Transcripts
1. Geometric Vector Illustration in Affinity Designer: Hi everyone. I'm Liz Kohler Brown. I'm an artist, designer and teacher. Today I want to show you how to create vector-based geometric illustrations on your iPad and Affinity Designer. When you take this class, you'll get all of the vector assets and colors I use in the class, including 33 customizable vector illustrations that you can use for personal or commercial use. First, we'll create a vibrant geometric illustration. Combining simple shapes and bold color. I'll show you how to use the tools in Affinity Designer to perfectly line up your geometric elements so they seamlessly fit together and how to add textures to your vectors so they don't appear flat and dull. We'll look at how to create interesting geometric patterns and how to add text to your composition to create a bold and vibrant lettering design. Next, we'll look at how to create complex geometric shapes using Affinity Designers, precise Transform tools. We'll cover all the math you need to know to get your geometric shapes to be perfectly symmetrical. I'll share with you a practice sheet of geometric shapes that you can use to practice all of the steps for creating any shape at all. Then we'll create a finished composition using a variety of geometric shapes, outlines and patterns. We'll look at how to use the pen tool to create detailed line drawings to complement your geometric shapes. I'll show you some easy tricks for building symmetrical designs and adjusting colors as you work. We'll also look at how to use Advanced Vector Editing tools to create the exact shape that you need, and how to add a smooth gradient to your backgrounds and vectors. Last, we'll create a complex astronomy themed composition combining all the vector editing skills we cover in the class into a detailed illustration. We'll look at how to combine pre-made vector elements and hand-drawn elements to create unique vector illustrations that are easy to customize and use for anything from social media posts to print on demand projects. I'll show you how to create your own vector assets and save them for using in the future. You could use them for anything like selling on Creative Market, or just use them for your own compositions. The amazing thing about this process is, you can create pixel-perfect geometric shapes using Affinity Designers Advanced Editing tools. Affinity is only a few more $ than Procreate and it offers the ability to work with both vectors and raster images. It also has precise transform tools, which makes it perfect for creating geometric illustrations. All you need to take this class is your iPad, a stylus, and the Affinity Designer app. So let's get started.
2. Downloads and Resources: The first thing I want to do is show you how to get all of the downloads and resources that I'll be mentioning throughout the class. You can find a link to get to the downloads page in the project section on Skillshare. You won't find the project section on the Skillshare app though, go to this class in a web browser like Chrome or Safari, and then click on the link. Once you click on the downloads link, you'll find that you need a password to get into that page and I'll show the password on screen right now. Once you get into that page, you'll see that there is a list of downloads just below the image. Any of the links or downloads that I mentioned today, you can find on this page. The first one we're going to take a look at is the geometric illustration Pinterest board. I pulled together a lot of inspiration for this first project. I'm just going to click on this. For this first project, we're going to use some simple geometric shapes and see how to use the tools in Affinity Designer to line things up perfectly. You could choose, for example, a single shape to repeat or you could choose multiple shapes and do a different type of shape on each line. You could also start out with boxes and then fill the boxes with different shapes. Or the same idea with circles. Start with a circle and then cut that up into different shapes. You can see there are a ton of options here for using some simple geometric shapes to create a really interesting composition. I'm also going to bring in some lettering to this piece. You may want to start thinking about a short lettering quote that you could use. Before we get started with this first project, you may want to take a moment to just scan through here and think about some ideas for what composition you'd like to do for this first project. Obviously we don't want to copy any of these people, just use some of the colors or shapes or maybe just tiny little part, maybe you like just one line of this pattern, that could become a whole composition. Once you take a minute to scan through here and think about what shape you'd like to use we can go ahead and get started with pulling together a color palette. I wanted to share with you the color palette that I'll be using today. When you're ready to get that, just go back to the downloads page and you'll see that the second item on that list is the short quotes Pinterest group board. I created a group board that you can view and contribute too, if you'd like to see some simple quotes, just short quotes that you could use in your lettering projects. If you need an idea for your quote, if you want to add a quote to this first composition, you can just click on that link and go to that page to get some ideas and then also click join if you want to contribute to the board as well. The third item on the list is download my color palette. To open that, I'm going to click and hold and then click open in a new tab and you'll see that this takes you to a page for Dropbox. I save all of my files in Dropbox, especially when I'm working in Affinity because vector files don't process well on the iPad. I try to take my vectors directly from Affinity and save them in Dropbox, then it's really easy to use them on the computer or pull them back into Affinity or another program on your iPad when you need them. All of the downloading and saving I'll be doing today is through Dropbox. I really recommend you get an account if you don't already have one. It's free for two gigabytes of storage. It's free to create an account and it's really easy. You can store your artwork there as a backup to your Procreate or Affinity gallery and it's really easy to integrate with all your other devices. You can just jump on your computer and all of your files from your iPad are there. The saving process I'll show you today is all through Dropbox but certainly you could use another storage system if you'd prefer to do that. To get this color palette, I'll click "continue to website" and then you'll see the image here. Next you'll click the three dot menu right here, and then click "Save to my Dropbox." You could also click "Direct download" and then open it in Affinity, that's an option as well. Personally, I like to save things to my Dropbox because I feel like they're much more secure and easy to find later on. I'm not going to click save to my Dropbox because obviously this is already in my Dropbox, but that's what you would do next. Then you can go ahead open up Affinity Designer, and I'll just click the plus symbol and rather than starting a new document, I want to import from cloud. Cloud, are we using Dropbox. I'll click "Import From Cloud" and there's Dropbox right there. One note here, if you just downloaded Dropbox, it may not show up on your files list. You can click "Browse" to make sure you're seeing this file list and then click "Edit" and it'll show you a list of cloud storage options. Just make sure that Dropbox is turned on and then you can find that file wherever you saved it in your Dropbox. Here's my color palette right here. I'll click that one time and that opens it as a new file in Affinity. When you're ready to save this color palette, you can click on the little color dot over here and go to swatches, that little arrow beside swatches. You can see I'm already in a color palette that I've created, but you probably want to make a new one. I'll click the little three hamburger menu right there. Then you want to add an application palette, that means a palette that will show up anytime you're using this application. If you add a document palette, that's just creating a palette for this one image. That's an option if you think you'll never use this palette again. I'll click "Add Application Palette", and then it's by default called unnamed. I'll click on the menu again and click "Rename palette", and then edit that name. Then I'm ready to pull some colors in. I'm going to click and drag on this little eyedropper symbol, and that's going to select that color and you can see it pops up right here. If I click that color, now it shows up in my main color swatch. I can click the menu, "add fill to palette." I'm going to repeat that same process. Click and drag the eyedropper. I've got that pink. Click on it one time to add it as a fill. Add current fill to palette. I'll repeat that process for all of the colors. I accidentally added the same color twice. That's no problem. You can easily delete colors. I'll click on it one time, click and hold and click "delete". Are you sure you want to delete this color? Yes, and it removes it from my palette. As you can imagine, you could repeat the same process with the color palette you found online or a photograph that you took. Any image that you bring into Affinity in this way, you can create some nice color palettes, and you can see I've created some others previously that I just save in this application. Let's go ahead and get started on our first project.
3. Building Shapes: For this first project, we're going to combine some simple geometric shapes into a lettering composition. I'll be using triangles, but you could use any shape here and you could even use multiple shapes or overlay shapes on top of each other. We're going to be working with vectors in all of these projects. One thing I wanted to mention is that if you've never worked with vectors before or you don't even know what a vector is or why you would want to use it, I would recommend you start by checking out my class on Affinity Surface Design because I go deep into what vectors are, how you can use them on your iPad and what are the benefits of using vectors. If you're feeling overwhelmed as we start this first project and start working with vectors, I would recommend going back to that class and watching at least the first few parts where I go over the basics of vectors and how to use all the basic tools of Affinity Designer. The first thing I want to do is create a new document. So I'll click the back button to go to my gallery, and then I'll click the plus symbol to open a new document right here. Then I'm going to change the measurement to pixels, and everything else on this side, I leave as default. RGB color and the iPad type, it reads that automatically. Next I going to choose the pixel dimensions. When I do this in Affinity Designer for geometric pieces, I'm always thinking about the dimensions of my final piece and the individual elements. For example, in my composition, I want to have nine rows from top to bottom and left to right. I want to choose a pixel dimension that's easily divisible by nine, so I'm just going to use 9000 by 9000. I'm also going to change my DPI to 300 because I am going to use some textures which are raster paintbrushes and affinity designer. I do want to keep in mind the DPI because I know I'm going to use some raster elements in this composition. I also like 9000 by 9000 DPI because that tends to work well for a lot of print on demand sites. Next I'll click "Okay" and then I have this document that's exactly 9000 by 9000 pixels, so it'll be really easy for me to create nine rows here using the affinity transform tool. I'm going to start with my first shape and I'll use the shape tool over on the left here. I'll click that once to select the tool and click again to get this menu of shape options. I'll be using the triangle but obviously, you could use any of the shapes here for this composition. So I'll click "Triangle", and then I'll just click and drag, and you can see that I can easily distort the proportions. If you don't want to distort those proportions, put down your finger before you release and it's going to lock the proportions. You can see here if I have it totally squished and then I put my finger down, it fixes that proportion. I'll set my triangle down and it really doesn't matter what size you use here. I'll go ahead and change this to a color that's easy to see by clicking the color palette, clicking swatches, and then choosing one of my bright colors. I know that I want my triangles to be cutting halfway across a square here, so the first thing I'm going to do is rotate so that I have this straight edge on the left and same thing with rotation, I can put one finger down to snap to 90 degrees. Now I want to be sure that this dimension is exactly 1000 because I want nine of these down my page. So I'm going to make sure that's selected and if it's not, you click the move tool and click on it one time or you can go to the layers panel and click on it. I'm going to click the transform tool and you can always click the little question mark here if you're having trouble finding a tool, and then you get all these labels. So I'm clicking "Transform Studio", and then I'm going to change the height, top to bottom here to 1000. First, I want to make sure this lock is on. The lock is going to constrain the proportions. If I just change this to 1000 and don't change the other dimensions, it's just going to become distorted. I'm turning that lock on; it got it's little circle around it, and then on the height, I'm just going to click and type 1000 then. Now this is exactly 1000 by 1000 pixels. Now I want to skew it over here into the corner. To make sure that things snap into corners and align with other objects, you have to turn on this magnetic tool at the bottom. So I'm making sure my magnetic tool is on. I'm just going to move this up to the top and you can see with that magnetic tool on, I get these little alignment bars when I move this into different areas. I want the green this way and the red this way when I get it perfectly into that corner. I can also check it because I've got my transform studio still open, and I want to be sure this is in the right coordinates. So the y-coordinate is 0 up and down, it's straight on top of this left axis, and the x-axis is 1000, so it's counting the very bottom of this piece right here. Another thing you'll notice with these factors is you have to always check the stroke and the fill. The stroke is the pink inner area here and the fill is the sperry outer outline. For these shapes, I'm going to use the same stroke and fill, and what you'll notice is if you don't use a stroke when you try to smush shapes right up against each other in Affinity Designer, you will get a tiny little pixel line, so I always use a stroke. I don't turn the stroke off if I'm trying to get a seamless transition between two vectors. I'll have the same stroke and fill, and then there's this little brush mark right below the Color option, and that's called the Stroke Studio, we'll be using that a lot today. In Stroke Studio, you can adjust the size of the stroke and you can really see that I change my stroke to a different color and then play around with the stroke size. So I'm going to set my stroke to pink and I'll just set it to 0.3 here. It doesn't need to be a thick stroke, it just needs to be a tiny little strokes so these shapes match up perfectly together. I also want to have my colors cut across this way so that I can have one color on this side and one color on this side, so what I'll do is, click the node tool and that's going to allow me to move this node. I'm going to double click on that node, and just drag it down, and again my magnetic tool is going to help me with that to make it perfectly aligned. Now I've got this nice shape and I'm just double-checking that my stroke and fill is pink and that this dimension is perfectly horizontal using the Magnetics tool. Because I'm going to copy all my other shapes from that original shape, I really want to take my time and make sure that shape is perfect. Check it in the transform studio and double-check your magnetics before moving on here.
4. Duplicating and Aligning: So next I want to have the same shape over here. So I'll make sure that shape selected by clicking the Move Tool, click at one time or just select it in the layers panel like that. Then I'll just duplicate it. I'll click the three dot menu and click ''Duplicate''. Because this is a perfect triangle, I can go to my transform studio and just click ''Rotate twice''. Now it's a perfect mirror image of itself. I'm just going to change the color of that for now, so it's really easy to see and I again, I'm changing the stroke and the fill every time. Next, I want to start duplicating the shape all over my Canvas, and then I'll change the colors later. So if I want to duplicate both of these, I need to make sure they're both selected. So I can either go to my Layers Panel, and click the first one, and then swipe right on the second one and you'll see that they both have a slight highlight, when you do that or if I deselect, I can get my move tool, click and drag and you'll see little blue lines appear around everything that's selected. So that makes it really easy selection. So I tend to select that way because it's just so simple to click and drag. Now that it's selected, I'll click ''Duplicate'' in the menu. I want to move this over exactly 1,000 pixels. So rather than doing it by hand, I think it's much easier to just go to the transform studio. Click on your x-axis, click ''Plus 1,000'' and ''Okay''. Moves it over perfectly without having to worry about the Move tool and the magnetic tool or shifting anything. I also want to rotate this because I want each square to be a little bit different here. Now this is a really cool thing that I love about Affinity Designer. You can click duplicate again and it repeats whatever you did last time. Next, I want to duplicate this set again. But I don't just want to click duplicate because one thing about Affinity Designer is that, if you duplicate after doing a certain step, it repeats that same step again. So because I duplicated and rotated, it's remembering that and it's just doing that exact process again. But actually what I want to do is shift this over to the right rather than moving it down. So I'm going to click and drag all four of those to select all four triangles duplicate. So now I've got eight of those total. I want to shift them over not 1,000, but 2,000 pixels. So I'll go to the x-axis plus 2,000 and now I've moved to those over. Now, this is the great thing about Affinity Designer. It can repeat things that you've just done. So whereas that was a problem with our last step, it also is a great thing when it comes to making geometric work. Because let's say for example, I just click duplicate. It duplicates it, and moves it exactly how I move to the last one. So then it's really easy to just fill up your Canvas in that way. Now, I've got this little extra overhanging vector there. That's okay, but I don't really need it, so I'm just going to select and you can see even though it's off the Canvas, I'm still selecting it and I click ''Delete''. So now I have a perfect row of triangles, and I'm going to click and drag deselect everything and then I can just click ''Duplicate''. Now, I want to move down rather than left and right. So on the y-axis, which is up and down, I'll click ''Plus 1,000'' and now you could continue to press ''Delete'' or what I'm going to do is rotate this because I want to get a strange pattern. I don't want it to be quite so predictable, and I also want to change some of these other pieces, so my pattern isn't quite so the same every single time. So you can see I'm just clicking and dragging on a random vector and its highlighting just those two right there. Then I can just rotate that one piece. So I'll do that with a few pieces. Because I want my pattern to be almost like a quilt, where it's not quite so predictable and it has a little bit of an interesting movement to it. So now that has a little bit of variation, I'm going to click and drag everything. Duplicate and then again, I'll move this down, not one but 2,000 pixels, and what we could do here, is just duplicate, duplicate, and then we filled our whole Canvas and I can click and drag on that extra row that showed up here at the bottom and click ''Delete''. Now I can go through and click and drag to rotate some of these, so that my pattern moves around a little bit. One thing you'll notice is you can't select in the interior like this, just messes up your pattern. So what I'll do is click one and then put my finger down and click again to select two. So we could do that with a few pieces. We could click one, click ''Two'', and then how about these two over here, and this two over here, and then rotate everything. So this tool's really helpful, when you need to select a lot of different objects. So I'm going to take just a few minutes here, to rotate some of these, so that my pattern doesn't look quite so predictable. One other nice thing you can do in this program is make mass changes. So let's say I want to change the stroke on all of these vectors, I can just click and drag. Now I'm selecting everything. I can go to my stroke studio, and just bump up the stroke a little bit. So if you're seeing some lines in between your vectors, you can just go ahead and bump up that stroke. If you zoom in here, you can really see if that line is showing up or not. So sometimes I'll just bump up that a tiny bit and it does change the look of your pattern a tiny bit, but I just take those white lines in between. So I always will play around with my stroke a little bit to make sure it's not visible at all.
5. Color and Text: I'm ready to start changing colors, but rather than changing colors on this document, I'm going to consider this a Save As Version. This is like my master document. I can do a 100 different things with this single composition, and now that I've done all this work, I'm going to back out and duplicate this so that we have this master doc to use later if we wanted to. I'll click the "Back" button, and then I'll click the "Three Dot Menu" on that document and click "Duplicate". Now we have this untitled copy. We could click the "Menu" and rename. Let's just call that our Master. If it's called Master, I would never delete it or change it so that's a safe document. I'll click the other one and now I can start playing with color. I want to be sure nothing is selected first, so I'll click the "X" here, which deselects everything, and then I want to start choosing some random spots to add some color too. I'm just going to start with this bright green, and I'm just going to click on some random triangles throughout this piece. All of those are selected now, I can click the "Green" to change the fill, and then I want to be sure I click the "Stroke" and also change the fill on that, so it doesn't have a pink outline. I'll repeat that same process with a few more green triangles, and of course you can add as many colors as you want here. I'm going to go crazy with color and add a ton of different colors, but certainly make this fit your own personal style. Maybe you just want to do 10 different shades of blue. Play around with some different options here and see what works for you. I'm going to continue adding a lot of different colors using this same process over and over. Now that I've edited all my colors, what I always do here is zoom in and double-check the strokes. You'll see some little places where you may have forgotten to change the stroke. That's a great time to just zoom in and look for any little weird lines, and then just click and you can see if the stroke is different from the fill, if it is, just click on that color to update it. I've also found that my stroke is a little bit too big, so I changed that back to 0.3. You can play around with the stroke, whatever size works for you. I just didn't like seeing that little bit of overlapping on the corners of the triangles. I have my stroke at 0.3. Next I'll click the "X" to deselect everything and now I'm going to add some text. You don't have to add text here, you can go straight to the texture that I'm going to do next, but for me, I think this is a perfect canvas to add some lettering. What I do is click the "Text Tool", type my first letter, and then I'm just going to zoom in so I can really see this. I'm going to swipe across this letter to highlight it, and then choose a font and a size. I can change the font by clicking on that number and then just selecting a font, and I'll zoom out a little here so I can really see a sizing. That looks like a good size to fit inside my square. Click the "Move Tool" and put it in the square and just see how that works. I'm happy with that size, so I'll select that letter again and just make sure the font and the sizing is exactly as I want it to be and then change the color. Just like a regular vector, letters have a fill and a stroke. I'm going to set the fill to white and the stroke to white. The nice thing about having a stroke is that you can adjust the boldness of the letter. For example, if I click the "Move Tool" to make sure that vector is selected, I can bump up the stroke to make that C much wider than it originally was and that's going to make it easier to see on this canvas. Once I have my first letter, I just like to duplicate that letter and move it into the other squares. I'm going to write the word create right here, and then I can just go to each letter, highlight it and change the letter. I've already got that font and everything set. You can see double-clicking on it will highlight it really quickly. Now I've got the word create here, and I can still change that font or color or size. You can see if I click on the "Letters Panel", there's the word create one letter after another. If I wanted to change, for example, the thickness or the color, I can click on the first one and then swipe to click on all the others. Then I could use the Move Tool to move it around a little bit, I could edit the stroke if I don't like the thickness. That multiple select feature is really helpful with text. Next I want to do my next word. I'll repeat this same process that I did here on my other rows. Duplicate first and put my letter wherever I want my second mode to be. You'll see if I duplicate again it moves the letter down here because affinity always remembers the last thing you did and it repeats it if you duplicate, so just need to move that up here and then I can duplicate all those letters and then edit them. What I've realized in typing this "Y", is that my text is a little bit too big. As you know, that's no problem we can just select all of the letters and then click and drag to change the size of everything. Make sure the Move Tool is selected. You can see that I can accidentally distort the proportions of this. I want to be sure I put down one finger to keep my proportion study. Once I've got that size, now I just need to go in and make some adjustments with the layout here. One tool that I use a lot is the Transform Tool. What I like is you can click and drag on the "X" and "Y" axis to move things. You can see this C, I'm just using the X and Y-axis to move that around. I find that really helpful when you just want to move something a little bit, and you don't want your hand to be in the way, you want to really see it from far away. That's how I make little tiny adjustments to my letters. I'm happy about lettering, but I can see that some of the triangle colors don't work well with the white text, so what I'm going to do is go through the some of these triangles that are gray especially, and just edit the color so there's a little bit more contrast between the letter and the color. I'm also going to change my text color to a pure white. I want it to stand out just a little bit more, so I'm selecting every single letter of text, clicking on the color studio, and you can choose quick colors, which usually has a white down here, or you can back out of swatches and then just get the pure white at the end of the triangle. Then you can just go back to your swatches to see that color panel again. I've got white as my stroke and again, I want to be sure white is my fill as well. That makes it stand out just a little bit more, and again, I'm going to just remove some of those grays, so I have a little more contrast.
6. Texture Options and Exporting: I'm happy with how this turned out, but I wanted to have a little bit more texture. It's just a flat vector right now, and I think it would be much more interesting if we had maybe a grunge effect or some texture on top of it. I want to create a new layer, so I'm going to go to the very top and click plus pixel layer, because I'm going to be using some pixel brushes from Affinity Designer to add some texture. When you want to do some pixel brushes, which is going to give you a lot more detail than a vector brush, you have to turn on the pixel studio or the pixel persona right up here. Click on that persona, and it'll say changed persona to pixel. Then we get some different tools and I can click on the brush tool. Click on the brush studio right here, and then just scroll over to find a brush I want to use. Unlike in the chalks and pastels option. I like the scatter chalk. So I'm going to click on that scatter chalk and make sure my pink color is set to white. You can see down here all of your brush settings at the bottom. So I'm going to click on that color. Get a pure white. You could also do black might look good on here as well. You can kind of try a few different options. You can also adjust the size right here. I'm just going to click and drag the brush size. When I do that, you can see that the brush size changes right here. I'm going to get a really big brush. Remember I'm on that new pixel layer and I'm just going to click and drag this brush. This brush adds a really subtle texture effect. I'm just going to do a tiny bit of this to just rough up my triangles a little. You'll notice that if you work with a big document like this that I'm using 9,000 by 9,000 pixels. There's a little bit of a lag with the brushes because that's a lot for an iPad to process. You just have to brush stroke and then release and wait for just a second. Next I'm going to grab the round chalk and we're going to bump up that brush size too. This one's much more intense. So I do use it sparingly, but I think it adds a really nice kind of grunge feel to these pieces. I'm going to try not to add too much texture near the text because my text is white, so I don't want to totally crowd my text. Obviously if you end up not liking that texture, you can just do the invisible symbol, click plus new pixel layer and start over. I'm pretty happy with how that texture turned out, so I'm going to leave it as it is. You could also grab your eraser brush, get the same brush or a different brush and come in and just erase a little bit of that texture because sometimes it can be just a bit too intense. I'm happy with how that turned out. So I'm going to leave this piece in my gallery and go back. Now you have the option to start creating a new piece with your original master document. I want to show you one more thing you can do with this composition. I'll click the Menu and click duplicate. Again, I'm not touching my master. I'm going to go to the master copy. I'm going to select all of these squares. So click and drag and select everything. Then I want to make these triangles a quarter of the size that they currently are. So I'll go to my transform studio. Right now this block is 9,000 by 9,000 pixels. I want it to be 4,500 by 4,500, half the size it currently is. So 4500 here. Then if I turned on my block guide, I wouldn't have to do this again, but I forgot. So 4,500 by 4,500 or turn on your lock guide and you only have to type 4,500 one time. We've got that square. Now we can duplicate it. On the x-axis or y-axis, we can type 4,500 to move it across. Let's duplicate it again. You can see it moved it over here because Affinity Designer remembers what you did. Let's just move it over and use the magnetic tool. Then just double-check if you use the magnetic tool, make sure you didn't shift your hand a little bit. So this is the 0 x-axis right here. It's at the y 4,500 axis, which is right in the middle. We can duplicate that one more time. Again, it shifts it down because it's remembering what we did. Put that in place. It says 4,500 by 4,500 for the x and y-axis. So that's perfect. Now we have this beautiful pattern. You might want to rotate some of these so it doesn't look quite so repeated. Again, we can click and drag from the corner and rotate that a couple of times. Let's click and drag from over here and rotate. I'll just do that 11 time. Then you may want to go in if you've got some kind of predictable looking areas, just go in and flip some things. Especially, I think this is necessary at these corners because you can see the straight line across here. What I'll do is grab some of these that look too predictable and flip them around. Maybe change this one as well so it seems to meet with the other border. Just take a step back and then play around with options that don't make those lines quite so obvious. Because this piece is a square, I can easily grab a whole square area and rotate it. So I'm just clicking and dragging from somewhere on the outside. Then just rotate and that gives you a little bit less predictability. I'm happy with how this piece looks, but what I really want to do is a color fade. So I'm going to click and drag and select about a third of this piece and then go to my colors. Let's start it with a pink. Then let's go to a different shade of pink here. I failed to do the stroke. So just double-check you're doing stroke and fill. Again here in the middle, let's do a lighter pink, stroke and fill, and then a gray. Now I want to create a fade effect. I'm going to go into these random spots and start adjusting this color. I'd continue that same process with the pink and same thing with the gray. I won't do this whole piece in front of you because I think you get the idea. But I did the same process with the text and the texture and scattered these pink and gray triangle so we get kind of a fade effect. So that's another option you could do. Or you could stick with the first option that we did and just add some different shapes in, if you want a little more variation here, we've got some circles and some triangles. As you can see, there are so many different things you could do with this process. You can change up your shapes and colors and composition. Of course, you don't have to do this as a square as long as you're getting your math right, you could do a vertical piece that would be nice for print on-demand project for example. The very last thing we need to do is save the image. I've got one of these images open. I'm going to click over here on the left to get this menu. Click export. Then we have to choose the file type. If I'm uploading the print on-demand, I'll choose PNG. You could also do JPEG if you are just using this for Instagram, for example, I tend to always use PNG unless I need a vector file that I'm going to open on my computer, then I would choose SVG. We'll choose PNG for now. Click Share. Then I always like to use Dropbox. So I'm going to click copy to Dropbox. Then it's just going to ask you to choose a folder and we can decide what folder to put this in or create a new folder. I already have a geometric folder. Just click, choose and save. Then it says, I already have something with that filename. So what I can do here is geometric multi-shape. To change the name and click Save. Let's go ahead and move on to our next project.
7. Building Complex Shapes: For the rest of the compositions that we're going to create in this class, we'll be using some complex geometric shapes. I wanted to start out with going over a little bit of the math that you'll need to make your shapes perfect. I created a cheat sheet with all of the numbers that you'll need, so you won't actually have to do any calculations. Also, I want to take a look at a little bit of inspiration, so you have a starting point for some of your geometric line art. You'll see on the class downloads and resources page there is a geometry and art Pinterest boards. I'll click on that, and on this board you'll find a ton of options for interesting shapes that you could use in your compositions. Obviously, you wouldn't want to copy multiple shapes from this same piece. But for example, let's say you really like one of these shapes, you could recreate that and affinity and then use that in an interesting composition. There are so many shapes to choose from and so many composition ideas on this page. Once we take a look at this next section, you'll be able to look at any of these and figure out exactly how to make these infinity designer. You may want to start by just finding one or two shapes here that really interest you. I'm also going give you a bunch of interesting shapes that you can copy. You could feel free to start with those and then maybe references board when you're ready to get some new ideas. When you go back to the downloads and resources page, you'll see the geometric shapes practice sheet. I'll click and hold, open in a new tab. Again, I'll click continue to website three dot menu and save to my Dropbox. This is already in my Dropbox. I'm just going to go straight to affinity. I can click the plus symbol here, import from cloud, find it in your Dropbox wherever it is. The first thing I want to do is lock this layer because I don't accidentally want to mess this layer up. It may be locked by default depending on your settings and affinity, but if not, you can just click lock. I'll clicked the three dot menu here and then make sure lock is red. That prevents you from moving this around the canvas or accidentally drawing on it. Next you'll see that there is a list of divisions here. For all of these pieces we're going to do, we need 360 degrees of the circle to calculate how many steps we need to move this piece. For example, if you wanted, say 10 spokes on a circle, then you would need the measurement of 36. The simple equation here is 360 divided by this first number equals the second number. You can see I skipped a lot of numbers here, because not every number fits into 360 nicely. I only chose numbers that were whole numbers or 0.5 numbers. You could certainly get a little more complex, and use 24.25, for example. But I just stuck with the simple numbers here and put those there as a reference for you. I'm going to start with the most simple shape here. What we want to do is create the circle and then create this spokes perfectly space around it. I'll click the plus symbol, click vector layer, and I'm in my layer studio here. I want to grab this circle. I'll click the rectangle tool, click it again to get the shapes, and I want the ellipse. I'm going to go ahead and choose my stroke, so I'll go to my swatches. Let's choose a red that'll be really easy for you to see. I'll click and drag here. You can see I can distort the proportions of this. I want to put one finger down and make sure I'm getting a perfect circle. Let's set that size, and you can see if I just click and drag again I create another circle. I'll click two fingers to step back and then click the move tool, to move this into the center. Then I want to turn the fill off, I just want a solid outline, I don't want to fill in the center. Then in terms of the stroke, I need to go to my stroke studio and bump up the size a little bit. Then I can click my move tool. If I resize this, I need to have my finger down. Keep in mind here, your shape doesn't have to perfectly match my shape. This is just a guide for you to get started with building these shapes. The next thing I'll do is click the pen tool. That's going to make it really easy for me to draw straight lines. I've got my pen tool. I'm going to click first on this little top area where the circle guide is showing me to click, one time there and then one time above it. That's going to create for me a perfect line. You can see it shows this green line here because I've got the magnetics tool on, it's helping me. If you don't get that line that's green across and you need to have your magnetics tool on. If you go to your layers panel, you'll notice now we've got two different shapes, the ellipse, and they're calling it the curve, but it's a line. We've got these on separate planes so we can make changes to them separately. We just need to make sure that selected rather than the layer that contains both of them, we want to select only the shape. Next, I'm going to make sure the move tool selected, and my line is selected in the layers panel. I want to be able to rotate this around the circle, but you can see if I rotate it right now, it just rotates around itself, and that's not very helpful for this instance. I'll click two fingers to step back. I'm going to click this little tool down here. This is going to change your rotation point. It's just a circle with a cross through it. That moves that point into the middle, and you'll see it show up in the very center of your shape. Then you can just grab that point and bring it down into your circle. When you get to the very middle of your circle, you're going to get this cross magnetic bar to appear. You want to be able to see that before you release. I'll zoom in here so you can really see that little cross that appears. Then you can release. Now when we rotate this bar, it's going to rotate around that shape. I'll click duplicate, and now we've got a rotation that centers around our circle. I'll click two fingers to step back. I want to rotate this perfectly to the degree that it needs to be, to end up with the right amount of space in between the last two. First I'm going to count these. There are 16 bars total. If I go over to my reference sheet, 360 divided by 16 is 22.5. I need to move this piece 22.5 degrees. I'll click and drag. You can see 22.5. You can see the degree as you drag. You just want to make sure you release right on 22.5. If you don't, two fingers to step back and try it again. I'm going to duplicate and do it again 22.5 times two is 45. Now, I can just click duplicate and it's going to repeat this 22.5 degree move every time. Once you get those first couple pieces down, it's really easy to just duplicate. We'll repeat that same process with small complex shapes over here.
8. Dotted Lines and Assets: So let's say you don't just want some simple line, so you want some more interesting dotted lines. So we first do need to start with that circle, and you could just copy this circle you already made by clicking on the "Ellipse" in the layers panel, duplicate, move tool and just scoot it over here. So you just put that in the center of your circle. We're going to use that as a reference and then we'll delete it after. So what I do like to do is keep shapes on different layers. So you can see I drag this new ellipse to a new section here. So this first layer contains that shape, and the shape is made up of all these little parts. I want these parts to act as one. I want them to always be together. So what I'll do is click and drag, to select all of those shapes and you can see them selected in the layers panel, and then I'll just click "Group". So now these act as a group. If I click on them, if I want to make changes, they'll always act together. So I do recommend doing that for a finer shape that you created. Another thing you can do with that shape is go to your Stroke Studio and adjust the size. So let's say you want this to be really thin or really thick, you can make that adjustment. You can also click "Advanced" and play around with some of the options here. So you can see we can change the cap from rounded. I accidentally de-selected that, so let me select it again. We can do rounded edge, a flat edge, we can do an edge that goes beyond the point or before the point. So you can play around with those options. One thing I always turn on here is Scale with Object. So if I don't turn on Scale with Object, and, for example, I want to make this bigger, as I make it bigger, the lines gets smaller. So if I make it really small, it's totally different from my original shape. If I turn on Scale with Object, it changes the stroke based on how big you make the shape. So I always turn that on because I want to preserve my shapes, and that becomes really important when you get a lot of different stroke widths like this piece in. So let's build our second shape. So this is on a new section, and I'll click "Vector Layer" and just drop that ellipse into that Vector Layer, so it's got its whole own section here. Then I can grab my pen tool. Same process, one dot on the top of the circle and one dot on the topmost area where I want this to be. If you feel like you didn't get it right on the first click, just try again. That looked a little bit bent, so now I've got that perfect green line up and down. I'll go to my Stroke Studio and make that thin. I also want it to be dotted rather than solid. So I'm going to click on the dotted line, and if you want square dots, you can leave the cap how we had it, but if not, you just click "Advanced" and turn the cap into rounded and then you get dots. Next we can play around with the dash and the gap. So the gap is the space in between and the dash is the size of the line. So I accidentally clicked and created a new line there. So you can play around with how close you want these dots to each other. I think that looks good. Then I want this dotted line to start up here, not down here. So I'm going to click my Node tool, and I'm just going to shift this up and I'm using the magnetics to keep them in the center of my circle. Now we've got that nice little dotted line at the top. So we're going to repeat the same process that we did with the last circle, but this one's a little more complex because it has outer spokes and inner spokes. So let's do the outer spokes first. So I'm just going to count these. So we've got 24 spokes, which means 15 degrees. So I'll click "Duplicate", move, make sure my rotation point is moved to the very center of my circle, and then I'll move this 15 degrees. Next one will be 30, and then we can just continue to duplicate for the rest of this circle. You can see this isn't perfectly aligned with my original, that's because I didn't line it up perfectly in the beginning. So that's fine, don't worry about that. Just try to get an idea of how the shape is built, rather than trying to make it perfectly match the original. So now I want to do these little lines that are in-between. So that's really easy because I can just copy one, click it, duplicate. I want these to be halfway in between degree 0 and degree 15, so halfway in between those would be 7.5. So I'm going to make sure my rotation point is in the center first. If you ever have trouble getting the center to reference point, you have to click on that shape again so that it knows that you're working with that shape, then go back to your line and try to move it again. So sometimes if the shape was created too many steps before the shape you're trying to reference, the magnetic isn't recognizing it. So just click on the shape, click back on the line and then you're telling the program, these are the two shapes I'm working with right now and I need your help with referencing them. So now I can go, 7.5. I also want this to be shorter than the others. So I'm going to get my Node tool and just move it down a little. Then I just want to make sure I didn't mess up my 7.5 rotation. So I'm just going to double-check that here. Okay, that looks good. Now I can duplicate. So we need 7.5 plus 15 because these are 15 degrees apart, but we've already used 7.5 degrees, so that will be 22.5. Now every time we duplicate, it's just going into the right place automatically. Let's say you create the shape and you really like it and you want to save it. So I'm going to make my ellipse invisible because I don't really need that part of it, and I want to save all of this. The first thing I would always do is group it. So I'm just going to click and drag from the outside of the Canvas, make sure I'm selecting all of those pieces, and click "Group". Again, I'm going to go to the Stroke Studio and click "Scale with Object". If I don't do that, every time I reuse this piece, the dimensions are going to get a little bit distorted. So I always turn that on. Then you can go to your Assets Studio, again, click the question mark if you have trouble finding that, and you can create your own list of assets. I'm going to share some with you as well that you can add to your category or create a new category for the ones that I share with you. So let's click "Add Category", and then "Rename Category", and then we need to add a subcategory. So this could be your assets as the category and then the subcategory, let's rename that to Geometric. See you might have a subcategory for flowers, geometric numbers, whatever you like to use often in your work. So once you have that subcategory created, you can click on the menu and click "Add Asset From Selection". So that's adding that piece to your saved assets and that'll be there when you open any document in affinity. I'm going to click on that and click "Delete" because as you can see, it's hard to see you when it's red so I'm going to go to my Color Studio and make it white. Back to my Asset Studio, Add Asset From Selection, and it's much easier to see when it's white. We'll see the same thing with this asset. Turn it to white, go to our "Assets Studio", "Add Asset From Selection". So now I've got two nice shapes that I can use in any future composition, and I can add to this at anytime.
9. Shape Options: For this next shape, it's a very simple process. We'll start by clicking "Plus New Vector Layer," let's get red as our color, get the ellipse tool again, drag to create that ellipse. You can see my stroke studio is still set to dots, I'm going turn it back to a solid line and make that a little bit thinner. Click the "Move tool" and just put that basically into place. Once you have that lined up the way you'd like, we can start duplicating it as it is. I want to have a few layers here. This has ten sections, so I need to move it 36 degrees, so I'll click ''Duplicate," 36 degrees, and then just continue to duplicate. Next, I'm going to do another one that's slightly shorter, so I'll just click ''Duplicate," make it a little bit shorter. Rather than making it shorter this way, I'm going to turn on the resizing tool, About Center. What About Center does is it resizes things from top to bottom equally, so you can see how that works. If I want to resize something, just a tiny bit and I want it to be equal from top to bottom, I can turn on that About Center option. Next time I want to place this right at in-between zero and 36, which will be 18 degrees. Before duplicating, I'm going to click away from less. One thing you'll find is because Affinity repeats the last thing you did, sometimes that's frustrating because you don't want it to repeat the last thing you did. All you need to do is click away and then click back and now it no longer remembers that last step so you can start fresh. Now, I can click "Duplicate" and move it down here at 36, so 18 plus 36, which is 54 and then I can start duplicating this. Sometimes you'll find that for whatever reason maybe you accidentally clicked away, the duplication doesn't work, so in that case, you just have to do a little math. If the first movement is 15 and the next is 36, you just have to add that up. 15 plus 36 plus 36 plus 36, that will equal your final dimension. What I'll do again is click and drag to select all of those, group them, go to the stroke studio, turn-on scale with object, first turn that into white, go to my Asset Studio and add asset from selection. You can see how this process just makes it really easy to save your work. You can imagine with this piece, we're going to do something similar. We'll start with an ellipse and I'll change that to a red. One thing you'll notice here is that these points are rounded and I want them to be sharp. The easiest way to make those sharp is to click on the "Node tool," double-click on the shape anywhere on that line, and click "Two curves." Two curves means I want this to be a shape that I can edit. I want to be able to change how these points are laid out. So I'll click "Two curves." One thing you may also want to use that's on that option is "Doughnut," so that creates a doughnut of your shape rather than just the outline. I'll click two fingers to step back, today, I'm just going to do two curves. Next, I need to decide what do I want do with these points. I want to make this one sharp, so I'm going to click on that one specifically and click "Sharp" so that it sharpens it up and allows me to make some edits as well. You could also sharpen the bottom one, let's click on that and click "Sharp." Let's say you change your mind, you wish you hadn't sharpened it, you can click "Smooth" to go back. You can also click "Break," which separates that, so you could do something else with those points. I'm going to just click "Back" to step back. I'm happy with both of these being sharp, and so I'm going to click the Move tool. Move my rotation point to the very center here, and then again, I'm going to count how many pedals I need, so we've got 24 pedals total. Before I do that, I want to make this pedal a little bit thicker but I don't want to grab one side and then grab the other because it's not going to be perfectly symmetrical. I want to make sure About Center is on so that if I do something to the left, it's mirrored on the right. So just poke that up a little bit and then I'll reference my chart, I want 24 petals, so I need to move them 15 degrees around the circle. Duplicate 15 degrees and now every time I duplicate, I'll get that exact rotation. For this last piece, we're going to use a combination of pre-made shapes and shapes that I've created for you. First I want to share with you the shapes that I created. We can go back to the downloads page and click, "Download My Vector Assets." Click and hold, open in a new tab, continue to the website, save to my Dropbox. Back to the gallery, plus import from Cloud and then geometric assets by me. One note here, usually you can save assets, you can export them, you could save them in Dropbox. With the new affinity update, there's a problem with that feature, so I've already contacted them and they're working on it. So that may work later on but right now that function isn't working. We're going to just copy the vectors from this document that I created. Once that file opens, you'll see all of the vectors that I'm sharing with you are on this document. For this piece we're going to be using this hexagon. What you can do is either go to the menu and click on it or just get the Move tool and click on it, then you can save it as an asset. For example, I'll go to my category where I'm saving all my geometric shapes and then I'll click "Add Asset From Selection." I've done that with all of these already. Any of the assets of mine here that you want to use, you can add those to your collection and feel free to use those in any of your compositions. Back on this page, what I'll do is use that asset, click on it one time and click "Insert," put it into place, choose my color, change my stroke. Now that I've got that into place, I can duplicate it, turn on About Center and change the scale. I want to be sure I'm putting one finger down so I don't distort the proportions of the shape. I'd like that shape, I want to do one more that's larger, so I'll click duplicate, make it a little bigger and now I have three layers of that red. Around that let's do another shape, that's a circle, putting down one finger to keep the circle perfect. I'm putting this in place and I'm also going to make sure magnetics is on, I've got my move tool and I'm centering it with my hexagon. You can see I get that plus symbol green and red to make sure that I'm putting that in the right place. Making sure About Center is on, I want to make this a tiny bit smaller so it touches just the edge of my hexagon and I'll duplicate and create another circle. You can see, there's not a real system to this, I'm just creating shapes, duplicating them and using the About Center to make sure I'm always working out from the middle. Let's say you want to have some of these outer shapes, we can create a circle here, use the Move tool with magnetics to make sure this is in the very center, I'm getting that green and red line. Again, I want to make this node sharp, so I get the node tool, click on that line, two curves, click on that node and make it sharp. I could drag that down a little bit to make it a little shorter or you can just leave it tall like that, and now I am sure you can guess what we'll do next. We would just duplicate and rotate around based on how many points there are. Then I would do the exact same thing with the triangles, duplicate and move those around. Before I duplicate this one now, I've got this inner circle that I want to make. I'll click "Duplicate" on that item, click the "Move tool," make sure About Center is on and just put that right in the middle. Now I can select both of these, duplicate them, click the Move tool and move my center point into the middle of my hexagon and move this around the canvas. It looks like I failed to select both of those, but you get the idea here, we create our shapes and then we distribute them around the circle. You can imagine how you would create a shape like this then. We will start by creating these points, making it sharp using the node tool and then we would just create this ellipse with a much smaller stroke. If you can just find one of these ellipses to copy, then you can repeat the rest. I'm using one finger down to make this perfectly up and down, I've got About Center on so I can make this a little bit smaller, and then we'll just rotate that 7.5 degrees around the canvas and then duplicate to repeat that action. Now that you understand how to build these shapes, how to align objects, and how to save and use assets, let's go ahead and create our first composition.
10. Creating a Central Image: For this next composition, we're going to start with a simple line drawing in the center and then surrounded by some symmetrical geometric shapes. I recommend you start out with some shape in the center that you're interested in. It could be an eye, a hand, a star, a pyramid, really anything at all that is an interesting shape that fits your personal style, and then we'll use some of the assets we've already created and create some new assets as well, just to surround and decorate the central image. The first thing I'll do is create a new document. Click the "Plus" symbol, New Document, changing this to pixels, and 3,000 pixels wide by 5,000 pixels tall. You could work in any dimension here, I find this is a nice dimension for print on demand projects. I like to display my work online within a frame, so I like to use this size because it makes the work look more professional to have it within a nice frame and even in a mockup. I show my whole process for creating these mockups in my class on society 6, how to sell your work and make mockups. If you'd like to do this, checkout that class. But for today, I just wanted to tell you why I'm choosing this specific size. So I'll click "Okay" to open that new document, and I'll click the "Rectangle" tool because I want to start with the background. I'll just click and drag over this whole piece to create the background, and as long as you have your magnetics tool on, if you click the "Move" tool, the magnetics will help you fit this perfectly to the canvas. Again, you can always check. You've got that rectangle selected, click the "Transform studio", and make sure it's the correct dimensions and that it's at the zero on the x-axis and at zero on the y-axis as well. Next thing I'm going to choose a color for that background, and I want to be sure that I'm setting the stroke and fill for the same color, or you can just turn off your stroke. In this case, you don't really need an outline. I tend to just always keep my stroke and fill the same rather than worrying about turning one on or off. Next thing we're going to go to the layers panel, and I want to lock this layer so you don't accidentally move it around. I'm going to click the three dot menu, turn on lock so that shows red, and then go back to my layers panel. I'll click the "Plus" symbol to create a new vector layer, and this is where I will create my first drawing. I'm going to start with the shape tool to create this eye, and I'm going to grab the ellipse, just like we use to create our shapes. I'll start with thinking about what's the general shape I want this eye to be? Once I set that, I can get my node tool, double-click on my shape, two curves, and then click on a node and make it sharp, and same thing on the other side, then you get this nice symmetrical eye. It doesn't have to be symmetrical, you could adjust that node a little bit, but for this piece, I'm going to stick with this symmetrical shape. Next I want to have the outer edge of the iris. Again, I'll get same tool, create my circle, click the "Move" tool. I'm using magnetics to get that perfectly in place, and then we can decide here, turn on about center, so we can resize this evenly. Do we want it to touch the edge or maybe be a little bit smaller? I'm going to have it touching the edge on this one. Next I'll click "Duplicate" and make that a little bit smaller using one finger down, decide how big I want my pupil. Then I'm going to go to the fill and make sure I'm using that same color. If you realize you aren't using the right color or you want to change your colors, you can just drag, deselect everything, and then click on the color you want to use. I'm going to use this charcoal gray color. Next I want to have some just simple lines below this eye, so I'm clicking on the "Pen" tool, click one time over here, and then drag. Again, I go deeper into the pen tool in my service design class. So if you're a little overwhelmed with creating the shapes, check that out first. If you're not happy with how that shape ended up, you can click the "Move" tool and move it around, make some adjustments. I'm happy like that. I want to have the same shape on the top, so I'm just going to click "Duplicate", flip it using the transform tool, flip function there, and then move that up, and I'm going to let it be a little further away from the eye on that part, and then I want to use that shape to have some eyelash shapes here. What I'll do is just click with the pen tool and click again, that's one eyelash. Now, if I click again, I'm creating a line that's attached to that, but I don't want to do that, I want to create a new line over here. So I'm going to double-click on that final node that I created, and that deselects it. You'll see if I double-click it again, it's blue. Blue means active. It means if you click somewhere else, it's going to continue that existing line. White means not active. If you click somewhere else, it's going to start a new line. Double-check to make sure your node is in white before clicking for the second time. I'm over here, double-click, and what you can do is click once, double-click, and then release. You don't have to click three times. Double-click, click, double-click. That's just a quick way to create the shapes. Now, let's say you don't like them being different sizes, some are longer than others. What you could do rather than creating a new line each time is just duplicate that same line over and over. Zoom out, make sure you're happy with that width, and then duplicate, move it over, and rotate it. I'll just repeat that same process with all the eyelashes. Sometimes it's easier to turn off magnetics, like in this case, I'm not trying to do things to snap to a certain point, so the magnetics isn't really helpful for me. It's actually annoying because it's trying to snap to different places that I don't want it to snap to. That's one thing to think about as you are working on these, feel free to turn off magnetics for a while if you don't need it. One last thing I want to add to this is some dots. Sometimes I'd just like to add dots to create some visual interest around the piece, and these don't have to be representational. They're just simple dots. Again, as I use the Ellipse tool, I put down one finger to create a perfect dot. One thing I like to do after I create a lot of elements is group them. All of these dots function together. I want them to all be the same size. They're all the same category, so that's why I would group them. I just want to tell you a little bit about why I think about grouping and not grouping objects. One nice thing about grouping these in particular, I've gotten them all selected and I'm just going to click "Group", is they all have a stroke. Let's say, I realize all of a sudden I made these dots too big, I don't like how these look. I can go to my Stroke panel with this group selected, and I can make them bigger, I can make them smaller. You have a lot more flexibility when you group things correctly as you work. I try to think about grouping as I'm working rather than waiting until the end because it is hard to have to go through and select everything at the end. You can also have groups within groups. I've got my dots group, but I also want this whole eye and dot shape to be a group. I'm going to click on that layer that contains all of these elements or just drag to select them all and click "Group". Now, this is a group, and the dots are group, and you could group the other things. Typically what I like to group is, like if all of the strokes are one color, I'll group those, then if I think, I want to change the color of the strokes, then I can do that. Just something to consider as you think about grouping and creating these shapes.
11. Symmetry and Balance: Next thing I'm going to click the move tool turn-on magnetics because I'm ready to start centering things. Turn on about center and remember we turned on in the stroke panel under advanced scale with object. If we don't turn that on here, you can see how things just get totally changed. If I resize this to be really small, it looks terrible. It's totally ruined the layout of my vector, if I click two fingers to step back, I can turn on scale with object and then my vector never changes the size of the lines in proportion to the size of the vector never changes. Now that I've got that, eye down, I'm ready to start adding some things to decorate it. I'm just going to go to my vector assets because I've already created some shapes that I want to use. Partly in the last section that we did and partly before this class. You may want to go ahead and create some shapes or feel free to just use mine as you're playing around with this process. I'm going to grab a shape here, click insert and then I'm going to change the stroke to black or charcoal gray. Make sure about center is on and make this fit around my eye nicely. Okay, I'm happy with that, but I think the stroke is a little bit thick, so I'm going to reduce the stroke a little. Then I want to start adding some interesting decoration up here. The first thing I'll add is a triangle, I'll go to the shape tool, click triangle, click and drag and we can put our finger down to get a perfect triangle or you can just let it be a triangle that's not perfect. I'm going to let it be a little wider than it is tall. Click the move tool to get that perfectly in the center and aligned on top of that inner circle that I just created. I think I'll make that a little bit smaller so we have a lot of room for decoration on the top. You can see at this point, I'm just going to play around with adding different elements in a few different methods, you could do triangles here, you could do circles, whatever works for your personal style and the style of the piece. I'm going to let that triangle be mustard. Then I want to have another triangle on each side of it here, let's go ahead and duplicate that and as I'm turning it, I'm putting down one finger to get it perfectly horizontal. I'm going to change the color of that to pink. Now I want to have another triangle that's in the exact place on the opposite side of the canvas, first I'll click duplicate and if it repeats the last thing you did and that's not what you want, of course, step back, click on something else, go back to that shape, and then click duplicate. Now we have a duplicate right above our original triangle. I've got that triangle selected. I'm going to swipe right on the background layer, I've got both of those layers selected. I'll go to the transform studio and click flip horizontal, it's using the shape of the background to know how to orient the second triangle. So you can see that it's perfectly symmetrical now. Anytime I do something that I want to be the same on the left and right, I'm going to do that same process. I want to add some little arrows that are pointing up across this piece here. I'm going to go to my asset studio, I've already created an arrow, but of course you could make an arrow using some reference that you found online or something you drew by hand or just feel free to use mine. I'm going to put this at a perfectly 45-degree angle, I think these triangles are a little bit too close, I'm just going to delete one, move this one over here, and then redo that process. Duplicate it, swipe right on my rectangle, go to the transform studio and flip it so that gives a little bit more space for me to do some interesting things with these triangles. Let's click on that arrow, duplicate it and we could flip that horizontally, but then it's not going to be perfectly aligned on our canvas. Again, I'm going to get my rectangle, swipe right on the rectangle layer, which is my background, and flip horizontally. Now this is equally spaced between the left and right sides of the canvas. I'm also going to add a little circle up here again, I'm using magnetics to get that perfectly in the center and I want it to be the same width as my arrow so I'll click my arrow and go to my stroke studio. My arrow is 4.5 pixels wide and you can also just click on that number of points for your stroke studio and click Enter so that will adjust the size of the stroke. We can do those one at a time like I just did or you can select them all in the layers menu. I'd like to zoom out to do this so you can really see the whole composition and then just play around with the width of all of these at the same time. I'm happy with how that turned out, but I feel like it's a little large, it's taking all of the power away from the eye. I'm going to click the move tool, make sure about center is on and just resize this whole thing a little bit with one finger down. This is something you can do as you work. Adjust elements to make sure things are lined up the way that you want them to be. Of course, there's no perfect way to line these up, but it is a good practice to zoom out and see if everything looks balanced and even. Next, I want to add a little bit more to these triangles. I'm going to grab the triangle shape tool and draw a triangle over this existing one and get it to match that shape. It doesn't have to be perfect here, if you wanted it to perfectly match that shape, then you could just duplicate the shape you already created and that would be the exact proportions. But I'm happy with just adjusting this a little bit. Then I want another shape just like that inside it. First, I'm going to set the stroke to be a little bit thinner. Duplicate that shape, make sure about center's on, and then make another triangle just a little bit inside that one. Then I can duplicate that action and get a few of those. It gives it an interesting effect too, because they get a little bit closer as they move. So you can go as far as you want with that.I'm just going to do a few, I'm going to select all of those in the layers panel click "Duplicate" rotate it, put one finger down to get that 90 degree angle, and then drop it onto my pink triangle. So you can see how just by duplicating, you can add a lot of decoration to your piece without doing a ton of extra work. I'll click duplicate and you can see it puts it up here. I'm just going to slide it into place. Again, what we could've done is use the background to perfectly flip that, but honestly, I don't worry about every little thing being perfectly symmetrical. I think it gives it a handmade look if it's not totally perfect. While you could calculate every single angle and pixel dimension to be perfect, it doesn't have to be, there can be some looseness to it as well. Now that I'm happy with that, I'm just going to select all of that stuff. The triangles, the decoration, the arrows. Click "Duplicate" and before clicking anything else, I'm going to swipe right on my background layer, go to my transform studio and click "Flip vertical" so now I have that exact drawing right there. I could repeat that same process with some more assets. I'm going to insert some arrows here, and I'm going to duplicate them so that I've got two of those. Then with both of those selected, I can click duplicate, go down to my background layer, swipe right, and flip it horizontally. I could also flip that vertically, I like one arrow going this way and one going that way. I'm also going to add some arrows on the sides that will be just a little highlight on the edge. I did the same thing with the arrow direction, but now I feel like there's too many things pointing down, so I'm going to reverse these arrows, so now we have on this side pointing down and up and this side pointing up and down. That's something I think about a lot, I don't want to have too many directional things pointing on the same direction because it makes the viewers eye go in that direction which you may or may not want. Let's add a couple more decorative elements here to the top. I'm going to start with a triangle, making sure that's in the center, and setting the color. Then I'll duplicate that triangle and turn off the fill, turn on the stroke with a charcoal black. I've got about center selected, so it's measuring straight from the center of the triangle. Am going to reduce the stroke size a little bit, and then I really liked how these triangles highlighted the inside, so I'm going to repeat that same thing here. I'll duplicate that triangle,turn off the fill, and I'm just going to turn the stroke to be the same color as the background, and then make that a little bit thinner, and I'll repeat that same process.You may have to play around with the order of things, so I don't like that this bar is above all of the white accents, so I'm just going to grab this triangle and drag it in the layers panel below those other layers and then the white triangle show up on top of the outline. One last thing I'll add just to get rid of some of this blank space is a little bit of dotted lines. I'll get my Pen tool, click, and then click again somewhere else. Let's turn this into a charcoal colored stroke, get the dotted line, and just play around here with the size of this and how big the gaps should be. I'm going to zoom out so we can really see how this will look in a zoomed out view. I'm happy with that so once you're happy with how it looks, you can go back to your pen tool, make sure that line's not selected, make sure you're getting a white node instead of a blue node. Click once, and then let's click again down here. Double-click that "Blue node" so I'm just making some interesting shapes to just highlight that little area down there so it doesn't just look like a dead space. I'm happy with how that turned out, so I'm just going to select all of those and group them because they're obviously a unit that works together. Then I can duplicate, find my background layer swipe right, and flip horizontal. Then we can select both of those in the background layer, duplicate and flip horizontal. Now we've got the same exact shapes up there and I want to do the same with these triangles. You can just Click and Drag to get all of those triangle selected, duplicate, swipe right on your rectangle and flip horizontal to move it up here. At this point you can just start making some adjustments, I wish, for example, this was a little bit thicker or let's say you wish two things were different, so like these arrows on the side, I think they're a little bit too thick, so I'm going to put down one finger while I select all of these, and then just shorten them a little bit so they're not taking up quite so much space on the Canvas and maybe even change the stroke width a little bit. Then we could even maybe move the arrows in a tiny bit, I like them spaced out like that though. You get the idea, play around with making adjustments, maybe add in some more decoration and the only way you know if you go too far is if you try it, and if you think it looks like you've gone too far, then go back, and you can always go to your layers panel or just click on an element and start making some adjustments. Maybe add some color into the center. We could have that eye be pink, so it's highlighted a little more or we could start totally playing around with the color. We could select multiple objects and change the color a little bit.
12. Revealing Textures: So I think you can see how you can really play around with these elements and make a lot of interesting adjustments to change what parts of the composition are getting the most focus. One more thing I wanted to show you with this process is how you can use these shapes to reveal a texture. I'll go back to my Gallery and duplicate this image by just clicking on the "Menu" and clicking "Duplicate". Then I can "Open" that duplicate and I want to change all of these pieces to the same color. I'm just going to "Drag" to select everything and I want to select everything except for the Background Layer. Then I'll click "Group". I've got everything except for the Background layer down here which is locked all on the same group. Next I'm going to "Insert" an Image. I'll click the "plus symbol", click "Pixel layer" and I'm going to "Insert" a Texture. I have some textures on my iPad so I'll click "Place image", "Import from photos" so you could download something and put it in your photos. I have a ton of metallic from my Metallic's class so if you want to pick those up, you can go see my Metallic's class and get all of the textures that I have here. I'm just going to "Grab" one of the textures here that I like and then you "Click" and "Drag" to place the photo. I'm going to place this on the canvas and scoot it over some more of the bright spot is showing. Then I'm going to "Drag" the Image below the Group. I've got the Group on top, then the Glitter layer after that, then the Background layer below everything. On my Group layer, I'm going to click on the "Color panel" and change it to white. One thing that you have to do with some of these elements is changed them individually. For example, things with a fill are going to be white. I'll click on that one time and you can see this messed up some of my images like my arrow. What I need to do is go to that arrow by "Double-clicking" on it. Then also select my other arrow by clicking on it. Then I need to turn the Stroke "Off" for those and turn the Fill "On". Usually what I do is just Select everything, make the Fill white, make the Stroke wide, and then go through and individually fix things that are wrong. It will take just a minute to do that. For example, I'll go to my eye, turn off the Fill there and I'm "Double-clicking" to select these. Once something is in a group, you have to "Double-click" to select it. You can see I turned off the Fill on all of those so now I can see my eye shape perfectly. I'll repeat the same process with anything that should not have a fill. Now everything is white that's on that Grouped layer. So I'm going to click on that "Group", click on the "Menu" beside the three dot Menu and click "Rasterize to Mask". What that does is it turns that layer into a mask and a mask reveals whatever is beneath it. Now you can see the Glitter layer is still there but we can only see the parts of it that we're white on our original layer. Now what we could do is go ahead and change the color of our background. So I'll click on the "Background layer" and on the Fill, I can start playing around with the color. But before I do that, what I need to do is "Group" my Glitter layer and my Mask layer. Right now, those layers are masking my Background but I want my Background to be a whole separate issue. So I'm going to select my mask, select the Glitter layer and click "Group". That makes that whole masking situation and its own group separate from everything else in the document. Now we can start playing around with different colors for the background. We could do a turquoise, a gray, a green, I really like this peach. So these are all colors from the Color palette I shared with you. That's just one more thing you can play around with adding any kind of texture beneath one of these compositions. Let's go ahead and move on to creating a slightly more complex geometric shape.
13. Building With Assets: For this next project, I'll mostly be using my assets that I've already created, because I want to show you how quickly you can create a composition when you create and save your assets in this way. Then we'll be adding a little bit of a gradient to the background to give some interesting color change to bump up the illustration. Then we'll also be playing around with some Boolean operations. The Boolean operations help you change your vector by cropping it or cutting it in a specific way so that you can get the exact vector shape that you need. I'll start by creating a new document, and I'm going to work again in pixels at the same size we used last time, 3,000 by 5,000 pixels at 300 DPI. Again, I'll start with a background rectangular tool. Drag that into place and choose a color. Then use magnetics to size that background to the exact canvas size. Then I always like to lock my background image. I'll click on that "little three dot menu." Right up here, and then click lock, and then new vector layer. I'm going to start by using the eye that I created in the last project and just throw that into the center. One thing you'll notice about the assets that I create is, I group the fills and strokes separately so that you can easily change the colors. I labeled the bottom layer stroke. Then the top layer is called fill. Then you'll just click fill, choose the color, and then it gets filled with that black. I'm also going to double-click on the inner part of the eye and change that to a gold. I'm going to use color sparingly in this piece, but I do want to add a little bit of color to some of these elements. Next, I'll add another asset. It's going to be one of these little radio pieces that I created. Again, I'm only changing the stroke on this one and making sure that's in the very center using magnetics. I'll turn on about center and make that a little bit smaller. I'm going to select everything just by clicking and dragging and just making everything a little bit smaller. I think it just looks nice to be tiny bit smaller on the canvas there.
14. Boolean Operations: Next I'm going to create a ring. Sometimes I just like to add a ring around everything. I'll turn off the fill and make the stroke a little bit thicker. Get my move tool and use magnetic-s to put that ring in the center. One finger down to constrain proportions. I'm going to grab another asset. You can see how saving these assets can be really fun because you can sit and make a bunch of assets all at once and just think about creating those shapes, and then later you can come in and see what you could do with them. Maybe some interesting shapes, put two assets together that you wouldn't necessarily have thought to go together. Sometimes you can make some really interesting discoveries that way. I want another ring, so I'm just going to duplicate that ring I have already created and bring it out here. I want to add some moon shapes around this piece. The first thing I'll do is create one little moon, just a circle. I'm going to put that using the move tool right in the very center top of that circle. What I want this moon to have is half full and half empty. I need to cut this moon up a little bit. What I'm going to do is get another shape and I'll grab the rectangle tool. Just so I have something to cut the shape and half with. I'm going to make the rectangle gold so you can really see it. I'll click the Move tool and just scooted over so its very center of my circle. I'm going to turn the stroke off, so that way it's cutting perfectly into the center of my circle. I've got one circle on top of a rectangle, cutting it in half. I want to select both of those, so I'm selecting my rectangle and my ellipse. I'm going to go over here to the menu. This is the three dot menu and I'm going to click divide. Divide cuts vectors up based on where they intersect. You'll see if I click divide, now I have a few different parts. I've got this part which I can take away and press delete. I've got this part which is a half circle, and then I've got this part which is another half circle. With this first half circle, I'm going to click duplicate and give it a stroke. Now I have a half circle and an outline. I can turn off the stroke on this one, for example. I could select them all and reduce the stroke size a little bit, so it really contrasts with the outline we've created. Then I'm going change that field to mustard yellow to match that in her line. Now that I've created that shape, I can highlight it all, go to my layers menu and group it. I want those to function as one group and always stay together. Now I'll duplicate that item. I'm just going to repeat these shapes around my circle. I just think these look interesting around the circle. I use my magnetic guides to help me place these right in the center. You may get some strange areas like, I don't like this little sliver that's showing up, so I'm going to go to this part of my group and I'm double-clicking on that stroke, then I can just fill that with the background color so we don't get that weird little sliver showing up. Sometimes you have to just play around with the stroke and fill to get things to line up the way that you want them to. I want to duplicate these again so that they're in between these four spots, so I'm going to select all four of these groups in the layer menu. Click duplicate, and then I can just rotate these. I'm sure you can guess here 45 degrees. Just like we made our previous pieces, we need to work with that multiple of 360, and in this case it's going to be 45. If you don't like how these are turned at this point, we can easily adjust that by just clicking on each one and then using one finger down to constrain that movement. I think I need to just fill this with green so that there isn't that weird overlap with the ring, but you may like that overlap, so it isn't necessary to add a fill or something like this. Unless you just don't want to see the part like me. I really like how these moons turned out, so I'm going to go ahead and do a kind of mirrored version of these on the outer rim. The first thing I'll do is just select all of them, then I'll click duplicate. Make sure about center is on, and bring these out a little bit. Putting down one finger to constrain proportions. While I do like these circles, I want them to be different on the inside and outside, so I'm going to do something different with this one. I think the first thing I'll do is merge all of these shapes into one.To do that, I'm going to select all the parts of this shape and click add. That just returns it to be like it's original shape, the circle. I'm going to give it that gray stroke and gray feel, and I want to have a half-moon side coming in here. I'll duplicate this circle and let me turn it into gold so you can really see it here. I'm just going to move it until it makes the kind of half-moon shape I want. I'm just looking at this gray area to see how do I this moon to be shaped? Do I want it to be like this, or I can make it a little smaller so that it's really curved? You could do anything here, it just depends on what shape you want to go with. Again, you can always use your magnetic-s to make sure that it's perfectly aligned. I'm going to stick with that, I want this kind of curved moon shape to appear here. I'm selecting that gold circle, and I'm selecting the gray circle too and just like we did before, the three dot menu divide. Now we've got a few different parts. We've got this inner shape. We've got this shape and enter moon shape, so what I need is those two shapes and then this one I could delete, or this may end up working somewhere. I might just drag it somewhere and leave it there, or you can just go ahead and make it invisible so it's not in your way. Now I want to show this half-moon shape, so I'm going to do a fill of gold, and then on this piece, I'm going to do a solid. Actually, let's turn that fill off so we have that nice moon crescent shape that's really visible. I'm happy with how that turned out and I'm just going to repeat it in these other four areas here. You can see that the magnetic tool helped me perfectly move that into place here below this existing piece, and I can just delete that one now. I'm happy with this, but I want the outer edge to have a little bit more of an emphasis, and I also want to change some of these so that they don't look so much like the inner moons. I'm going to grab another asset and it's actually going to be the same asset that we used here, but I'm going to make some changes to it so it's a little bit different this time. First I'm going to really reduce the width of the stroke, and then I'm going to change the stroke color. Make sure about centers on, and I want to have this perfectly line up with my moons. I'm happy with that, but I don't like how some of these overlap with my moons, so I'm just going to double-click on the pieces that I want to delete and then use my other finger down here to just delete those as we go. I think this needs just a couple more little things to finish this piece off. I'm going to grab the pen tool and do some nice little dotted lines here. Go to my stroke Studio, click the dots, and then play around with the dashes and gaps and stroke size. They always zoom out when I do this because sometimes something looks really good close up and then you zoom out, and it just doesn't really make sense with the composition. I always take a minute to zoom out and check everything. I want the same line on the opposite side, so I'll click duplicate, then I'll select my rectangle. Click the transform studio and flip horizontal. You have to make sure the move tool is selected when you do that. I like those, so I'm going to go ahead and duplicate that again and flip vertically. I think I'll add some more lines here as well. Same processes before one line, and since my dots are already set to the right size, they'll just automatically match those previous dots. As you can imagine here, we could keep going with this. We could add a lot more decoration and make this really packed, or you can just keep it really simple like it is, it's totally up to you here. One thing I've noticed is that my circle isn't quite centered horizontally because these little lines have showed me they're overlapping here. What I'm going to do is click and drag to select all of that center stuff, and make sure that's perfectly aligned with the very center of the canvas and also make it a tiny bit smaller. We've got just a little more breathing room there.
15. Adding Gradients: The very last thing I want to do is go to my rectangle background layer and add a little bit of radiations. Flat vector shape is so common, you see these everywhere. Sometimes it's nice data, a little bit of texture or gradient, or some interesting background. I'm going to click this tool over here, which is called the Fill Tool and it's right here below the Pen Tool and it's called the Fill Tool, but it's really the Gradient Tool. What we do with this tool is we click and drag and there are these two little points that appear when you click and drag. The top point is the brightest, the bottom is the darkest. We can change these two colors by just clicking on one. I'll click on that color and I'm going to change that to, let's go to our color palette and get a darker green. Then I'll click on my top circle and change it to a white. Then we have a really extreme color change, I can also change that to a totally different color. You can really play around here with a lot of different options when it comes to the color variation. Another thing you can change is this little center point that you'll see in the very middle. You can click and drag it to change how the gradient is spaced across the Canvas. You can also move these dots. Let's say you want it to be gradient top to bottom. You'd put the dots top and bottom or maybe left and right. If you've got some of the solid circles that don't really work well on this gradient background, just double-click. Make sure you've got the move tool selected. Double-click, and then let's give it no fill. Then we're just revealing that nice gradient color. I'll repeat that on all of these pieces that I gave a fill to. Then all of my vector shapes are transparent except for the yellow and we've got this nice fading that comes into the background. This is another one that would be perfect for print-on-demand project. You could do something about moon phases, astrology. You could do something that is related to religion or scientific principle or constellations, really choose any shape here that works for your personal style and you could maybe even write a little bit about the background of the piece that might be interesting for your viewers. Let's go ahead and move on to a slightly more complex project.
16. Building on an Axis: For this next project will be combining all of the steps that we've learned in the previous lessons and adding in a little bit more complexity and some layering. I'll also be using some shapes from sacred geometry. You can find sacred geometry charts online and you'll find that there are all types and meanings assigned to the shapes. If you're interested in that, you could start by creating some of those as the central part of your image. I'll be using the theme of astronomy for my composition. I'll be combining some stars, moons, constellations, and tying those altogether in a varied composition. I do recommend you choose some theme. You could feel free to copy my theme and then do something else next time, or you could choose something totally different if you're into astrology or you could use some religious reference, whatever works for your personal style here. I've gone ahead and created a document that's the same size we'd been using, 3, 000 by 5, 000 pixels. I'll grab the Rectangle Tool and make the background. I pretty much always start with the background. I'll just set the stroke and fill for that. Click the "Menu" and then lock that background and create a new layer. The first thing you want to do is add a little border. I'll get the Rectangle Tool again, and just drag it just like I did the background layer. I'm going to choose the stroke to be black and then give it a little bit of a width, maybe 5-6 pixels. I'll click the "Move Tool", click about center, and then drag in a little bit and put one finger down a constrained proportions and then I can just get this nice border shape. You may have to zoom in a little bit if you have trouble getting it perfectly on the inside there. I think I'm going to make it a little bit center on stroke studio. The next thing I want to do is create a centerpiece. I'm going to choose one of my assets that I've already created. Again, this is one of the assets that you can feel free to pull from that document and use in your composition. I'll click on the "Asset" and click "Insert". Then I'm going to change the color to black and adjust the size. One thing I wanted to note about this piece is that I made this and procreate, and then I vectorized it using Adobe capture. I do show that whole process in my society six class and my service design class on Affinity Designer. I won't show that again here. But you can easily look that up in one of the other classes if you really want to create something and procreate, and then use it in affinity as a vector. Next, I'm going to add some circles. Again, with the Move Tool using Magnetic Tool get this right in the center. It's really important to center that first piece that you create. Because every piece you create will be based around that. I always take a ton of time to make sure those things are centered properly before moving on to the next piece. The next thing I want to do is create a line here that centers all of my elements. I'm going to start at the top, one dot and then do another one. You're using that center line to create this perfectly vertical line with the Pen Tool. Then I'm just going to use the transform studio to adjust this down the page. One thing I've noticed is it's really easy to align simple shapes like this oval and this line. It's really easy to align those with each other. But when you bring in this other shape, it does get more complex. I recommend, as you're lining up elements, use your simple shapes to do the lining up and use your complex shapes for decoration. Don't worry so much if your complex shapes aren't perfectly lined up because if they're complex, it's really hard to tell if they're not perfect anyway. Whereas, with the symbol shapes, it's really clear if they're just a little bit off. I would take my time with the simple shapes, make sure those are perfect, and then add in the more complicated parts. Next, I want to duplicate this oval a few times and just bring it in so it has this interesting almost globe like field and I'm using about center to make sure that's pulling from both sides equally. I'm going to grab another asset here and it will be this dotted line. Again, I'm lining that up with my simple shapes and with my stroke. I'm going to get black is my color. I'm going to make this just a little bit bigger. We really have some space to spread out on the canvas. One thing I don't like is that these dots are overlapping with my central element. I'm going to create a new circle. That's going to just leave underneath that element. It'll just serve as a protection for that element. For semi defined wherever that is, and then put this under it and put it on top of all the other things. I'm going to fill it with gold, which is my background color. Then I'm going to make sure my dot layer, which is this layer, goes below all of that stuff. I've got this flower layer, which is very complex. Then I've just got this simple circle below it. It's just a gold circle and it's just helping me cover up that dot layer so I can zoom in and make sure it's properly cutting off little areas like this. It needs to be a little bit bigger. I want to make my vertical line darker because I really want that to be like a central point for all of my composition. I'm just going to beep up a little bit. I'm also going to add some interesting elements to the top and bottom of that line. I'm going to grab this moon shaped that I created. Click the "Move Tool" and rotate with one finger down. I'm going to make this thinner so it more closely matches the line that it's sitting on. If you wanted to be exactly like that line, just check and see where the line is 4.6. Then we can go back to our moon and that is 4.6 as well. For this piece, I want to have a black outline and white interior. Then I'll duplicate that. Move it to the bottom, and I'm going to do the same thing, but with all black on this side. Creating just a little bit of visual difference between the top and bottom. I want to add some more elements along this line. I'm going to go to my assets and just pull some assets in and start adjusting them along the line. I'm also going to grab a triangle and put that along the line. This is a really easy way to create a composition. Just start with a line and then just play around with a lot of different things that you could do within that line, any decoration you can think of. Just try it. It may look weird and then you can take it out and try something else, but just this process of trying and playing around is really good exercise in composition. You also never know what you'll discover when you work like this, when you just don't have a full plan, you just have a lot of assets to play with and you can just see what happens as you work. I'm going to add some solid pieces on top of this because I really want to add a little sun and moon into this area. I'm going to grab one of the star shapes from the Shape Tool over here and put that in as well. One thing you'll notice about the constrained tool to put your finger down is that with assets that actually works the opposite way. By default, the proportion from weaken strained. If you put your finger down, it'll allow you to change them. When it comes to assets, things are going to be a bit different than they normally are. It looks like I accidentally moved my border. That's no problem. We can just delete that layer and we'll fix that later. One more thing I want to add is some little dots that rest on the end of these. Before I start duplicating those, I'm going to zoom out and make sure I'm happy with that. Make it a little bit smaller. Again, I'm going to give it a stroke because I want to have that ability to change things later on. Leaving that stroke and gives you a little bit more flexibility in terms of the border. I'm just going to go through duplicating this and adding one to each point. I don't have to create all the dots on the second side because I can easily just select all of those dots by clicking and dragging. Duplicate, flip horizontally, and then just use the Move Tool to shift them right over. I can zoom in to get an up-close view. If they aren't all perfect, we can just go in and make little adjustments there, but just duplicating it in that way makes your life so much easier.
17. Filling the Canvas: The last thing I'm going to do with this is just fill up the background with some astronomy-related pieces. I've got some constellations. You'll notice if you look at these constellations, the stroke and the fill have to be adjusted separately. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate that because I know I want to have at least two of each constellation. I'm just going to rotate them and change the size a little bit so they look a little different in each case. Then I'll repeat the same process with a few more constellations. Another thing I'm going to use to fill this background is some stars. I'll create a couple stars using this shape tool over here. But I'm also going to create my own star, kind of a starburst here. Really simple process like we did before. Just creating some lines. They don't have to be evenly-spaced. Double-tapping on the second one because we want to finish out that pen line. If we just keep clicking, it'll just create one continuous thing. I like that these aren't symmetrical and everything else is, it gives it a different feel. I want to be sure that I'm selecting all of those pieces. I'll do that in the layers panel and grouping them so that this item is one group. We're going to make that quite a bit smaller and reduce the stroke size a little bit. Then those will be nice little star shapes that we can scatter around the Canvas. Each time I move one, I'm just rotating it, so it looks a little bit different from the others. I'm going to repeat this same process, putting the stars and starburst that I just created around the Canvas. I'm just going to re-do my border because remember that got shifted. This is a good lesson to remember for me as well. It's probably a good idea to just go ahead and lock your border every time. Soon as you create your borders, just lock them and then you don't have to worry as you create your composition if you accidentally shift your border. One last thing I might do to just fill this in a little bit more is just play around with adding some dots. As I said that I'm going to remember to do from here on out is I want to lock my border. Let's go to that border layer. Group those and lock them. You may also want to pull them to the very bottom of your stack. If your border keeps getting selected, it's probably on the very top of the list. You just want to shift it all the way down to the bottom. I've got it right below my background layer and it's locked, both my background and my border are locked. Now I'm going to go to the very top new vector layer. I'm going to grab the vector brush tool. If you need to change the brush, there's a Brush Studio right here if you don't like how it looks in the beginning. I think by default it's a solid pen. It sets down a pretty just simple dot shape that I'm going to use. Let's get black as the color. I'm literally just tapping to create these dots. I think that just fills it in nicely and it gives it more of a star feel as well. We've got a few different types of stars here and I like how they interact with each other. Continue this around the Canvas. Obviously could keep going with this. My next step would probably be to play around with the background color a little bit and also apply this to some print on-demand projects so I can really get a feel for how it would look on an art print or cell phone case, [MUSIC] something like that. Let's go ahead and call this piece finished. I hope you enjoyed this class and that you feel inspired to start creating your own Geometric Illustrations. If you liked this class, you may like some of my other classes where I cover a lot more ways to design and paint on your iPad. Like how to sell your iPad Art and Designs on Society6 and how to create unique folk art illustrations in procreate. Check those out on my profile if you want to see more. Also I share a lot of resources for iPad artists and designers on my website, so if you'd like to get more resources like what you've got for this class, check out my site. I would absolutely love to see your Geometric Vector Illustration. So please share what you make. You can do that here on Skillshare in the Project Section by taking a screenshot of your composition and cropping it in the Photos app. Or you could upload it to Facebook or Instagram and tag me. You could also join the Facebook group I created for iPad Artists, Illustrators, writers and Digital Planners. It's a place to get opinions and advice on iPad, Drawing, Painting and Digital Planning and get inspired by Digital Creations from around the world. If you love creating things on your iPad and want to join other people around the world in conversations, sharing ideas and seeing each other's work, check out the group to the link on my website. If you have any questions about the process you learned in this class, please feel free to reach out to me. You can reply to my discussion here on Skillshare, or you could email me through my site. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time. Bye bye.
Liz Kohler Brown, artist | designer | teacher | author
