Introduction to Affinity Designer 2 for iPad: Simple Winter Doodles | Jennifer Gottleber | Skillshare

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Introduction to Affinity Designer 2 for iPad: Simple Winter Doodles

teacher avatar Jennifer Gottleber, surface pattern designer + iPad art

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:53

    • 2.

      Class Project

      1:50

    • 3.

      Why Affinity Designer?

      2:15

    • 4.

      Getting Set Up

      2:13

    • 5.

      Pen Tool

      6:04

    • 6.

      Gingerbread Cookie Pen Tool Practice

      6:26

    • 7.

      Import Color Palettes

      1:24

    • 8.

      Gingerbread Cookie Fill and Details

      7:26

    • 9.

      Saving Assets

      2:08

    • 10.

      Pencil Tool

      3:40

    • 11.

      String of Lights

      10:18

    • 12.

      Mug

      7:10

    • 13.

      Mug Decoration

      2:45

    • 14.

      Pair of Mittens

      2:50

    • 15.

      Winter Phone Background

      5:36

    • 16.

      Export

      1:17

    • 17.

      Phone Mockup

      2:49

    • 18.

      Thank You

      1:15

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About This Class

Come join me as we look at ways to incorporate tools in Affinity Designer V2 on your iPad to create clean, precise lines while working smarter, not harder. The pen and vector brush tool help speed up your illustrations while providing enough of a by hand feel that we all love. Something I affectionately call efficient doodling or doodling for the perfectionist!

You will learn….

  • How the pen tool can be used for precise lines
  • How the pencil tool can give a nice hand drawn look and feel
  • The ease of using the node tool for adjustments
  • Discover built in inspiration and reference images
  • Ways to create simple, fun doodles
  • A way to save your motifs for future use 
  • Simple ways to share your new design

I used to think these tools were scarier than picking up an ol’ fashioned pencil and eraser - I was wrong. By becoming friends with the pen and vector brush tools your work will become faster and you’ll be able to get more done. Say goodbye to drawing and redrawing the same line to get it just right and say hello to nodes. As you become BFFs you’ll find yourself reaching for these tools over and over again in your next projects. 

You’ll create…

A unique phone background to use or share with your friends or followers. As a bonus I’ll provide an Affinity Designer phone mockups to show off your newest work! 

This class is for anyone who wants to or works in Affinity Designer for iPad. Little to no drawing skills are required. A charged iPad and Apple pencil is all you need!

Resources you’ll get…

  • Color palettes - 4 .afpalette files for import 
  • Mock ups - 4 PSD files for use in Affinity Designer

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Jennifer Gottleber

surface pattern designer + iPad art

Teacher

I'm glad you're here!

Hi! I'm Jennifer, a surface pattern designer, and artist. I love a good neutral look, but we all need color in our lives! My work is bright and has a hand drawn feel because it is!

I'm also a boy mom, wife, dog mom and coffee lover. When I'm not working on my designs, you can find me reading, playing games with my husband and kid, or cheering him on at swim meets. I love sipping on some coffee and listening to an audiobook while I work - it's my favorite thing about being an adult. My favorite genres are historical fiction and mystery.

I find creative work to be a form of self-care and hope to inspire others to ... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: I'm Jennifer, an elementary teacher turned self talk creative. I began my journey by learning how to make vector repeat patterns and found the process magical. Then I found Designer in my search for an iPad app where I could work in vectors as I prefer a flat, more simple film. Once I learned how robust the Designer program is and that I could use my iPad, I was impressed. I can draw anywhere now, on the couch or even in bed. Don't get me wrong, I love other apps still. However, it's nice to have some options and flexibility from time to time. My work from Jenny got designs has been selected for journal covers by makers, printed on poly mailers, and sold online. I found creative work as a form of self-care and believe everyone is creative. I hope to encourage you on your journey. Let's dive into the class details. In this class, we're creating a unique, one-of-a-kind background for your phone. This class is great for beginners or anyone familiar with Affinity Designer. Let's start with the pen and pencil tools and use a model to trace. Then we will work on a string of brightly colored lights. Together, we'll draw a coffee mug, mittens, and a snowflake to keep practicing with our new tools. As a bonus, let's try out your new design on a phone mock-up, all done within Affinity Designer, no need for another program or app. You want to share your new skills on social media, this mock-up will make it super easy for you. By the end of this class, you'll be familiar with several drawing tools and have a new phone background for yourself or to share if you want. You can even put it on an Apple Watch. I look forward to seeing you in the first lesson. Let's get started. 2. Class Project: The project for this class is to make a phone background using your doodles. While I don't care to stand out of the crowd too much, I do like my phone to feel like me. I've heard people spend up to an hour or more, I look at their phones over 100 times per day. I'm sure you're not too surprised about those numbers and I know I have similar habits. Let's be sure that next time you pick up your phone and makes you smile. To get started, we'll draw some fun and simple doodles. We'll arrange them into a layout that makes sense to you all the while making design changes as we see fit. Who knows? Maybe you'll want to make more than one or make something that coordinates. Lastly, we'll export your design to your camera roll. The mockup provided will come in handy if you want an easy way to share your work with others. I invite you to share your project by uploading your design or the mockup in the project gallery. Head to the Project and Resources tab and click "Create Projects". You can add a cover image. This is the image or picture we will see in the gallery view, a title and be sure to upload an image to the project description area as well so we can see your work. Be proud of your new skills, show them off. Also, be sure to check out and download the resources. I've included the mockup files there. Side-note, resources are only visible on desktops, not on a mobile site. If you don't see it on your phone, no worries, just look for it on a computer. As a reminder, it takes 10 seconds of courage to share your work with this wonderful community. We'd love to cheer you on in your creative journey. Go grab your iPad and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Why Affinity Designer?: [MUSIC] You may be wondering why Affinity Designer? Here are few reasons why I enjoy using Affinity Designer. Right after you download, you have access to over 100 plus vector brushes. I think this is incredible. I find almost any brush that I need is already been preloaded and ready to go for me. On the off chance that you can't find a brush that you want, you can always modify and change the brush settings or you could go to a third-party marketplace and buy and install new brushes. Another reason is the flexibility you have in working with the Designer persona or in the Pixel persona. When working in the Pixel persona, you also have access to a large library of pixel brushes. I think you'll be able to find the brush are looking for between pixel and vector personas. You can also import and open Illustrator and Photoshop files by going to open and locating them on your iCloud drive or on your iPad. Affinity makes it easy to export your project by offering many different file types. This is so you can easily move the project made in infinity into other programs like Procreate or Photoshop and Illustrator. The export persona, in my opinion, has just about anything you could imagine. Expert persona has a lot of potential different files to export in, including JPEGs, PDF, and SVGs. The options by default tend to work really well for my projects. However, by just playing around and modifying a few of these, I bet you can find the export you need for your project. Another great tool in Affinity Designer, the Assets library. You can save your own assets and make your own categories, use what you already have. You can go back and reuse these motifs over and over again by having them saved in your own personal library. Affinity is a single purchase model which I really enjoy. It's one less thing to have to worry about month-to-month and you won't ever miss out on updates. I'm sure you'll find some reasons why you enjoy using Designer. I'll see you in the next lesson! 4. Getting Set Up: [MUSIC] Let's spend a few minutes looking around Affinity Designer and getting set up. In the newest version, V2, the interface has been completely redesigned and I think it looks really nice. Once you tap on the designer icon, there's options to close all documents, to check for updates, import content. The Live Doc section is where we're going to be working most of the time. New and Document. There's lots of options that they've added here that are preset, pre-filled, ready-to-go, print-ready options, press-ready, photos for web and even different devices, and architectural. You want to open a document you have from your iCloud Drive or on your iPad. There's also an area for templates and samples. I think the Help is really helpful. They have a great search bar here where you can just type in anything that you're looking for and you'll be able to get resources to help you. That's really nice to have built into the app. Then I didn't want to spend a few minutes on Preferences. Under General, I like to save to my iCloud Drive. If you prefer to save on your iPad, this is where you would make that change. I also like to look at the tools. Under Tools, I toggle on allow canvas rotation in all tools. This allows me to rotate my canvas as I'm working so it won't be stuck in one vertical or horizontal orientation. I also look at the pencil settings and make sure to toggle on enable double tap. With this double-tap action, I have set to undo. If you have another preference that you prefer, this is where you would change that. Once you're happy with your preferences, go ahead and tap "Done", and then we'll set up our new document. We're going to tap New and go to our Web section, though it's a little ways down. We have a social media story post which is going to be perfect for our phone background. Our page width is already at 1,080, our page height is at 1,920. I want to bump up this DPI to 300. Everything else is set and ready to go. We're in pixels, we have our color format. All we need to do is tap "Okay". 5. Pen Tool: Let's start when looking at the pen tool. I'm back in the document that we've created and I'm going to select the pen tool. The pen tool is on the left-hand side, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 down. We need to add a stroke and possibly a fill to the pen. To do this, we're going to select our colors. I'm going to go ahead and choose black for both. Both these circles should be completely filled with black and then the point size. In order to show the stroke, we're going to need to toggle on the second option which is a stroke, and then the width is set automatically to 0.20. I find that a little small for I like to work with something around two, one, or sometimes even three. Let's start with two. Now that we have a black stroke we're added two point, we should be able to use our pen tool to draw. Another way you could do this is on the left-hand side, you can change the width as well. And then once you're happy with that, I'm going to change my back to two but I wanted to let you know that there are two places you can do that. We're going to start with the pen mode. We're not going to be able to just to draw like we would with a brush, just a paper or pencil just to draw a squiggly line, instead, we're going to lay down individual points. When we tap on our screen, it creates a point, also creating a node which we can come back and change later. I have my first point right here and then when I tap again it's going to connect between the two points that I tapped on the screen. This is my first line that I laid down and you can see it's a pretty straight line. If we don't do any modification with our node here, it will continue with the straight line. We're going to connect each node as we lay down a new point as we tap with our pencil. However, if we wanted to add a curve because the pen tool is not only great for straight lines, it's also great for building curves and that's a little different. What we're going to do for a curve is really lay down our first node. Hang on. I need to actually double tap to close this. Now this will not continue to connect between each point. Now that this is closed, I can tap over here and we're going to start working on a new shape. I'll lay down my first point and tap to create my second point, but this time I'm going to leave my pencil on the screen and I'm going to drag down with my pencil. You can see as I'm dragging down, it's creating a curve. Now if I move over to the right, the curve is going to move on the line more to make a C-shape curve. These blue lines that we have here that we're dragging out, we're moving up and down or left and right, these are called handles. The handles will be what allows you to create the curves. Once you're happy with your curve you can lift your pencil off and add a new point. Since we're still working with this we haven't doubled tapped, when we lay down our next point it's going to connect the two. This is automatically predicted. It's tried to emulate what curve I want next. If I wanted this that would be great. If not then go ahead and tap again on that last node, don't lift off, keep your pencil on the screen, and then you can drag these handles to modify the curve to exactly where you want it to be. You tap again, again, and here, last time to close the shape. The node that we created they're white inside with a blue outline. Note that I want to close actually this red one. It's blue but it has a red outline. I'm going to double tap and now the center is white which means I've closed the shape. Now when I go to lay down my next point, they're not going to be connected. I'll be starting on a new shape. The next mode is smart mode. Smart mode is a little bit more user-friendly, a little bit more intuitive than the pen mode. The smart mode, I find is really helpful to lay down a few more points but it will automatically create those curves for you by laying down more points it will create more curves which in turn makes the work a little bit easier. Smart mode tries to get some of those curves built in for you and then you can always go back and modify them as you need. The next mode is the polygon mode. It makes polygons easier for you. Again, you're to lay down at points, it'll connect between the two and you will have a straight closed figure also known as the polygon in no time. This is nice for creating shapes quickly. When you're finished make sure you double-tap so that you close the shape. Right now I have a white, I have a red, so I don't want to double tap to make sure that I don't continue with that next point. Having those be connected, I want to make sure that they're closed so I have two different triangles. The last is line mode. Line mode makes, as the name says, a line. It actually makes a line segment. When you tap between the two nodes here, you don't have to close every time. It's only going to connect two nodes. Now when I tap again, they haven't connected I have two separate lines. I didn't double-tap there. If you have a design that you're working on say a star or a snowflake, this line mode of the pen become in handy. We'll look more at the pen tool in the next lesson, I'll see you there. 6. Gingerbread Cookie Pen Tool Practice: Now that we're familiar with the pen tool, let's practice by tracing around a shape. I'm going to go ahead and clear my Canvas and to do that, I'm going to select the top curve and I'm going to use my Command Control to select Shift. With Shift selected, now I can tap on the bottom layer and it will select all the layers between the top and the bottom. I can tap "Delete" and they will all be deleted at the same time and tap to deselect Shift. We're going to use a picture from a stock studio. Affinity has a stock studio built-in underneath the Assets panel, you can use Pexels or Pixabay. These are both stock sites that are great for finding resource pictures. Let's find a picture that we can trace to help us get some of these curves and lines down with the pencil tool. We can choose between Pexels or Pixabay. I'm going to start with pexels and I might tap to "Search" I'm going to use my keyboard and type in gingerbread. I'm looking for a gingerbread picture that has a few different cookies and they're mostly black. It looks like this one will do here. I'm going to long press on the picture, drag to my Canvas, and then the picture will load. It looks like the picture is pretty large and that's okay. We're just going to go ahead and size this down a little bit. Making sure we have our move tool selected, I'm going to drag the top right-hand node down and then I'm going to drag the picture over a little bit until I can get it on my screen. It looks like these two right there in the middle will fit. Then I'll just tap to "Deselect". Now, what we can see on our Canvas, these two gingerbread cookies. These are the two that we can trace to practice using the pen tool. Let's select the pen tool. We want to make sure that we have a stroke black and that we have at least one point but two or three would work out. Then we'll start tracing. Let's start with the pen and pen mode. I'm going to start right here at the base of the arm and the head, I'm going to tap about halfway trying to make the curve here that it's right on the outline of that cookie. You can see the further I drag the handle, the higher the curve get has more of an arc. I'm going to tap to the other arm here and it's a little too much of a curve there. However, we can come back and modify that in just a few minutes after we close the shape. Let's go ahead and make our way all the way around the cookie and then we'll come back and make some more fine-tuned adjustments. I'm tapping maybe 2-3 times per curve here. Find the least amount of tapping to work best for me. If I tap too many times, then I really get a little bit more work in the end because I have to come back in and make some really fine adjustments with the node tool, trying to create curves with the least amount of points seems to work pretty well from my line. Look up here. We obviously have a couple of points that we need to fix and we can do that easily with the node tool. The node tool is right underneath the Move tool and work at a tap on our close figure and now we have all the nodes that we can adjust. I'm going to actually work on this. I know right there was a little off, this as well. We can add a node by tapping on the blue line. All the nodes have handles as well. They will change based off direction that you pull them or if you want them to be a little shorter. This needed to move in now since I have the three nodes moving really in a nice smooth shape there, that's one reason why I liked to lay down as few nodes as possible. I know might adding nodes when I come back to make these adjustments but to begin with, working with the pen tool, I think it's just helpful to try to lay down the least amount of points possible. See how we're looking I'm pretty happy with that. If I wanted to seal out the gingerbread cookie behind it, I'll go to my Layers panel and beside the image, I'm going to toggle off the image. I'm going to can do the same thing with the second cookie. I like to really have more than one more tip to work with. For the second cookie, let's use the smart pen mode and see how that works. A lot of times these tools just take a little time practice getting used to them and then you will find which mode you prefer to work in. With the smart mode tool, I do find that putting nodes are little closer together as you trace around is helpful if you want this to be done a little bit more for you. The smart mode might be a really good work choice for you. I know a lot of people when they're using the pen tool, they're actually building shapes just by free hands. That's really a good use for the pen mode. The smart mode might be a better option. Let me deselect. Here we're doing all right. I'm going to turn off the visibility layer of the image here. As you can see, they look pretty similar. This one isn't as smooth. What I want to do is I want to select with the Move tool, I'm going to double-tap to select the node tool. You can see all of the points that I laid down. I'm going to tap this button on the top bar. It looks like a little squiggly line and this is to smooth. This will help some of those rough places and I just tap it a couple times to see what it looks like. These look like two cute cookies. I'm going to tap on the second one and rotate just a little bit. They're a little more wide. There you have it. We have used the pen tool with the pen mode and the smart mode to trace our gingerbread cookies. We'll add some fill and color in the next lesson, I'll see you there. 7. Import Color Palettes: Now that we've gotten a little practice with the pen tool, and we have our gingerbread cookies, let's add some color. I have four color palettes for you in the resources section, make sure that you've downloaded those. After you download them, we're going to go into the color studio, toggle to switches, and then these are the color palettes that come with designer. Now, I already have all four installed, but I want to go ahead and show you how you would import a color palettes I've provided. Under the swatches panel, go ahead and tap on the three horizontal line. Import palette as application palette. The application palette, that means that this part will be available in any document that you open within Affinity Designer. Then you'll select one of the four color palettes, and it will automatically fill with the color palette. I already have a Winter 1, and went ahead and added a Winter 12. Winter 1 and Winter 12 are the same, it's just a second copy of the first Winter 1 palette. You'll go ahead and do that for all four of the color palettes, and then choose which color palette you would like to work in. I'm going to be working in Winter one today. However, choose whatever palette works best for you. 8. Gingerbread Cookie Fill and Details: With our pelletes installed. Let's go ahead and add a fill and some fun details to our gingerbread cookies. I'm going make sure my Move tool selected. Then I'm going to tap on her first gingerbread cookie. The stroke right now is black, which I'm going to leave, but I am going to change the fill color to this lighter brown or maybe the darker brown. I like the darker brown actually, I'll do the same for the second cookie. Now, if you are happy with the stroke, you can leave it as a black stroke. However, if you'd like to change the width of the stroke, you can go ahead and tap on the two PT there with a stroke. You can slide the width slider up and down. You want to change the color. You can go ahead and tap through to add some different colors to the stroke. I think I'm going to go ahead and keep mine for the time being. But go ahead and select one that works best for you. Let's add some fun details using the vector brush. The vector brush is under the pen tool and actually part of the pencil tool. When you tap on pencil, you'll see pencil or vector brush. If you don't get that, then just try pressing a little bit longer on the pencil icon and it'll bring up the menu for you. I'm going to tap vector brush. Then we need to go ahead and add a color stroke and a point size. I like to work over here on this right hand panel, you can also make your adjustments here with the sliders or at the top, whichever one you prefer to work in. I'd like to go in and change my stroke back to that 2.0. Then I'm going to change my stroke and fill to this off white color. Add some cute eyes here and a smiley face. As you can see, the vector brush picks up a lot of pressure and sensitivity within the stroke. If you want to, you could even use the node tool to go in and clean this up just a little bit. The interior, you can tap on the node at the end, adjust the handle, we've got a little cleaner. Do the same with the other side. You can also, and this would be a good time to use the smoothing. Next, I'm going to add some squiggly line details on each of the arms and legs for the gingerbread cookie. You can see actually going over the black stroke and that's intentional. I'll show you in just a minute why I'm not spending too much time being too particular about the details here. Last but not least how about a few, cute little, but now our squiggly stripes that we have on the arms and legs, I'm going to group those together. I'm going to tap my top layer for one of the squiggles and you can always turn on and off to make sure you're selecting what you think you are. Then I'm going to hold the Command Control Tab Shift defined the bottom layer, It looks like this will be at now the group together. When I turned them off, all the squiggly lines should be grouped together so there'll be visible or not. Deselect my shift key here. Now, I'm going to take this group and drag it on top of the gingerbread with a fill. I think it might be this one, but let's see. Nope, that's the one beside it. This is the one that we've been working on. A lot of times to find things, I just toggle them on or off real quickly, now I'm going to drag this group all the way down to the bottom. If you watch now, the white lines, they're almost like they've been drawn behind the black stroke. The curve of the cookie with the fill and the stroke acts as a mask. I do want to go ahead and select everything else as well. I'm going to select that shift key again, find this last group. Then I'm going to drag this down to the curve group here. Everything should be grouped together. We'll do the same steps with the second cookie, maybe adding just a little different details here. But I do want to go ahead and still have that white and the two point stroke selected. This was on the group that was on the gingerbread cookie to the left. I'm going to undo, I'm going to select the other cookie now and then I'll start drawing on this. Layers are kind of like sandwiches so essentially, the curve here is the bottom layer. Now I'm adding the filler elements that would be between the two pieces of bread, i guess you could say this curve is the bottom layer and then everything else is going to be drawn are added on top of that piece of bread. Another option you have if you don't want to go back and clean up, I'm just going to toggle this off for a moment. Is you can use the pen tool, the pen tool, and then smart mode. You can add a couple dots like that. That looks like I have a brown stroke there. There's the off-white stroke or I'll just been too that you wanted. You could also use the pin mode and just do one time at the left side and one time at the right, not lifting up. Then you could draw a smiley face there with the handle and be very nice and smooth. That would work as well, that's another option. If you don't want to have to take the time to go in with the node tool to clean up the start and the stop. I'm going to add some squiggles again. Still on the pen tool there. Let me go ahead and switch back to the vector brush. You can also use the pen tool for this if you wanted as well. I do like the vector brush when I don't have to necessarily clean up the end. They're going to get maxed in just a moment. Here, three buttons. For this one, I am going to use this lightest pink here to add a little bit rosy cheek. Perfect. Now we need to group our squiggles together, I'm going to select the top layer again, using my Command Control to select, Shift, select the last curve, group together, and deselect the shift. Now I know that the other cookie is here. I'm going to make sure to turn on and off. Here's my group of squiggles. I'm going to drag, hold the pencil on the screen for just a moment. Then drag down to the curve. Now it should be below the curve group. Now, these were actually grouped together as well. I'll go back and grab the other element. If this command control situation isn't quite working for you, you can always swipe to the right. That will also select a layer for you. Once you have them all selected, then you'll drag them. Normally show you, I am nine layer selected here, It'll show you how many you're dragging, then you can move that below the curve. That's another way to go about it. We have some gingerbread cookies and they are looking pretty sweet. I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Saving Assets: Let's go ahead and save in our asset library so that you can come back and use them in future projects. The asset library is on the right-hand side, and it's going to be about four icons down past the color and stroke. The assets are arranged by categories and subcategories. To begin with, we need to add a category. The side assets here to the right are the three horizontal lines that we're going to tap and then add category. This will be the overarching main category so I'm going to title this winter phone since I'll be using these elements to make your winter phone background and tap "Okay." Now that we have the name of the folder, almost like a filing cabinet type system, we need to add a subcategory. Once you add a subcategory, it'll automatically name this as asset. You can leave this as asset that's totally fine. However, if you want to organize a little bit more, you could rename the subcategory. It would be something like gingerbread, and then you would rename each section going forward as snowflakes, hot cocoa, something like that. Or if you just want it to be in one big group under winter phone, then you can leave it as asset. To add your assets, make sure you have the move tool selected and then we're going to tap our first cookie. I want to go back and double-check and just make sure that I am going to be selecting all the elements from each cookie, which it looks like we are great. I have this first gingerbread cookie selected. I'm going to go back to assets, to the right, I have my hamburger menu, I'm going to tap and add asset from selection. Add the cookie that we've selected to your subcategory under winter phone. I'll do the same thing for the next gingerbread cookie tap to select hamburger menu, add asset from selection. Now we have two cookies that we can use anytime we want. They are saved just like this ready to go for future projects. I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Pencil Tool: Next up is the pencil tool. The pencil tool is helpful in creating a hand-drawn look and feel, and you can vary the line width as well. This helps achieve a hand-drawn look. As you draw, the nodes are created. The pencil tool is a little more intuitive than the pen tool. We've really done a lot of work already by learning how to use the pen tool. The pencil tool will seem pretty effortless and user-friendly. The pencil tool is on the left-hand side under the pen tool, I want to make sure that I have a black stroke and a two-point width. You'll notice that the pencil tool acts more like a pencil. We're not creating each node instead, as we draw, dropping those nodes for us. Once we have a line drawn, we can use the same features from the pen tool, like the node tool to come in and just make some of those fine adjustments that we know how to make. Now, we can also go back to the width and slide the slider for the width here. If you want to change that, if it's too small or if it's too big, you could do that once it's selected as well. We also have some differences here with the brushes. We can use a brush default, automatic, pressure, meaning the pressure sensitivity of the brush, or none. I often find myself working with none. However, play around with these and make sure that that's what you think works best for you as well. We also have two options in stabilizers to achieve an even smoother feel. The rope stabilizer drags the pencil behind, making it really great for tight corners. You'll see as I'm drawing, there's a rope and front and this helps get in some of those smaller details. Now, your rope, if you want it to be even further out, you can drag the slider, the length of the rope will increase. Now you can see there's quite a bit of difference between where my Apple pencil is in the actual line itself or if you want it to be less of a rope, you could decrease the length. Other stabilizer is a window stabilizer. A window stabilizer is pretty fluid and elastic. Really great for curves, maybe even creating spirals. The window stabilizer I have selected and now as draw, it helps even more in the smooth circles. You can see the nodes are added automatically, which allows you to still go back and make those minor changes. To be honest with the pencil tool, I tend to use none and no stabilizer. I know I make a little bit of work for myself by doing that. You might really consider playing around with the rope and window stabilizer and trying to get familiar with those to begin with, which would save you some time. I did want to show you one more thing on the pencil tool. With our colors selected, we have a stroke of black. I'm going to add a fill. Let's do this green. Now, this is what I had selected just a moment ago. Those concave section have been filled in. As you draw, I'm going to de-select this. It will fill in automatically those areas between. This is very handy. It does take a little getting used to when you're drawing with it but we're going to look at this a little bit more when we draw in future lessons. I'll see you there. 11. String of Lights: Now that we're familiar with the pencil tool, let's draw a fun string of lights. I'm going to go ahead and select all of these elements that we were using to practice with the pencil tool and delete them. Now we have another clean canvas to start our string of lights. We can start with the vector brush tool. Make sure that is selected. I'm going to make sure that I have a black stroke at two point. This will just be a string. We'll do a little curve, a little squiggle, and maybe another curve here. I'll take my node tool, and do a little tuning. Make this a little bit smoother. If you really liked the vector brush but you don't want to come back and fix all these nodes at the end, I just actually take this one and delete it, and that'll give you a nice clean start. That's a little bit faster than actually going and taking the time to fiddle and faddle with the ends of the line. This one actually looks pretty good. I'm going to leave one. Now we have our string. To make these sockets, let's go ahead and use the pencil tool, but let's use the pencil tool with the fill. Now I'm going to have the black stroke and the black fill. This will make a solid shape. It's almost like we're making a trapezoid. It's an upside-down trapezoid though. I'm going to start by drawing in at an angle, over, back out at an angle, and then across to where I started. I do want to close this shape. I'm going to grab that node tool and I'm going to grab this node, drag it on top, so it will close for me. Do a little smoothing, corner. There we go. This looks a little rough. This is not perfect and it's not really meant to be perfect with a hand-drawn doodle type of feel, but it's definitely getting the point across that this is a socket that the light bulb are going to be in. We can go ahead and duplicate the socket and add a few more down the string have lots of lights and colors. Let's select the socket here. You could also go to the layers menu and make sure that it's selected. Then we're going to duplicate. I'm going to do a three-finger swipe down, duplicate, and then move this socket over and get it lined up. We'll do the same thing. You can also use a one-finger long press to get the same quick menu here and you can duplicate. When you duplicate sometimes it's good to try to predict where you want it based off of what you've done previously. In this case it's okay because I know where it's at. I can just drag it back to the string here and then arrange it where I want it to be. Just an FYI sometimes it'll actually duplicate it off of your canvas. If that's the case then you might want to go over to the Layers panel and start tapping each layer and selecting and turning them on and off so you can find it. If not then it's not there, it's just that you can't really see it because it's actually duplicated it off of the canvas. We have three on the top here, let's go ahead and duplicate again. I think I'm going to add one more to the top here and then we'll add some two bottom. I'm going to select, one finger press, "Duplicate", raise and repeat until you get as many sockets as you want on your string. I'm going to try to go for about eight here I think. However, if you want to add more, go for it. You are welcome to have as many fun, festive, bright lights as you want. Conversely if you just want to have a few, go for a few. This is yours, so do what you want with it. It looks like this didn't duplicate, did it? That's okay. We tap back, long finger press, "Duplicate". Let's go ahead and group these sockets together. I'm going to use my "Command Control", tap and select "Shift". Tap my first layer, tap my bottom layer, group them together. Turn on and off to make sure I've got everything I wanted and then deselect my "Shift". I actually want this to be in one group. I'm going to drag the group sockets to the curve. Now the group is underneath the curve. When I turn on and off the curve, the sockets are now included. The lights we can draw with the pencil tool as well. Make sure we have the pencil tool selected. We want a black stroke and then you can give your lights any color fill that you want. I'm going to be using this pink to start with. I'm going to start by drawing the shape of the bulb and then the fill will come right as I'm drawing because it's going to fill in that concave section. If you wanted you could draw a little skinnier maybe with a point, something like that. You can also do more of a round bulb, that would be fun. Decide what sort of light shape you want and then you can delete those curves that aren't working for you. I'm actually just deleting the whole thing, so two-finger tap to undo that. I think I'm actually going to redraw and start with a little bit more pointed shape. Grab that node tool out just a little bit. I try not to grab the node tool every time however, I'm a little bit of a imperfect perfectionist if there's such a thing though sometimes I just can't help myself and I need to go back in and just change that a little bit. We have the light on top of the strings which are also on top of the sockets. The lights need to be behind the socket. I'm going to drag this curve below the last socket. Now, it looks like it's just coming from behind not on top of the socket. I'm going to duplicate all my lights and move them and get them into the correct position, and then I'll come back and add some color. There's lots of options here. You could do a pattern of sorts. Oops, I need to select it. Double-tap if you're not in to that group. You'll have to go down into the light. One tap will give you the group and two will get you into the socket or the lights. It looks like this little guy moves. I'm going to tap again to get into that group and move the socket there back to the light bulb, and duplicate it again. With the lights you can use more than one color. You could do the same color. I'm going to go for a pattern. It looks like our lights are going to overlap there, which I'm not really feeling that. We have a couple of options. What I can do now is I'm going to tap into the sockets. I have the socket selected. I'm going to hold down my finger and I'm also going to select the curve. This will select both the socket and the curve of the light bulb here. Now I'm just going to drag it over and try to arrange it a little bit so maybe they don't overlap. That looks pretty good there. You could do the same thing for this guy. Now I just need to do a tap. I'm going to tap the socket, tap the light bulb with my finger on the screen to select them at the same time, and maybe you just move him over just a tiny bit. That looks good, I'm happy with that. Now, we're going to select each light and color according to your palette, to your preferences. I have this first one selected and I'm going to leave it as the pink. I'll select the second one, red. I'm just going to go up my color palette here. Let's see how the brown. I think I'll go back to the pink and then this last one will be the red. Now we have a fun set of colored lights. I do want to add one last little detail. Let's use the vector brush with a white stroke to add just a little bit of detail. For a highlight or shining off of the lights here, just give it a little something else. I don't prefer a ton of detail in my doodle work. If you do though, you could go ahead and go back and add some details on the sockets here. You could also add a little bit of a glow, some lines, maybe some squiggles, or something to show that the lights are shining as well. I'm happy with how my lights turned out, so I'm going to save them as an asset. Tap over to my asset studio, and then I'm going to make sure my move tool is selected and select the light. I want to double-check on my layers menu. If I were to turn off this group I get everything. Well, close. It looks like the only things that weren't included in the group are the white details that I did at the end. I'm just going to drag each layer over to the right, I going to hold. Now I have the seven in the red circle, drag to the group. Now they are the highest object. They are definitely above the whites here, and that's what I wanted. Up here's my group. Turn those off, turn it back on, and they're all together. Perfect. Back to my asset studio, move tool, select your lights, hamburger menu, "Add Asset from Selection", and now you should see your lights appear there. If you want you could go ahead and duplicate this white. Drag it down, and just do a quick recoloring if you want it and then save it as another asset. I need to tap to get into the group and then tap again to find the light. Now with my color palette, maybe I just want to do a pink and red. I could do a pink, back and forth. Then I could go back and using the same steps, turn them on and off, head over to the asset studio and save "Asset From Selection". Now I have two different strands of lights and two different colors. I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Mug: Let's get to work on our coffee or hot cocoa mug. To start with, let's hide these elements that we've already created. Just a little sign note here, if you are a fan of it, just stay in group or curve, you can go into each layer here by selecting the layer and then the three dots to the right tapping on group and this will allow you to rename the groups. If you would like to keep each layer labeled, this is a great way to do that. It really is helpful on the long run to be able to come back and not have to guess. Let's get to work make sure you have pencil selected, I want a black stroke, I'm going to use this pink color to make base, bottom and the front of our coffee mug. Now this is really going to be a U-shape, almost with a flat bottom, back up to the top and then for the handle we're going to make a C. We're actually going to draw all the outline of the C so that we can use the fill feature of our pencil here. I'm going to draw a little ways away from the mug, I don't want to draw right on top of the mug necessarily but just a little beside it. Start to the side, draw my C. Then we go up, back around to make the curve back around to where I started so actually closing that shape. I didn't close mine all the way, so I'm going to use that node tool and g back in and get that closed. Now I have a C that will work as the handle. With the move tool selected I'm going to slide this over best I can, and then I'll need to resize it. It's a little too big now which is okay. Bring this up just a little bit. Let's see if I can barely nudge it over there. Now what I need to do is make these little adjustments our node tool to make this look like it's one line. That I wasn't drawing on top or beside, but that it was just one line. That looks pretty good. It's still a little big. I think I'm just going to bring it in just a little bit. Let's work on the top of the coffee mug now where you're actually going to see and don't forget the marshmallows. Let's start with a shape. Actually let's go over here to our rectangle. If you tap on that bottom corner, you can see there's a little tiny arrow that will give you more options. Now I'm going to tap on ellipse and I can still use the same colors that I have here. However, I'm going to start drawing, and I'm going to go up here. If you keep it down, it's going to look a little flatter, you draw up, it's going to give it a little bit more depth so something like that. The move tool, I'm going to slide it over and into place. Although I want this to be just a little bit more of a stronger presence, so I'm gong to give it a three-point width. Perfect. I do want the inside of the mug to be white. I don't really like this pink film, I want this to be white. We have the top showing the inside of the mug. This is where we need to add our fun detail. I'm going to use my pencil tool again with the stroke and fill. Just to note too, this is the stroke here for the black and this is the fill. The fill will pull up colors or swatches. On the colors, there is a color picker tool so if you have a document where you are working with other colors, you could use the color picker. I'm going to go to my swatches and pick this lovely light brown color and start working on filling in the hot beverage that we have inside. This has a three-point stroke, which is a little much so I'm actually going to go to my stroke and turn this off because I don't want to have a black stroke on this part. I just want to have the details that the coffee there is sitting right inside the cup. I'm going to go to my node tool, make some little adjustments here to get as much of the node lined up as possible with the bottom and drag this one out just a little bit. I could have spent a lot of time being very precise in drawing this or I can go back with the node tool and make these fine tuned adjustments, which is what I really prefer to do. I found I was really spending a lot of time going back and drawing and redrawing and redrawing. Now this node tool I feel like it gives me enough flexibility that I don't have to continue going back and again to draw. With the move tool selected, I'm actually going to make this just a little bit taller, a little bit wider. I have a gap here that I'm not really liking so again, I'm going to take the node tool, double tap, drag this down just a little bit. Take this and just as gauche, I could spend a lot of time going back and making all these, but just go ahead and make what feels right for you and the fill that you're trying to evoke from this style. Let's add some cute marshmallows. I do want to have a white stroke and a white film, help me get marshmallow shape that I want. Since it's a pretty large at three point and it's working with a small area. It's really helpful to see exactly what they're going to look like and it helps me make them a little bit more to begin with. I'm not going to go back into that node tool and just work with these as they are. I'm just drawing a few here. Select the move tool and start arranging them so that they're overlapping a little bit and they're melting and the part of that a lot of us really enjoy with our hot chocolate. Now, I have five drawn here. I could continue drawing them, or I want to just go ahead and start duplicating elements. If you do find yourself wanting to duplicate, just to be sure that you change them up just a little bit so maybe you rotate here. You can go to the top here and flip horizontal or flip vertical and that will help it look like it's a new element, not that it's just been duplicated. Although you do save some time by duplicating some elements. This is what I was talking about earlier. See, it's actually gone off of my motif here. It's not necessarily off the Canvas, but it's hard to find so that sometimes you might just have to search for them. They are there, they're just maybe not where you thought they would be. We have a lot of marshmallows there, they're a little small so I am going to go ahead and select all of them with my Command Control, Shift, group them together. Now I'm going to drag them out to make them a little bit larger. I don't want them to be on the white necessarily maybe not get them too much larger, something like that. 13. Mug Decoration: Let's use the pencil tool to write a sweet short message on the front, maybe something like warm wishes, stay cozy, maybe two words, three at the most. I'm going to bring my width down quite a bit to one. Now I'm just going to use the pencil like it is a pencil on paper. If you don't like that, just double-tap and go back. Group them together so that I can go back and make some quick changes. Maybe I want the width to be just a little bit more, maybe at two. I want to change the color. I can go back and change at the same time. It looks like white might be the best option. I'll keep it at white. I want it to rotate just a little bit. You could do that. This is an option that you can add some text. Another option would be to draw some snowflakes or some other motifs. This group is warm wishes. I can go ahead and click on the three dots and rename this. I'm going to toggle that off. Now I'm going to use the pen tool on the line mode to make some snowflakes. I'm going to group this together as I work just by dragging to the right. Normally, if I just have a couple of things that I want to grab together, maybe 10 or less, I'll just swipe to the right. If I have a lot then I'll use that Command control. Move it over just a little bit and then back to the pen tool and make just a few more quick snowflakes. I'm going to have some of these snowflakes hang over the end so that I can use a mask again so that it looks like they're going to be wrapping around the side just a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and select all three snowflakes and I'm going to drag all three of them. We'll wait until I get my red three down to the coffee mug itself. Now you can see again, you're wrapping around the edges just a little bit. Now that we have our coffee mug made, I want to go ahead and group everything together. I'm going to swipe to the right, select all the layers, and then group them together. Now I'll toggle on and off just to check. Head over to your Assets studio, add asset from selection. Now we have a couple of different motifs to choose from. I'll see you in the next lesson to make our last one. 14. Pair of Mittens: [MUSIC] Let's work on some cute mittens. I have hidden the mug layer. I've turned off the visibility, I did rename it mug. Now for the mittens, let's use the pencil tool again. I want a black stroke with a pink fill. Then we're going to draw one mitten. We're going to draw with the thumb to the left here, then a little curve back and around, then a little curve again, to where we started. I want to add a band of color at the bottom like a color block. I'm going to go back to my color studio, choose the red color. We'll choose red for both the stroke and the fill, then I'm going to draw a rectangle on top of the mitten all the way down to cover bottom side of the mitten. Doesn't have to be perfect because we're actually going to drag this down to the mitten to create that. Sometimes if you drag it under, then the element will be below like I did. But then if you drag it again and try to get it right on top of that curve, then you'll be able to use it like a masking feature. I want this to be a little straighter across the bottom, so I'm going to drag this down a little bit. There we go. Now I have one mitten. Let's go ahead and duplicate our mitten here. The move tool selected. I'm going to drag it over just to arrange them a little bit of an angle. I'd like to draw with the vector brush, a string to connect the two. For the string, I would like it to be below the mittens. I'm going to drag that layer below both of the mittens. Now, I'm going to add one little detail to each mitten, which is going to be a snowflake. I'm going to grab my pen tool, line again, and then one larger snowflake here. There we go. Like that. I'm going to group my four lines together and change the color to white. Then, with my move tool, just to give it a little resizing. I'm going to duplicate and drag over to the next mitten. We have two groups, we have our two mittens, and we have our string. Swipe to the right to select all of those. I'm going to group them together. I can go to my asset studio then add asset from selection. Now, we have a couple of different elements we can use for our phone background. I'll see you there. 15. Winter Phone Background: You have quite a few asset saved, so let's use those to create your phone background. I have hidden the visibility of the mittens layer and renamed it. We don't actually have a background that we can chain. To do that, we're going to create a rectangle. Lots of other shapes to choose from, but we just need a rectangle right now. Then, we're going to drag it out a little over and down around all four sides overlaps, and this will be our background. Now, we can change this rectangle to be any color that we want for our background. I'm going to go ahead and keep it at this light brown color to start with, but I might change it later on. I do want to drag the rectangle underneath my elements that I already have in my layers panel, so that the background is below the other elements, and the elements that we've created will be sitting on top of the rectangle. Let's turn on some of these layers. There's our gingerbread cookies and we can move them, and arrange them now in a design, or pattern that you like for your phone. If you want to create a foe seamless repeat then your motifs can hang over the edge of the canvas just a little bit. That will give the illusion that could be a seamless repeat. You could also keep everything on your board, and that will be perfectly fine too. If you don't want dang off the edges, that's okay. It doesn't have to. It does look like more of a pattern when they do. But again, this is your phone background, so make it exactly the way that you want it. But these little lights down here on the corner, move up the gingerbread man here. See what else we have? We have another set of light, which I'm not sure I'm going to use those right now, so I'm going to turn those off. Let's turn on the mug layer, and see where we want to arrange. Down here in-between the gingerbread cookies, be great, and our mittens. Mittens are a little large, so I'm going to bring them down. Now, if you notice, the outline is getting a little large and it's not matching the stroke from the other motifs. I'm going to go over to our panel here, and drag the width down to 2.0. There we go. Now, let me go to my Asset Menu and choose some more. This is everything I had that was hidden on our Canvas. Now, I'm going to be working from Asset Studio to bring in some more motifs. I'm going to long press on the line, and they should do this little wiggle, and then, you should be able to see them as you're dragging it over inside my blue circle. I see the lights and then once I release my pencil there on my canvas ready to be used. You can come to the Transform Studio here to flip and rotate. I was saying earlier that just were quotation, and a little flip makes it feel like a different motif. This is another place where you could do that as well compared to using the toolbar at the top. I'm going to put my little lights up here again. I think that'll look really cute. How about another pair of mittens? I'm going to hold, bring it over to my canvas and release. Oh, yeah, these guys were a little big, so let me delete that and instead, let's duplicate the mittens I already have on our canvas. There we go. Now that I have my motifs arranged where I want them for my background, let's add some snowflakes with pen tool, and the line mode selected. Remember this will make line segments, so we don't need to close or finish anything, because we are connecting two points ever at a time. This makes it really easy. Some of them I'm using three lines, some I'm using four, just want to make them a little different. Also filling up just some of this space, while also trying to balance it out, and make it feel a little bit more evenly distributed. Next, I'm going to go to the vector brush. I'm going to increase my stroke quite a bit here because, what I'm going to use this for now, let's start with 10 and see how that works. What I'm going to use the Vector Rushmore are some dots. I'm going to group these together in just a moment, but if you're not particularly thrilled with the size, or even the color, some of my dots are going to hang off the Canvas as well. Then, we can go ahead and make those changes in just a moment. Okay, so on the Layers Panel, I'm going to select the first curve my Command Control, Shift is selected, the last dot there grouped together. Now, they're grouped, we can turn them on or off. We can select them with the move tool, and we can change their color as well. This will be the stroke color, so that brown, that looks nice and works well with the gingerbread cookies. The pink is a little light. Have a lot of pink already, red, that's nice. I think I'm going to go with little darker brown there, and they are a little too big. I wanted them to be just a little bit smaller, so they're not as prominent. Let's go with a four point instead. Now, I'm going to go back and add a few more details, a little bit more embellishment. Feel free to do as much as little as you want, and then, I will see you in the next lesson. 16. Export: Congratulations. You have just created a fun unique phone background. Let's export this and get it saved to your camera roll. Tap on the "Designer" icon at the top left-hand corner and tap on "Export". In the Export persona, tap on the "Hamburger" menu. Tap "Export". Now we have Export selected as JPEG. If it's not selected go ahead and tap on that. Then the filename, go ahead and rename that. Your design will be automatically saved to iCloud if you selected that at the beginning of the class. I'm going to go ahead and save mine to iCloud in my Skillshare folder. Now this will be available when you go into your files, you can find your exported JPEG. It should appear under Recents, and you can tap that to make sure that it has been exported. Then in the top right-hand corner, click the "Share" button and you'll want to save image. This will save the image to your camera roll. On an iPhone, you're going to need your image saved to your camera roll so then you can add it as wallpaper. Once you have your design exported and saved to your camera roll, will add it to a mockup. I'll see you there. 17. Phone Mockup: [MUSIC] Last but not least, let's add your design to a mock-up to take it to the next level. I've included several different mock-ups in the resources section. They should look something like this. Mock-up number one. Mock-up number two, three, and four. Make sure you have already downloaded those and save them to your iCloud or your iPad. Open the mock-up that you would like to use. I'm going to duplicate mine first before I use the mock-up. I'm going to go ahead and use this tile mock-up number two. Let's swipe to the left, and this gives me an option to duplicate, which I will tap. Now I have a copy. I'm going to use the copy. In case I accidentally mess up anything or make a mistake, I can always come back to the original. The mock-up will open and then you'll need to go ahead and access the layers panel. If everything closed, that's okay, just go to an open as much as you can. Phone 2, then expand this layer and then drag photo here. This is where you want your photo to be. However, let's place your image first. Hamburger menu to the right of the designer icon, place. We're going to place from files. Now I have winter phone and my recent. Let's try to place your image. I'm going to drag just from the top corner to the right-hand corner to drag and place the image. It's at the very top. Let's drag this winter phone layer to the drag photo here layer. Now it should be inside that phone. There's actually a rectangle there that acts as this mask. Now we can resign and make sure we have all of the rectangle covered. You could then center it just like that with the snapping tool on. This is your own winter background in a phone mock-up. We'll follow the same steps to export once you move over to the export persona, and then you will most likely want to export this as a JPEG as well, especially if you're going to want to share. I really hope you enjoy using the mock-ups that I've provided in Affinity Designer. There are other programs you can use to create more complex mock-ups. However, I thought it'd be nice to show that Affinity Designer can also be used to create simple mock-ups like we're using in this class. I'll see you in the next lesson. 18. Thank You: That's a wrap. Thank you for joining me and for allowing me to be part of your creative journey. Now, you are familiar with quite a few tools and some of my most used features. You know how to use the pen, pencil, and vector brushes when you need them. Being able to have multiple tools in your back pocket will come in handy. My hope is you feel comfortable with them so you can continue learning how they best work for you. Remember to upload your markup in the class project gallery so we can cheer you on. I can't wait to see them. If you have any questions, please be brave and leave them in discussion area, as I'm sure others may have a similar question. Feel free to share the one you made in this class with your friends or on social media. Tag me @jenni_got so I can share them as well. This program is quite robust, so I recommend checking out the Affinity Designer site as well for updates. Lastly, I'd also like to encourage you to leave feedback. Feedback is critical to being an effective teacher and I'm always looking for ways to improve. Again, I appreciate you being here and wish you the best in your creative endeavors.