main hamburger menu, I'm going to remove it, and then we will import it back again. So to import the category of assets with the color palettes, we have to go to the option Import category, and then the color palettes will be available for your download. You have to save it up either to your Cloud storage or directly to the storage of your iPad. So what I like to use for my iPad is simply the Files app. This is the icon for the Fils app. And I have a bunch of folders here with my backtup files, various resources, and I also have a dedicated folder for all my affinity assets because I'm still working on all those assets categories and every now and then I need to refresh it and back it up again. Here I saved up this category of winter color palettes. Very important, it has to be on the device storage, and then you go to Import category. And over here, you could have, for example, gone first to on my iPad. You basically have to find the folder where you saved this category of assets, it's over here. It has a file extension dot AF Assets. And then you just select those assets, and they will get imported into your interface right away. There they are. If you click on the name of those assets, you will see the entire list of assets that you have in your asset studio. And then if you would like to use those color palettes, you can just long press and drop them onto your document, or you can just click on the color palette and select Insert. Pala. Go to the Mufto and these are your color palettes, but I'm going to remove those because I prepared the color palettes that we could be using for this illustration here in the middle. So you have a few color palettes to choose from. I named them winter cold, WinterFest and Winter Green. They share this cool nature, so to say, that I associate with winter. You are more than welcome to choose your own color palettes. Maybe you have color palettes that you used previously for your winter themed illustrations and the easiest way to go about it is like, in this case, this is an illustration that I already completed. This is just a JPEC of the illustration that I created before. You go to the hamburger menu and you place it, for example, from your photos. Any previous illustration that you would like to recycle, you can import it through this menu over here. Alternatively, you can also do some research on Pinterest. And then, for example, if you like a color palette, you can screenshot it, again, save it to maybe the photos, app on your iPad, and then go through the same menu, place place from photos. On Pinterest, you got to be careful because sometimes you see too many illustrations by other artists and you are maybe too tempted to copy everything, so it's better to come up with your own color palettes. One way to go about it and to stay a little bit more neutral is to go to Google Images and to search for non illustration photos that you can screenshot. For example, this one looks very pretty. There are those winter blues and purples paired together with complimentary reds and oranges. So maybe you would like to screenshot this photo like so. I would screenshot it like this. And then click Done and save it to my photos. And then I could go to Affinity and search this photo from the Photos app and bring it as my reference photo somewhere onto the document area. I'm going to make a test swatch, and if I wanted to color pick those colors, then I would use the color picker tool, and this is how I could theoretically build my new winter color palette. So three options. You can use your previous color palettes or previous color palettes saved as assets. You can search on Pinterest, but be careful not to copy everything from a given artist, and then you can also look through Google images or even use your own photos. Okay, so enough about the color palettes now, we can start coloring in, and I think I will be using this original color palette with the cool tones. So I will deselect all the other color palettes so that I can stay more focused. Now, this will be relatively fast. I always recommend to select the object that you would like to color, not from the move tool, but actually from the node tool because for example, if I wanted to select this path from the MVTol, sometimes I would have to click too many times. In this case, it was relatively fast. But normally it takes longer. The easiest way see is to do it from the node tool because the node tool selects everything super fast. In case your background is not selected, then maybe it is locked. Over here, you see this padlock symbol that means it's locked. So for the background, you probably locked it so that it doesn't move around. For the background, you would have to go to the layers panel sort of manually. And then for my background, I'm going to choose this lighter pink color. The snow, the smoke coming from the chimney, the moon or the sun will stay the same. Now let's maybe select the main base of the house. So the walls will be S, you can also use the colors from the color swatches. I'm actually going to do that. So I will choose this darker pink. And then because we grouped all those lines into one group, it will be very easy to apply a new color on the group level. Okay. That looks good. Now, let's also color in the roof. Maybe this red or you can select the color directly from your reference photo. For example, I can select this mountain and go here to this blue from the previous illustration that you created. Let's also color in the trees. Maybe choose this blue color. In the next lessons to come, we will be also applying gradients to some of the elements of our illustration. Now let's take this blue here, the same blue for this bush, the path, another blue. We will apply a gradient later on. The snow shouldn't be gray, it should be a little bit more bluish white. Then the elements of the fence, maybe the ones on the front will share this color here. And then the element at the back will have the same color, but then we can get out of swatches. And now we don't need the gray sliders anymore. If you're working in the color format RGB, I tend to work with HSL sliders. So we apply the same color, but we can make it a little bit darker. Okay, now this step can have maybe the same color that is on the fence. And the same with the chimney, it can share the same color or actually, this one is a little bit more warm. So I'm going to apply this original color from my illustration. The same here. The reason why those colors are a little bit more yellowish is that I chose this original gray color, and then from HSL sliders, I increase the saturation a little bit so that you see, so that it's a little bit warmer. Okay, so now I'm going to go ahead and color in the rest of the elements. Remember that if some of the elements are grouped, it will be easier to bulk color them in. The same for those glass elements of the window and the same here. Again, I'm selecting or finding the element through the node tool, going to the group level, applying this blue color. Again, selecting one element and then switching to the group level, applying the same color. Now let's look at the frames of our windows. I will choose the brown from the original illustration. You can also choose it from your swatches or play around with this brown that you're creating. You can make it darker, you can make it lighter. I'm going to choose this original brown from this illustration and really do not shy away from recycling your color palettes. So it's actually a really, really good strategy to have another illustration of yours over here, the way I'm doing it. Because by re using your signature colors, so to say, you are creating a more cohesive look. You will be so to say, recycling some of the colors, and they will become eventually your signature colors. Like, you will be the person who likes a particular a particular type of blue, for example. And then hopefully with time, you will become more recognizable for that. People will start to recognize you at aha. This is this artist. I do recognize their line or the colors that they're using. Alright, what else is left? The shutters over here. So I can select both of them and choose this basic red color, and then I can open both of them and select two groups and apply this darker red. Yeah, I will have to check after filming this video how long it took me to color everything in, but it's actually really, really, very fast. And with that regard, I think that working in gray scale first is really worth it. It makes you more efficient. You are able to first focus on the illustration itself and then you can leave the colors towards the end. I just switch quickly to the node to so that I can as I was coloring in, I saw some imperfections that I would like to fix, for example, how the snow is here. By clicking anywhere on this line, you can create extra nodes to edit your shape. I think this looks good. You can also use the privy mode to cut out anything else. And via this could be actually the end for this course. Our illustration is colored. However, in the following videos, we will be adding in even more depth and interest into this illustration. So we will be still checking the values and the contrast on our illustration. We will be applying some transparency tricks. We will be also practicing to add in the Gaussian blur on this moon. And finally, we will be adding in more depth by using gradients. I'll see you in the next video. 10. Transparency Tool: In this video, we will be applying transparency to our vector objects. So now we will be adding even more interest to our illustration by applying transparency. You can find the transparency tool here on the left. The first option is the gradient tool. We will be using it later, and then we have the transparency tool. Let's bring the visibility of everything else. Around and to demonstrate how transparency works, let's create first normal rectangle that will be also overlapping our original illustration because before you can use the transparency tool, you can change the opacity of your object by manipulating it directly on the layers panel. Transparency will help us to edit our objects and kind of edit them from fully opaque to fully transparent in various scenarios that I will show you in a second. But without using the transparency tool, you can change the opacity of the whole object from the layers panel by going to the three dots menu, and over here you have the opacity slider. So you can make it more transparent by using the slider. This is very light. And then it's getting more opaque, and then at 100%, we have to full opacity. So let's maybe leave the square so that you remember about it and create another square to explore other types of transparency. Okay, so we have this square selected, and then we go to the transparency tool, and you start adding in transparency by simply drawing a line you can manipulate both of those circles. So the one on the left and the one on the right. The very first type of transparency which you see here in the menu is the linear transparency. So this is the default transparency that you start with. And I will just keep this line at a diagonal. So that you can see how it looks. Over here, you have a little line in the middle that can also be manipulated. You can bring it up or you can bring it down. You also see that this circle here is full. It means this is the side of the line that will have the highest opacity with the color, and this circle here is white, which means it's empty, there is no color. It's not about color changes. It's about making the color more invisible, so to say. Then you can use this slider to adjust this transparency further. So this is how this looks. Then from the MO tool, we will copy this rectangle, go back to the transparency tool, and now we will explore another type of transparency. So we can go back to the sub menu and move to elliptical. Okay. So see you already have an ellipsis here. You can position, for example, this full opacity color in the middle, and then you can move both sliders. They're actually quite equal here. You see they are both white, which means you will be moving towards more transparency with those circles. And this created this nice oval or elliptical shape for us. And there's another slider line that you see here. You can further work this transparency by making it with more defined edges or less defined more blurry edges. Gonna also leave it in the middle. Actually, magnetic snapping will make it snap exactly in the middle, and this line will turn red. So this is the elliptical transparency. It looks like an ellipsis. Then again, to the move tool, we copy another. It's actually still this original rectangle. And then we go to the transparency tool and from the elliptical, we move to radio. The way I interpret radio is that it's basically behaving like a circle. We have a radius here. I can also position it here at a diagonal. And again, full opacity is in the middle, which is represented by this fully colored circle and less transparent so more transparency, more invisibility, so to say, is represented by this white circle. And again, we have this line slider. We can also position this circle outside of our shape. It will also help us create interesting effects because the color will be still kind of captured in this original rectangle shape. So nothing will be op, see daisy. Nothing will be kind of falling out of this original shape. I'm going to make it a little bit smaller so that you see this radius and the circular shape as opposed to this elliptical shape so that we can see the difference better. And then I will make another copy. Back to the transparency tool. And the final type is the conical type, which I don't really use a lot. It looks a little bit like a cone. So I'm going to position like this. Sometimes it works when you just position it on the edge of your shape, and then you can play around with it. But personally, I don't use it too much. You can also manipulate this line over here. It looks a little bit like a cone when you deselect it. So I'm going to go to the Move tool and the select so that you can see everything. You can manipulate the opacity on the layers panel, and then you can apply different transparencies by using the transparency tool, linear, elliptical, radio, and conical. Another thing that you can change. So I'm going to select, again, this original rectangle. You can also rotate your transparency by 90 degrees. So this is moving by 90 degrees. Let's bring it back. And you can also reverse it. What it will mean is that this full circle will switch places with this empty circle. You can also see it here. It looks very interesting. See, now we have it the other way around. So the outside is more opaque and the inside is more transparent. I can also show you that here. And again, the color is still contained by this original rectangle shape. Okay, so those are all the transparency types. This is a very, very useful tool. And in our illustration, we will add transparency to this smoke coming out of the chimney so that it looks as if the most dense smoke was right at the chimney and then it's kind of getting more transparent. That's a nice effect. So I use the note tool to quickly select the smoke, and then I go to the transparency. And I never know which one is which one when I start drawing the line. And now we can kind of experiment with what kind of transparency we would like to apply here. When we go to the Layers panel, we see only the smoke is selected. I will maybe rename it because it's just named as a curve. Okay. The transparency is only applied here. You can, of course, explore here other types. I think elliptical would also be very interesting here. But linear is very straightforward here. If you don't want it to be a little bit too roughly cut with a little bit more variation, then you can either go for the I think elliptical would be nice because it's not like this clean circular shape. And then you can also work the slider to see if this is the effect that you're the most happy with. So maybe I will drag it a little bit up so that there's like bits of transparency also here on the left side. And then I normally like to go to the move tool and deselect to to see the effect. I like it a lot. See, let alone this, add it in a little bit more interest. Alright, so this is it. I don't think we have to add transparency to any other elements, except except maybe here because those are the snowy parts of the mountain. How would it look? Oh, that looks also great. Maybe elliptical again. Mm hmm. Ah, I will show you one more trick. Right now, we have this little element on the mountain, and we could try to replicate this effect for the remaining parts of the mountain, the white ones, the snowy caps. There's a better way, which I absolutely love. So let me show you the better way. Having this shape that is already edited with the transparency tool selected, we go to the three dots menu and we do copy. Then we can go to the next element three dots menu, paste style. Look what will happen. Uh. So the whole thing that we edited previously is reapplied. Oh, I love it. And then we can go to the last one, three dots. And where was that paste style so fast. I mean, when you get used to all those tricks, it will be like, boom, boom, boom, super fast. You will be drawing very, very fast, and you will become very efficient. Oh, super Okay. This is where we stop, I guess. I hope that you like this transparency too. It's super Duber interesting, and I hope that you will like using it. In the next lesson, we will be refreshing our knowledge about the gaussian blur and we will be adding a glow effect to this little moon over here. 11. Gaussian Blur: This video, we will be adding in the Gaussian blur effect to one of the elements in our illustration. Namely, we have this little moon or this little sun from the node tool. I'm going to quickly select it. And I think it would be very interesting to add a little bit of blur, and it's going to look kind of similarly to the transparency effect that we were using in the previous lesson, but it's still a little bit different. The Gaussian blur will help us to achieve a glow effect. If I bring back the visibility of everything else that I have here in my documents, this is the glow that I created on my original illustration. So now we will try to replicate it. How to do that? I'm going to make everything else invisible so that we can focus here. This is our moon. I will start by making a copy of the moon. You can also group it so that everything belongs to the moon, so to say. So this very first moon has to stay opaque, so we are not touching it. And the original shape of the moon that is underneath, it will be squeezed out and blurred out. And this will be the building block to create our blur. To go to the Gaussian effect, and by the way, I hope I pronounce it correctly Gaussian Gaussian. I think it's Gaussian. So we stay on the moon that is underneath, and to add in the gaussian blur effect, we have to go here on the right most menu to the FX options. From all those options that you can see here, from the layer effects options, you can go to select on this little slider here, Gaussian blur, and then you click on it, and you have an extra slider that showed up here to the left. And then, you see, you have to use the slider to make this glow effect bigger or more subtle and smaller. Back to the move tool. And now the best way to see if it made any difference is to make it invisible. So we can also deselect, and we're bringing it back And let's zoom in so that you can see better. So now there is no glow and there is a glow. This is a very subtle effect again, but we are adding more interest to our illustration. The Gaussian blur effect helps you achieve this diffuse glow look. So have a look at your illustration if there's anything else that you would like to glow. Maybe also you could duplicate. I'm not going to do that, but just to demonstrate, I will duplicate the mountains. We can also kick out the white elements on the mountains, just keep this blue shape, and we can experiment, what would it look like if there was a glow on the shape of the mountains? And you can also change the color of the mountains. Maybe we can change it to this red just to demonstrate. You don't have to stick to the original color of the elements that you would like to glow up. You can choose a completely different color for interesting effects. So now I have a copy underneath my original mountains. Staying on this layer, I go to layer ex, Gaussian blur. I click on it, I get access to this slider. And now I make the glow. So red looks a little bit weird, but don't worry because once you selected a given color, it's not set in stone, you can still change it. So, ah, oh, purple looks nice. Blue looks nice, maybe a darker pink would look nice, or actually lighter pink. You can choose the new color from the swatches, but you can also go to your sliders. Maybe make it white. Oh, I actually like that. You can also go to the moveTo and you can change this shape, so it doesn't have to stay within this original mountain shape. I can drag it a little bit up, deselect, so that it's a little bit more visible and I actually really like that. So I'm going to keep it this way. I just want to double check the blur on the moon got deselected. Now it's fixed. Okay. So in this lesson, we explored again or refreshed our knowledge about the Gaussian blur. We added a nice glow look to the moon and to the whole background behind the mountains. We are nearly finished with refining our illustration, but in the next video, we will move to I think one of the most fun parts of this tutorial, namely using gradients to add even more depth into our illustration. 12. Gradient Tool: In this video, we will be applying gradients to our vector objects. This will be the final part of adding more depth and more interest to our winter cottage illustration. We will be adding so called color transitions because this is what essentially gradient tools are about. They are very similar to the transparency tool. We will be doing the same exercise. I will demonstrate how the gradient tool works by drawing another rectangle and adding in different types of gradients. The menu will be pretty much the same with the transparency tool. The difference between the transparency tool and the grading tool is that here we moved within one color and just played around on this spectrum of its opacity and transparency. And the gradient tool will be a wonderful play between two colors or even multiple colors. And to demonstrate what I mean, I'm going to go to the gradient tool and start drawing my first line. So even though it's not super clear right at the start, there is a different color on the other side of this rectangle. So when I click on this very first circle, this is this original red color that I used when I was drawing my rectangle. And when we have to click on this other circle that is at a diagonal, this is the darker version of the same color. So from my experience, the default settings of the software is that when you create your first gradient line, the second color that will be chosen for your color transition will be the same color but darker. However, you can of course, choose any other color. So here I added in just having selected this other little circle, I added in another color and you can really play around here to see what effects you can create. The menu is pretty much the same. So when we click on gradient types, we have linear. We've got elliptical, we've got radio, and we have conical. So I'm going to keep here at a diagonal this linear gradient, make a copy. Go to the gradient tool, change to elliptical so that you can see things better. So this will rather move within this ellipsis shape and then another copy. Back to the gradient tool. Radio will be editable at this radio line, so to say. And finally, we've got the conical type. Here we can also move on this editing line. Now, a fun thing about gradients is that you can apply more than one color. Simply click along this line to create a new point. Now this new circle is selected, and then you can go back to your color studio, you can move this point and you can also move the sliders that will dictate how much of a color you have along this line. I can also create one more point here and add in something more contrasting like this. And that means that you're not limited to only one color. Now let's choose this one, make another point and choose another color. That looks pretty psychedelic and again, those sliders here, they will help you to edit your gradient further. The same with the radio gradient type. And the same on this blue line, create any new point. Let's really make multiple points here so that you can see it's really in action. This is where you can basically play with your rainbow. I'll add in here on this radial one, a blue color so that we have a little bit more contrast and the other options remain the same. You can also rotate everything by 90 degrees or you can reverse the order of the colors on this spectrum, so to say. The same here. So with that regard, the gradient tool behaves and give us all those editing options in exactly the same way as the transparency tool. There's one more interesting thing that I wanted to tell you about, and this by the way, also applies to the transparency tool. We are going to create a circle, perhaps change the gradient to yeah, bitmap. Bitmap, by the way, guys, I'm not talking about it at length here in this lesson because bitmap is basically when you get, for example, a pattern and static image like a JPEC or a PNG and it can create a gradient from that image. We do this technique when we are testing our repeat patterns in my other courses, but in this course, we will not be discussing bitmap. Where was that? We can keep the radio one. I can also remove one of the points. For example, I selected this purple color. I can also delete it to make things simpler. Let's, for example, change this one, all the colors in here to warmer colors, another new thing that I wanted to show you is that for all those examples we were manipulating with gradients on the fill side. The fill is what fills the inside of our shape. But we can actually also add in the outline, the stroke. I'm just going to add here a standard black stroke line. We can manipulate its width from the stroke studio, and we can add gradients to it. I cannot really imagine where I would use that maybe for lettering because you can also manipulate text objects with gradients. Maybe it will be interesting to use it for some lettering experiments. Personally, I haven't used this one because I rather stick to fill, but I still wanted to show you this option. Then back to the gradient tool, when you select the question mark, you can also see what other options you have. We have, for example, this full circle is selected and it gives us the fill context. We need to activate the line context, this one here. Then by just again dragging a line on this stroke, we can create our gradient. I can also move this first color to the top and the other one on the other side. Now we can choose some cooler colors that will be on the stroke side, for example. Oh, maybe this looks contrasting enough. You can still have all the options to edit your stroke for normal stroke, except that this one is with a gradient. If you would like to bake this stroke and convert it into curves, you can do that too, and this gradient will be preserved. You go to the three dots menu, expand stroke. Let's maybe go to the Move tool to stay neutral. Then you can see that we have this original ellipse shape with its unique grade and with the warm colors that I selected. We also have separately a new shape that was created from this outline. But if we go to the Node tool, we will see this is not just a line anymore. This is actually a new curve that is further editable in the same way as any other filled shape, so to say. Let's go back, bring this, group it. You can, of course, resize it. All the other editing techniques apply, so to say. So to sum it up, there's a lot of similarity between the transparency tool and the gradient tool. Not everyone knows that you can create gradients with the whole rainbow, multiple colors. Remember also, let me, for example, choose this blue color. You just don't have to select a color from your swatches. You can also use this eyedropper tool. You can leave the swatches panel and you can keep editing this color through the sliders. For example, you can change its hue completely. Green looks nice, or you can manipulate its saturation. This is really psychedelic. So all those colors within those gradients, you can also edit them like any other solid color, so to say. Now, how to apply what we learned here to our illustration. So let's maybe remove this square so that we can see better and move back to this original illustration that I created. So here the sky is the limit, and normally, it's very common to start by adding a gradient to the sky to create some interesting effects. So feel free to add in gradients. All over the place. This is your illustration. You can add in a gradient just to the sky to practice, or you can dit the gradient even to all the small details on the cottage. I recommend always to start with the biggest planes of color. So I will add in a gradient to the sky. And then this original illustration, it's not so striking, but actually, if you zoom them properly or if you printed it out, you would see that there's this pink color of the sky that gets a little bit lighter. Here, we also use the Gaussian blur effect, so this white color will stay and it will not be edited if we change the colors on the gradient. I think in this copy of this illustration, I will use a slightly different gradient to have not just the same pink color with different brightness, but maybe different hues as well. Then I will also add a gradient to this snow area in front of the cottage. It's again, exactly the same blue color, except that here it's a little bit darker, here, it's a little bit brighter, and I added in the gradient to the path. To the bushes and to the background trees, and of course, to the mountains. I'm going to switch off through the preview mode, anything else so that I'm not distracted and I will start in adding my gradients. Okay. All those happy experiments, I'm going to group them so that they stay out. I will go to the Layers panel to select the background layer manually because it's lock, so I would not be able to select it because it's locked so that I do not select it and move it around by accident. Alright. We have the background layer. Let's maybe zoom in a little bit. We go to the gradient tool. And then we create a line. It doesn't matter at the beginning what colors you're using, you might actually on purpose, choose contrasting colors. The first circle, you have to click it will maybe have your original color that you have in mind for your sky and the second color just to see what shape this gradient has, I can actually stay some contrasting color that you can adjust later on. I would first recommend that you see what type of a gradient you would like, but I think bitmap no, I think we're just Shop, it lost the color. I think we will just stay. Within this original line color with two finger tap, I'm going to go back and I will keep a linear gradient. I will position it in the middle, more or less at a straight line, and now I will be ready to even though this red looks actually very interesting. But now I can go back to my swatches, maybe to either the winter cottage color palette or to another winter color palette that I have saved. I was thinking actually to use this orange for an interesting effect, but maybe make it a little bit subtle. Oh, I like that. I think I'm going to leave it, but you can, for example, still select the bottom colors. In my case, it's this orange. And it's quite bright in here. So I can leave the swatches. I've got the selected, so I have to make sure that I'm on the right color. And you can, for example, keep it orange, but make it more pastel. Oh, that looks lovely. I always go back to the move tool to deselect the gradient so that I do not keep editing it further. Wow, this is great. I hope you can see that on my camera. So there's this very subtle pastel pink that kind of transitions into this pastel orange. And this white glow, it's not a gradient. It's the gaussian blur. And that's another advantage of doing the Gaussian blur separately. It will not be edited over when I'm using a gradient. Doki now the mountains. From the node tool, I will find my mountains. I'm going, it doesn't matter how but I'm going from top to bottom. My mountains are selected, and then I go to the gradient tool. I think over here I will also draw a line. I have this pastel blue and I'm thinking what to do with the color that is at the bottom. I'm going to keep it as linear as well. Maybe I make it lighter. And maybe I change the hue to a little bit more purple. A little bit more red, something warmer. I have full saturation here and I'm just playing with this slider. Actually, that looks very interesting and it's very, very subtle, but you can create your own effects, basically. You don't have to be super subtle like me. You can create something very contrasting. A depends what style you have. But I really like this because the more this grading goes to the bottom, the more it turns to this new pink, which also goes well again with the overall color palette. I'm going to deselect it, deselect everything. Zoom in and zoom out to see how I like it, and I think I do and I'm going to leave it. Then I'm choosing the trees. It's also good to start from the background because the background is like a canvas for the rest of the elements. Now the trees are more to the foreground and it will be easier for me to do any contrast and color adjustments on those trees because the background is already set. To gradient. I think another line and this time, I actually like what I'm already seeing here. I think I would like maybe to keep the same blue color, but the bottom of those trees will be a little bit darker. Now I would still like to explore this darker color. I have to select it. You can also see that the selection change in the color studio I would like to see, maybe it would look even better if I make it even darker and I think it does. Now, I think I like this whole gradient a lot and I would like to simply copy it to those two bushes that are in the front. If you find the gradients that you like, you can just go to the three dots menu, copy, and then I can go maybe first to this push over here in the front and paste style to copy this gradient. Then you can still see if you would like to change this further. That looks good. The same here, can go back to the gradient tool and then three dots paste style. Maybe do it at an angle. I think I'm going to select this dot here and maybe from HSL sliders. That looks nice. You know what? I'm going to copy it again, so I will overwrite this other gradient that I copied. Then I'm going to go to this other bush. Element and paste. Oh. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. That looks very nice. This is a happy accident. That's how I like teaching my tutorials. I prepare an illustration that I would like to teach so that I can demonstrate, like, all the things that I would like to teach you. But somewhere along the way, this original illustration is altered anyway because I'm having some uh, improvement ideas that are very spontaneous. Actually, I could have also started from this snow area, the background because the background will then change and then I might come back to those bushes to the front to tweak the value again, the contrast. I think it's going to be okay. I'm going to select now this front snow area that looks very messy underneath. Then I will use another gradient tool. I think I'm going to flip it, it should be a little bit darker on this line where we have the cottage. Maybe it's the shadow of the cottage and should be brighter towards the front, but this is a little bit too bright. I will go again to HSL sliders, make it more blue. Then the other blue is a little bit too saturated. I keep switching between those circles until I'm happy. This can be brighter. Maybe this first blue on top, maybe it can be more blue purple, so to say. I'm on this other circle. I actually want to do it the other way around, so I'm going to go back and make sure that I'm selecting the blue that I wanted to edit. And maybe I'll change it to more purple. Now, this actually doesn't look good, but it's good to try things out. So maybe a little bit more green blue. Yeah. I think that looks very good. And now the path, I think the bushes look okay, so I'm going to leave them. Another gradient on the path. Okay, that looks quite nice, especially this blue, but I have to change this one because this one is too saturated. Okay. Then I will select the circle at the bottom and make this a little bit lighter and a little bit more green spontaneously. Then I will also play around with this middle slider here. Maybe like this. Maybe this angle will be more interesting. Pala. Okay. That looks good. Back to the move to deselect, and I think I've got everything. The one last thing that I want to do is to check the contrast. I will go to the navigator menu and next to this vector view mode, there are those three overlapping circles where you can turn everything to gray scale. Just as I thought this fans over here, it should have a different value or those elements on the house because it's getting blurred it melts in and you can only see it. When you change to gray scale. You see? I can go to this color here and maybe make it darker so that the contrast is better and I want to get back to the color and maybe pump up the saturation a little bit. That looks good. Now just checking our layers, I think I can also sort things out, the mountain should be together in one group. Here we have the moon, the snow fall. And then we can also group the entire illustration together. So, guys, this is it. We finished our winter cottage illustration. We used a whole bunch of different vector design tools, and we also played around with the Gaussian blur, with the transparency, and we practiced in adding grading. So we're pretty much as good as done. Now you might want just to keep this illustration in your portfolio. That's why we created it in the RGB color format. But in case you would like to turn it into a poster or a postcard, and you would like to print it out. In the very last video, I will show you how to convert this RGB document into a print friendly document, into the CMYK. 13. From RGB to CMYK: In this video, we will be converting our winter cottage illustration into a print friendly format. So imagine that you would like to print out this winter cottage. Maybe you would like to frame it or turn it into a postcard. The best way to do that is to actually create a copy document so that we do not overwrite this one. When you go back to your live docs, you will also see that your document is not saved for starters. And we have to do that, of course. Actually, I should have done it a right at the beginning, but I forgot. Luckily, everything is saved. You can save it as and you can save it to your Cloud storage or to your internal storage. This is what I do. I'm going to name it as Winter Cottage Winter Cottage illustration. Then I'm going to save it to my licensing folder, which is saved up into my iPad storage. Safe and now also the name of the document changed. Apart from checking whether your document is saved and checking the name, you also see here the information about the document itself. We see here the dimensions, 3,000 504,000 pixels, and you see the little information here that this document is an RGB color format. When you swipe quickly to the left, another sub menu will open, and by choosing this very first symbol, you can create a copy, which will retain the same name, but it will have this word copy. Uh, at the end of the name. This is exactly the same document. If you want to tidy it up, you can also kick everything else out. Like so. So now when we exit the preview mode, there's nothing else in the document, and it can be a little bit lighter. And now we will be changing from RGB to CMYK because CMYK is the printer friendly format. To be honest, whenever I'm working on client work for publishing for children's publishing, I never work in RGB. This was pretty new for me before before I started to work in children's publishing. I rather focus on my social media on licensing, on patterns where RGB was actually completely fine. And there were no printing problems, and a lot of my art was actually meant for screens. So either for my Instagram or for my website. But since I started to work with publishers, the prerequisite for the final files was that everything is in the CMYK color profile right from the start. So if you were creating a new document by clicking New New document, you would be able to adjust the color format right away here instead of RGB. You could, for example, choose CMYK eight, and I always leave this US web coded swap V two because it has from my experience, the best compatibility with the printing outcome that the publishers want. But since we choose RGB, from the start, we have to overwrite this original document and also see how the colors will behave because print friendly colors, the colors in the CMYK format will be normally less saturated, and we have to see what will happen to our final illustration when we convert it from RGB to CMYK. The conversion is super easy and it's actually much more printer and publisher friendly than Procreate. I heard a lot of times, but it's outside of my experience because I'm not using Procreate for illustration work for clients. But I heard a lot that Procreate's CMYK profile is kind of wonky, and you still have to import it to Adobe Photoshop, for example, to tweak the colors because they will be messed up. But I cannot say anything from my own personal experience because I never use Procreate for client work. And then affinity doesn't have any problems. Everything is fine. So another reason to use affinity instead of other software. Converting, this document will be super easy. Hamburger menu, convert document. And here we can choose instead of RGB CMYK, make sure that we have US web coded Swap V two or however I should pronounce it. And then we tick it through, and it's already applied. This entire document now will reflect all the colors in CMYK and not in SRGB. You could, for example, go and export this photo, for example, keep a JPEC share and save this image into your camera roll, basically. But I can already tell you that I can see that the blues are less saturated. But I think for print, it still looks quite good. Then you can go to this original illustration. The copy says CMYK. This change, it gives you a hint, this entire document is in CMYK. We can go back to our original illustration. I can already tell o, the blues are much brighter. It will be great for your portfolio and for computer screens. That's it. And then we can export this one also as JPEG, the same dimensions, share, save your image, and then we can find both of those illustrations exported into our camera roll and try to compare it side by side. Okay, so this is my winter cottage folder. And now I just have to find I think I can make it bigger. Those are the two illustrations, and I don't know if there would be a good way to zoom it in maybe without the side menu, or what you can also do is to take another screenshot. And so this is just to check whether those colors are really different. And now I opened this screenshot and I can kind of compare those two illustrations side by side. I will also include this comparison on a slide so that you can see it better on your computer or on your phone screen. But most of the colors stayed the same except for the blues. So this blue is definitely in RGB color format, the one on the left, and the one on the right is in CMYK and it's a little bit more muted. But that's because, you know, the paints that are used for the print, they are also limited in the real world, so they will not be able to replicate the colors that we can achieve for the screens. Is it a problem? Normally, it's really not a problem. You can still keep tweaking your design so that you can achieve max saturation for your illustration. So I will make sure that I'm again in the CMYK. File, and then the way I would go about it if I wanted, for example, to adjust this blue color. I have to go back to this gradient option to access gradients and if I would like to still try to manipulate this bottom blue color, I select the circle that is at the bottom. I go back to the color studio. But if you have a document in the CMYK color format, I would rather not recommend that you manipulate the HSL sliders, but instead, you go to CMYK sliders. Yeah, this looks a little bit different. And to be very honest with you, at the beginning, I really struggled to switch from my RGB thinking about colors to CMYK thinking about colors if it makes sense. It's standard that you have the sliders for Cyan magenta, yellow and black in here. Black is very straightforward. You will be able to change the brightness. And oftentimes it will happen that your gradient will disappear, so you have to apply it again. And now everything gets messed up again. You can try to win back the same saturation like you had before. From my experience, if you already, that looked nice. If you already converted something to CMYK that was originally in RGB, once you convert it through this menu, convert document, I would not edit it any further because you see that when you start manipulating those CMYK slider, sometimes things get really messy. Unless there's a big color issue, when you convert your RGB document into CMYK, then just let it be and if you already know this is client work for publishing, for example, or it's definitely going to be a postcard. When you create your new document, make sure that you don't start with RGB. But you start with CMYK, and then when you're editing your colors, you have to get used to those new sliders. At the beginning for me personally, it was quite hard, and I couldn't achieve the same effects as I would achieve with the HSL sliders because this was just so easy and I've been using them for years. So it was also years of my habits. But now that I've been working in publishing for a good year now, well, I think I got used to. And I'm getting better and better in preparing my final client work for print, and I'm getting better and better results because I'm getting used to the software that I'm using, and I can anticipate what effects I'm going to get through those sliders better by drawing a lot, by drawing lots and lots of illustrations. This is how you gain practice, and this is how you gain this confidence in using the tool. And then the final basically the tool that you're using is just a medium through which your creativity will flow, and the end result of this creativity will be your illustration. Talent, ideas and concepts, they're one thing. But knowing your software, knowing what your software can do, all the little tricks or how to adjust the colors, I think this is a big half of the success of your final illustration to know your software. That's why I keep creating those new tutorials in affinity because the more you practice, the better you get and the final results that you can then present in your portfolio to your potential clients, they will get better and better. Trust me on that. Now our final winter cottage illustration is complete. Thank you so much, guys, for drawing with me. 14. Final Thoughts: Thank you very much for taking my course and learning Affinity Designer with me. We learned and refreshed a ton of information about using vector Illustration tools and Affinity Designer for the iPad. I would love to see your winter cottages, and I'm really curious to see what you came up with. If you're taking this course on Skillshare, you can share your work in the project gallery, and if you're taking this course on Gum Road, you can share your final art on the social media, for example, on Instagram under the Hashtag Magical Vectors. We also have a dedicated Facebook group for illustrators using Affinity Designer and Adobe Fresco because Fresco also has vector design tools. So you can definitely publish your projects in our Facebook group and ask for a feedback or troubleshoot with us and ask any questions that you might have. If you would like to keep learning further about Affinity Designer, I highly recommend my 6 hours long affinity and Fresco master class where we tackle vector botanical illustration. So it's a really fun project. Or alternatively, you can take my shorter Illustration class about illustrating book covers for children's books. Last course is not specifically just for kidlit artists. It's actually for everyone. It's just a fun project so that we can learn some of the affinity designer vector design tools. Remember that, the more projects you complete an affinity, the more comfortable you will become with the software. And this will translate directly into the quality of your final work. Will also see on my YouTube channel where I'll be sharing more affinity tips and updates, as well as shorter tutorials. And if you prefer the written word and you enjoy reading knowledge articles, I would love to see you over on my Substack block letter. Remember that you can learn with me both on skill share and through my Gum wrote courses. See you in my next class.