Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, I'm Nick. I'm an artist and an illustrator. I make art for all products, from wall art to bedding, greeting cards, luggage, and everything in between. I do most of my work on my iPad and the apps available now are incredible. Affinity Designer has been available on the desktop for some time and has a growing fan base. I was very excited to see the iPad version. It's a fully featured vector app with great pixel capabilities as well, which makes it unusual and very versatile for illustration. In this class, we'll be creating some fun and quirky robot characters. You'll be taken step-by-step through my process from initial sketches to finished art. I'll show you how to come up with a color palette, things to think of when designing character, how to use the Affinity Designer app to draw and paint the robot, and how to export the finished artwork. We'll cover all things including gestures, shapes, Boolean operations, the Pen tool, freehand drawing, groups, clipping mask, brush pellets, gradients, pixel textures, and much more. Here, you will end up with a fun robot in your own style and a good starting knowledge of how to use the Affinity Designer app which you can take forward into your own projects. This class is suitable for everyone from experienced artists to creative doodlers. You need no previous experience with Affinity Designer or vectors. Don't forget to follow me to be kept up to date with my new classes. There are robots waiting to be created, let's get started.
2. Design & Sketch the Robots: Let's start by sketching out some robots. You can either do this on paper and take a picture of it with your iPad when you're done. Or else you can use your favorite sketching app. I'm using Procreate. Just because I'm really familiar with it, but it really doesn't matter. As long as whatever app you're using, you save your final pictures or picture to the camera. So robots can be however you want them to be. They can be futuristic, they can be scary. Whatever you like. I'm going to go for cute, Retro 1950's inspired robots, thing that may be a grandpa could have put together out of bits and pieces that he's got lying around in the shed or garage. Say my robot is going to have springs, rivets, wires, dials, things like that. So I'm going to start by just drawing a lot of robots, parts of robots. The more you draw it, the more familiar you going to get with the subject and more comfortable you're going to fail. Some of them might not be so great. It doesn't matter. These are just sketches. So you can sketch lots and lots and you can pick out your favorites, [inaudible] whole robots, you can do bits of robots. So start by doing a whole bunch of heads, or you can just draw out a few robots to get you going. The heads are most important bit, because that's whether the expression is and that's what's going to give them personality. So I would draw out lots and lots of heads and a whole bunch of bodies just to give yourself some ideas to work from. So just keep filling up your page with all sorts of different robots. Think about variety. Think about different facial expressions, different details, different positions, and just have fun with it. You're not going to use all of these robots, but we'll come out with a good selection to choose from. [MUSIC]. So now I've got a whole bunch of robots to choose from. I've got it my favorites together all a one-page. I've saved that to my camera roll. Ready to work on in Affinity Designer. [MUSIC]
3. Introducing Affinity Designer: Now we need to go to the App Store, and download Affinity Designer. I've put a link to the app in the introduction, and also in the project section of the class. This is a complex app, and as always, there are many different ways of using it. What I'm going to show you is my process. To open up the Affinity Designer app, one thing you might want to do in the Preferences, is to enable the palm rejection. If you go to Tools, and you can choose touch for gestures only, and just one other thing I would recommend changing in the preferences, is under General. At the bottom it says default save location. The default is on my iPad. I think it's actually safer to save things in the Cloud, so just pressing the down arrow and change it to iCloud Drive. I'm going to press the 'Plus' for new document. I'm choosing New Document, and the first thing I'm going to do is go down here where it says points. I'm going to change that to pixels, I'm going to go to the DPI and change it to 300 by tapping on it, press 'Okay'. I'm going to change the width to 7,000 pixels, and the height to 7,000. This is quite big, but I'd like to work big. Even though this is a vector program, and in vectors you can make them bigger later. Because we are also going to be using some pixel effects, I'm going to start large anyway. We've got the orientation which doesn't matter because we're working square. We've got a transparent background, and mountain not going to choose Create art board. That's an option you have. I'm going to press Ok. I'm just going to show you a few of the gestures that you use in Affinity Designer. 2-finger tap is the undo, a three finger tap is the redo. It's also an option in the Preferences, under interface to show the undo and redo buttons on the screen. If you do one finger press, and release, you get a context menu, which changes depending on what you're doing. This one says de-select custom copy, tap it again to get rid of it. You can zoom in and out of your canvas by pinching. But you can also use the navigator studio, which is this second one up that looks like a compass. If you just press on it, and move up and down, It will zoom in and out as well. You can just double tap on the navigator window to see into where you were and back out to a full view. Let's have a little look around, and we'll start with the top left, there's a little back arrow. That will take you back to the main screen. On the home screen, at the top right, you've got three different symbols. You've got the plus, which is to make new documents, a bit like we did with the big plus there, you've got the question mark which takes you through to some information and tutorials. There's also the Coke for the settings. If you go into the settings, there's all sorts of things in here that you might want to change, at the moment I've got my touches showing so that I can show you what I'm doing on the screen, which is very good for demonstrations but you might not want that for everyday life. Let's have a look through, and see if there's anything there that you want to customize. When you've finished, press Done, and let's go back into our document. Next, we've got the document menu, which has all the usual things. It's customary size, export, save. Then the next one along after that with the three dots. I often call this the three dot menu but it's really the edit menu. Try and remember together. That's got the usual editing options there. Then the next three along these is known as personas, which are menus. The one that's highlighted at the moment, this blue one is the vector persona. All the tools now are vector tools. Next along is the pixel persona. All your tools now have changed to master tools. The third one is the export persona. Go back to the vector persona. You've got the usual vector tools down the left-hand side. At the bottom, you've got the cross, which will cancel whatever you're doing at the time. If you've got something selected it will de-select, you've got their little magnet snapping menu, and you can toggle on and off. At the bottom you've got your trash can or dustbin, which is your Delete. Over on the other side, that very top little square, this will get rid of the interface. It makes it very clean and clear if you want to work without distractions and you just toggle it back in. If you happen to be working very near the edge, it will just automatically disappear and then come back when you move away. All of these, the right-hand sides, these are all the studios, and they all have different options. At the bottom and the middle is the context toolbar. This will change depending on what tool you've got selected, and what persona you are in. Sometimes there's this little tiny white arrow right at the edge. If you press that you'll get extra options so do look out for that. Then right at the bottom here, there's a little question mark at the bottom right. If you touch that, it will tell you what all the tools are. That's well worth having a look at because if you're not quite sure where to find something, that's the way to go and don't forget the tools on the left bar will change depending what the persona you are in. I'm not going to go through every single tool with you in this class. We're going to learn by using the tools to make our robots. You'll be learning as we go. You don't have to remember all of these for everything. Some of these you might never use.
4. Create the Colour Palette: Now, we need to choose a color palette for our robots, and the way you can just do this within the app, I quite like to just gather together some objects which are the colors that I'm thinking of so I can see how they work together in real life. I've gone for a bit of a muted 1950s look, which I think it'll go with my old-fashioned robots. I've taken a photo of my objects with my iPad and it's on my camera, I'm back in a fancy designer. I'm going to go up to the document menu. I'm going to choose place image, and to import from photos. Image imported drag to place, you can either just tap and it'll import to its original size, or you can drag it to place set. It's rather larger than my artboard. It's placed as an object. I'm just going to tap on the corner and drag that in to resize it. I can see that this picture has a little bit of oblique cast on it, but I actually like it like that, so I'm leaving it as it is. Before we start making our palette, so I just want to make sure that this object is de-selected, otherwise, once we've picked some colors, we're going to color our object by mistake. Let's do that to make sure you've got the Move Tool selected up here and just tap outside. I could also just press on the cross down here on the lower left to de-select. We're going to go to our color studio. Up on the top left of the color studio you've got the fill and the line colors. What we want to do is to make a color palette. You're going to choose Swatches in bottom. Then we're going to go up here to the three lines menu, and we're going to choose, you have a choice of add application pellet, and that means your currents are going to be available in all your documents from now on. Or you can add document palette, which is what we're going to do, so that's means that your palette is just with this particular document. If you want to name it, you can go back in and choose rename palette. The first thing we're going to do is to use one of the color pickers. This one up here, and this one down here. I prefer to use this level one because it cuts out one of the steps and just makes little quicker. You just drag the color picker and the color that you want to pick. If you haven't looked down at the bottom while I'm doing this, it's got under context menu, it's got the radius, so you can scroll through and change that. It either takes the exact point you're on, or you can take an average. You can make that average larger. That's quite good if you want a blend of some colors, I'm going to leave them back on its original point, and the color you're picking is what shows on the outer ring. You see now that the fill color has changed the color I've picked. If you go up to the three lines menu at the top, you can do at current filled palette. If you don't like it, press on it and you can delete it, give it a name if you want to. I'm just going to go through and pick a selection of colors from my palette, and then just to demonstrate something you can do, just going draw out a shape and this spokes whether you've got the color studio opened or not. Let's just close it. If you just move your finger up and down on the color, you can change the intensity in this way, you can get variations from your basic palette. Now, I'm finished with the picture, I'm going to have to move tool selected and then the tap on it to select. I'm going to tap on the trashcan to get rid of it. If you don't want to do your colors like that, if you just want to choose them, only needs to is to go to whichever way you want to choose your colors. The color wheel and some existing Swatches, got Pantone colors, all sorts to choose from. Whatever color you have selected, you can add to your palette, so you can go through to find the pallet, and then you can just add as we did before.
5. Strokes & Fills: When you're using vectors, you're using shapes, not pixels. All shapes have two properties. They have a stroke and fill. These can be visible or they can be transparent. If we go into the color studio and we look at these two circles up on the top left, the solid circle, which is currently red, that's the felt color. The hollow circle, which is currently pink, that is the stroke or line color. You can swap these over by swiping across. Whichever one is on the top is the current selection so that one, you can change the moment I can change the fill color. If I swap them so that the line colors on the top, I can change that. Nothing we can do in affinity design is to make those invisible just by swiping up. I'm going to make the fill invisible. In fact with a fill that means that it doesn't exist. Back here and tap on the colors, to change it back. You can do the same thing by just going down here to the quick colors and just tapping on that. You can make the stroke invisible by either swiping and pull tapping on that. Making a striking visible don't actually mean it doesn't exist, it is still there. It's not really a good idea to have a whole lot of invisible things. There's still that. The only way to properly get rid of the stroke is to go into the stroke studio and choose the next one down. Stroke width right down to zero. Now you've just got a solid shape of it than any invisible strokes or some other things that you can do in the studio. I'm going to pop down this little arrow here says, Advanced. This just means that we can change things about the stroke, can change how the end of the stroke appears with the cap. In this case, it's not going to make any difference because it's a closed shape. You can change what happens at the sharp corners with the join. At the moment, I've got a slightly curved join. You can have join that cuts off the end. Or you can have a join that gives a pointed end. You notice that the top here, it hasn't given a pointed end. If you move the nodes up, you'll get the point. It just depends on the angles involved. Now I think it is quite cute with the curved ends for what we're doing is cute illustration. The line option, for the moment you can see this blue line in the middle of this stroke. That's where the edge of the fill is. The line just changes with stroke is compared to the fill. This one will post inside the fill. Then the last one will put it outside the fill. I'm going to put it back to the middle because that's how I'm used to working. Then the other thing you can do is I'm going to duplicate it by putting two fingers on the screen and then moving it across with the move tool. This one on the left, I'm going to leave as it is and just scale it up by pulling on the corner handle. I've got one finger on the screen which will keep it in proportion. This one to compare, I'm going to change the scale with objects and switch that on. We're just make that one because you can see the difference. The stroke has scaled up and is still thick on that bottom one that's been scaled with objects. With the top one, then stroke has remained it's original width. I've made the stroke bigger, the line is proportionally smaller. That makes sense. It depends what you're doing at the time as to which will be the best option.
6. Selecting Multiple Objects: Let's look at various ways of selecting multiple objects. In certain situations, one way will be better than another. The first way is with the move tool selected. Let's see all the objects. By default the center selects objects that are completely covered by the selection, you can change this under the main settings menu in the tools section by toggling select object when intersects selection marquee, that way you only need the last two parts of an object for it to be selected. Second way is to open the layer studio and swipe across each object layer from left to right. You swipe again to de-select. The third way is to select the objects using move tool and then tap and hold on the first object and use another finger to tap on the other objects. The last way that I use is to select the first object with the move tool, and then in the context menu at the bottom of the screen, toggle the "add selection" button, which has the plus sign on it. You can then tap more objects, and then once you finish, you can toggle it back off.
7. Shape Tools: We going to bring in our sketch image. Go to the document menu, press place image to bring the image in from wherever I saved it in my case it's my photos. As image imported drag to place your image. If you tap the image, just bring it in its original size and drag it over the area we want it. I'm just going to concentrate on one of these robots first. Let's pick this chap in the corner, and I'm going to drag down the sketch to make it bigger. Go to the layer studio, and I'm going to click on the three dots menu, and I'm going to take the opacity down because it's a sketch layer and it's just easier to work that way. I realized after filming the video, that I should just set this layer to multiply as well, which means that the pale parts of it are see-through. You can see what's going on underneath a lot better. I did this in the next video, but you should probably do this now. Also considered lock that layer so that I can't accidentally do something wrong with it. I'm going to press on the layers options at the top to take me back to the regular layers palette. I'm going to start a new layer to do my drawing on. I'm going to press the plus and it's going to be a vector layer. With vectors, it isn't strictly necessary to work on layers, but I find it easier. I'm going to put each of these robots on his own layer eventually. You can start by drawing the robot's head to the shape. If you hold your finger down on the shape, you have enough of lots of different shapes to choose from. But his head is quite rectangular, so they will go for the rectangle, and then make sure that in the strokes pallet, which is the second one down, that this stroke width is zero because we don't want to stroke on this one just to fail. In the colors studio, I'm going to pick the fill color that I want to make this robot. We go through to my swatches for the robots. I think I'm going to make him yellow to start with. Starting at the top corner, track out the rectangle, and if you actually put another finger that might only doing this. It's going to constrain it to a perfect shapes and this case perfect square. I don't want my robot perfect, about that will do fine. Now it is at the moment it's a shape, you can rotate it with this little handle up top. You can pull the sides out, and you can scale it. In affinity, you have these shapes which you then convert curves. I'm going to convert into curves, once I've done something to corners. You can run the corners and there's a couple of ways of doing this. You can go down to this menu at the bottom and the manager says corner type none, I'm going to go across, and you can have round corners, which I think we'll go for. But there are other options as well. We go back to the round and the top left, there's this little red dot, which you can move. This is going to give you very rounded corners, or only slightly rounded corners. That looks about right for my robot. Maybe we just drag it out a little bit there. Now I'm going to convert it to curves because once it's curves, I can do other things with that. Now we've got nodes, these little white pieces here. With the node tool selected, which is the second tool down here, you can move the nodes. If you select a node, visit handles pop out. At the moment, we just got a handle on one side of these. You often have a handle on two sides. You can move those too, to change shape. I'm going to make my robots a little bit less, books like, I know robots are books like but I prefer mine to be a little bit irregular. I'm going to tap on a node, and I'm going to put one finger down and tap again. I've got two nodes selected. When I move one of them, it moves the other one too.This would move things around a little bit. You can de-select either by pressing the cross down here or you can deselect by tapping on a new node without your finger held on the screen. I'm going to put the finger down, to pick those two together to smooth them.There we are, so it's a little bit less even it's not a huge amount, but I like it better that way. Another way of doing corners is to use the cooler tool. To do that, we're going to make another rectangle first body, I going to de-select the head by pressing the cross twice. Then for his body, I'm going to select the blue. I still got the stroke at zero. I'm going to get to the shapes. I'm going to pick the rectangle again. I'm just going to drag a rectangle out. She's roughly the size of his body. Then I'm going to go for the corner tool, which is the third tool down. I'm just going to drag down from the corner. You can take this down as far as you like further than you could with changing the corners on the shape. Then once you're done, you compress pick corners. That converts it to curves. You can see that you've got the nodes here. If I go for the node tool, I can just change everything as I did before. I'm just going to give this a little bit of a curve by pulling these handles. Nothing could be the same here to give him a neck. In the layers palette, I'm going to drag the head on top of the body. Let's go back to the layer menu, and let's just strike the sketch layer up above the other layer. That way we can see what's going on. In the next video, we're going to find some good ways of combining your shapes using Boolean operations.
8. Boolean Ops & Geometry: Boolean operations are a fantastic way of combining shapes in order to make new shapes from them and there's so much you can do with these. Let's have a look at some of them.Now, we go to the shape tool and I'm going to choose the ellipse. I'm going to drag out the circle. I think I'll do this, I shall drag the layer back down and then you can see what I'm doing a bit better. I've done a circle for the base of his ear. Then I'm going to go for a rectangle and just do a very thin little rectangle here. Then we want another circle. With the move tool, we move these around. This one, I think I will have slightly at an angle quite like these things a bit imperfect but you can make yours more nice and even if you prefer. T he first cycle selected, I'm going to select to the upper two parts. In the Edit menu here, the three dots, I am going to go down to where it says geometry, and I'm going to choose add. This is making the three shapes into one single shape now. You can see on the layers palette that it is just one single shape that says curve. This is a Boolean operation. I'm just going to demonstrate a few different things you can do with Boolean operations. You can see that those two are overlapping. The end products will take on the color of the lower piece. If I select both of those, if I add them together like I did before, you'll see that they both become one piece. There is the color of the lower piece. If you subtract that top piece takes a bite out of the bottom piece and you're just left with that bottom piece. If you intersect, that's what it says, it intersects where the two overlap. That's all you're left with and it's the color of the lower piece. If you divide, you're left with three separate pieces. Then last of all, combined, which I must say I've never used, you end up with one single shape, that has the intersection taken away from it. With these Boolean operations, this geometry as it's called here, you can make an awful lot of shapes this way without having to use the Pen Tool. Particularly good for robots, as they're quite boxy things. [inaudible] , I could do it all with us again. But why make extra work? With the Move Tool selected, I'm going to tap on it here to select it. I can either go to the Edit menu and press "Duplicate", or I can do a two finger tap and hold on the screen and drag. If it's not there, it's the wrong way around. I'm going to go into the transform studio here. Up at the top here, I'm going to flip horizontal, drag that into place. It's far. I want it to be behind the head, but let's turn it around a little bit using the handle. It has got two ears. I'm just going to go through and build my robot using the shapes as much as I can, and anytime that you want to do the bits that are underneath, obviously his faces is covered up. Just drag that layer on top. Something again for its antenna and nothing selected at moment. I'm going to pick a red film. For the lips to draw out of rough phoenix. I'll draw a circle from the top. The rectangle is told move that into place and slightly shifted all about. Then I want to select those three get Edit menu and add these together and in the layers, I am going to drag that down beneath the head. I think his shoulder caps can be easily done with ellipsis is to move tall just to get those into the right position. This legs would be very easy to do with shapes. For the rectangle, his legs can be yellow. Again, I'm going to change this to curves just so that I can make it a little bit more uneven. I'm going to use the move tool double finger tap and prolapse the other leg and then use the note tool to just hold to the nobes. I'm going to tap and hold on that. With Move Tool, select it and then I'll tap as well on the leg to select both of those. Then with the two-finger modifier, I'm going to drag down to make the lower legs and vent to alter those individually with the Note tool. [inaudible]. I'm going to give the layers, stoke cross, second legs, select both of those. I am going to change this to curves carry them with the Note tool. At least do one at a time. I'm going to move these nodes to get it to the right size. But I'm also going to move these handles to change shape a little bit and make them more uneven. In the last palette swipe across all these leg layers and the kneecaps. I'm going to group them. I have got a group of his legs. We're just going to track that down beneath the body. Then I can press on the group against one group if I want to. Look at his head to now, he has this separate parts on top which I think I'd like to be another color. I'm going to select the head. I want to duplicate it, but keep it in the same place. It's easier to do that in the Edit menu and just do "Duplicate". This is going to be the piece that's at the top of his head. I'm going to change the color of that. Then I'm going to use another shape and just use the rectangle. Let's change color it so we can see it. I'm going to use that the head shaped together with one of the Boolean operations. I'm going to use the intersect. This is just going to leave the bits that overlap, which is the bit we want. If I take the layer with the sketch, I switched that off by pressing the little tick there. You can see that that's given me a perfectly lined up piece. Then once you click back off that photo layer, otherwise I'll be doing things to that. Then for his eyes, I'm going to go for a circle, it does have a stroke, into the swatches. Pick the Fill Color, and then stroke color, I'm going for this darker team. On the stroke below, you don't match you have to go throughout the way you can just pull up and down to change the stroke width. Or you can go into the studio and just put it up. Let's see how that looks. With the lips, that's too wide. Again, you can just move up and down to change that dynamic clay. Or we can use this slider here, convert its curves, duplicated with the Move Tool selected and the two finger tap and drag, and make this a little bit bigger. I can learn to build a character. I'm going to leave those round. We need circles for centers of his eyes, which are going to have no strikes. Take that right back down to zero. Then the sloppy with their stroke can fill color that the fill color is the tail. Stroke color doesn't matter because he didn't have a stroke. If the ellipse tool and drag out the pupil is close slightly both side look quite like. Do the same for the mouth. This time I'm going to give him an orange mouth. The outside of the mouth is going to be the red. Give it little bit stroke there. Rotate it a little bit of rounded edge corner, and then convert it to curves. Tap on that note and then that note move this. You can see little magnifying tool which sometimes is more helpful than others, and otherwise select more than one load is just too messy over them. The inside of his mouth is going to swap over the fill this lying colors, I am going to have stroke take that down to zero using the Eclipse tool and draw out some uneven ellipses if you want them even, of course, you would be putting down one finger while you're drawing. That one's even. Let's give him a nose and a take that right down below the top of his head, which is down here. I'm going to grab that layer and put it down. I'm looking at these dots where his top of his head off. In fact, choose the polygon shape, I can make them like bolts. Five sides. Let's give them six sides like a bolt or is it to not. I think it's not pressing one finger down just to keep the shapes even whole bunch of these can line them up in a minute. They're all different sizes. It could of course, select some and duplicate them, so I'll do that. Then because they're quite small, it's going to be complicated to tap and drag. I'm going to go up to the Edit menu and duplicate and drag out my duplicate ones and do that without changing the size. Now, I've got a whole bunch of bolts and turn off the sketch layer so I can save them. I could just space them manually, which I like myself. But if you want to be all even, you can select them all which should be easy to do in the Layers menu. Select the top one and then double tap on the icon for the bottom one and that's selected all of them. Then we can go into the transform studio. At the bottom here we've got alignment options. If you go in there, now we can align them vertically and you can align them to the top, the middle, or the bottom. We'll go for the middle, rotate them a little bit, and there you go. I quite like them a little bit one case, so I'm just going to move mine around. You could also make them all same size by destroying one and duplicating it a number of times. This spring that we've got here, I might replace that with some coke because there's a excellent Coke shape and that's a great way to demonstrate some of the other features shapes. Before we put the cokes in, we've got to put in this rectangular background for the cokes, choose the polygon tool. I'm going to go for the Coke, which they very kindly put in there. I.m Just going to drag out a Coke shape, but I'm going to do this up here so that you can see what I'm doing a bit better. Make it perfect by putting one finger down. At the bottom here, you've got options in the context menu, you got the number of teeth. If you slide one way or the other, it changes it. You got the inner radius, you've got the whole radius. You can change that. Then if you zoom in here, you see you've got all these different red dots that like you had on the corners of the rectangle. You can move these as well, change the angles, can make Cokes convex and you can change the angle here as well. You can play around with these. Once you've got your Cokes to your liking though, would be pretty good on the robot. I'm going to choose that from the Edit menu. Try [inaudible] helps make it a little bigger. I know this doesn't make engineering sense, but it's artistic license. I'm going to go for the same green button. I'm going to just drag up and down on the screen to change the intensity of it. Then we'll have another dark on by duplicating this one again from the Edit menu. Let's do his feet. I think there should be made again. Use the move tool to double tap and try to reshape it a bit same with this one. Then I'm going to use some other shapes to cut off the bottom of his feet. I'm going to select that one and then I'm going to tap and hold and select that on as well. I've got those both selected and appearing to the Edit menu and subtract. The top rectangle took a bite out of the bottom circle to leave the shape we wanted. I'm going to do the same again for this one. It's got them best selected there, Edit menu, subtract. During the Boolean operation, has converted curves anyway. You can tell that because you got these nodes, these curves. Just pop in his little dials here, simply ellipses. Let's have a look in the Layers palette and switch to sketch back on. The layer that takes all of the curves. It's got this little down arrow on the very left of it. If I press Stat, it's just compressed all of it. Still there. But it just makes it easy to drag the other layer beneath it. Dragging from the photo layer at the bottom. So we can see our robot. He's looking quite cutest snake suggests you familiarize yourself with all these shapes. There are so many available already. Of course, you can make shapes by combining other shapes and dropping bits after them using the Boolean operations.
9. Freehand Pencil Tool: I have decided that I don't like his top antenna, I'm going to change that. So I'm going to select to with move tool and puts it in the trash. Along to it Select the next object down, which is his ear. So I'm just going to click off that because I don't want that selected. I'm going to use the pencil tool, which it's a free hand drawing tool to give more of a hand drawn look. I'm going to be working with a stroke and node fill for this. But at the bottom here under Context Menu, it's got width zero, which is the stroke width, and I'm going to just slide that along to take that right up to the maximum which is 24 for this tool. If you construe menu, you can see this little box, which is the stroke pressure settings. So if I draw stroke and I move these settings around, the left dot on the settings is the start of my stroke. So if I move that up you can see the stroke becomes thicker. If I move it down, it becomes thinner at the end. The same goes the middle. You can make it thinner in the middle, thick in the middle, thin on the end, and thick on the end. So you can move these around to change the settings. You can also change the settings at the bottom here in the context menu with the controller. So you can move that cross that moment it says none. You can choose the brush defaults, automatic. I quite like using pressure because I'm using an apple pencil. So the hard drive press, the thicker it's going to be. You can see that as I'm moving around, is actually changing what's in the window there. If you haven't got an apple pencil or a pressure sensitive stylus, you can actually get the effect of one by moving these things around. I'm going to stick with pressure, make sure I've got a stroke color and let's draw this antenna. I think I'm going to make the end of it a little bit thinner. So let's thin on both ends and the middle of it, a little bit thicker. Something you can do with the pencil tool on the context menu here on the left is sculpt. If I choose that, its a little bit tricky, but you came to reform your lines, doesn't always do what you want. The other thing you can do is use the node tool to move the nodes around. I'm just going to make this a little bit more defined by moving the nodes and the handles. Again, this can be a little bit tricky when you're not used to it, but it's easy when you know how. I'm going to slope that antenna and going to lower this pallets and I'm going to drag it right down so that it goes below his head. Now, I'm going to show you four different methods of doing the arms. Which works best for you is just purely personal choice. The first method is to go back to the shape tools. For the rectangle tool, I've got my stroke on 0, and I'm just going to draw out skinny rectangle. It's roughly the right length and width. I'm going to convert it to curves. Then, I'm going to go to the node tool, which is actually selected when you convert curves. Now, I'm going to just strike out from the center here and push these curves into shape. Let's go to the move tool and move it into place. I've made it too long, so I'm just going to pull it up a bit, and it really made it too curvy, haven't [inaudible]. Let's go back to the node tool, and it's going to move each node into place. Then, you can alter it either by pulling the handles. If I choose this node, the other handles will appear or I can just use the node tool to nudge it into place using just the edge. So that's actually a really easy way of doing it. So that is on number 1. On number 2 is going to be using the pencil tool. In exactly the same way as we did his antenna. So I'm going to take the width up to 24 points, which is the maximum width. I'm going to untick use fill. I am going to make sure it got a straight color. I'm going to have my controller on non. So just going to draw down over here. I can use the sculptor if I want to with that enabled. You can go in and just change the shape a little. I can use the node tool just to nudge everything around. So that is our method number two. So the next one is also using the pencil tool. This time, I'm going to do it as a fill in set of a stroke. So I'm going to take the stroke, width down to 0. I'm going to click on Use fill. Make sure a I've got fill color selected. This is really very much freehand drawing and couldn't draw down over my original sketch. You can again sculpt to smooth it if you want to. The only thing about doing it this way, if I go to the Node tool and zoom right in, it doesn't actually close the shape. So if want to close the shape, you need to just pull the last node over the first one so that they cliques together. The fourth method is the pen tool. Again, you can either do this with the line or fill, and the line is going to be easier for this skinny shape. Using the pen tool, I'm going to take width my line up to 25 issues snip. I want to make sure use fill is unclicked. I'm just going to tap and drag at the top of the line, and tap and drag at the end of the line. You can move these handles around so that fits perfectly. Again, you can go into the stroke menu and give it some tape or if you want to seek and make it maybe skinny at this end. So there you go for different methods. I guess you could have a fifth method to be using in pen tool with fill only, but we'll be doing a lot more of that later. So the next thing to do is, his upper arm. I'm going to do that with the pen tool as well because that's what I prefer. So I'm again going to tap and drag it up and it's got like an elbow joint. So tap and drag there. If you drag towards the direction that you're going, I'd like his skinny arms and you use and node tool just to move it tiny bit, and then he needs some fingers. Let's try pencil with the fill, because we're doing lots of pen tool later. So I didn't take the stroke width down to 0. I'm going to click Use fill and make sure that fill up she does have a color because at the moment it doesn't. So I'm going to make that orange as well. I can do these all as one piece. Means that the node tool to his thumb is a little odd. Again, I'm going to just move that last node onto the first one to close the shape and do his other hand. With the Node tool drag that first node on to the last one to close the shape and then deselect. Let's put his shoulder things on top of his arms by selecting them both and then in lays pellet dragging them up. So I think our first robot is done. Let's switch off the photo layer and have a look at him. He has this little bit of texture putting on which we'll do later.
10. The Pen Tool: Let's move on to second robot. I'm going to collapse that robot layer by pressing on this little triangle side, and we'll start on a new layer and it's coming to layer. If I press on the three dots menu here and tick on the layer one, I can give that a name, I'm going to call it robot 2, and let's go back to layer options and make the sketch visible. If I unlock the sketch and move it around, I'm going to make my first robot invisible so that we're not distracted by him. Maybe this guy, I'm not sure if he looks more like a robot or a zombie. Let's lock that again by going into the three dots menu and pressing "Lock". I could do this robot the same method as before using the shapes, but the idea of this class is to show you all the different ways you can do things, so we are going to use the pen tool, is a great tool, very accurate for following curves. So let's start off with his face. I'm going to use the Pen tool with Phil. I'm going to make sure that my stroke width is on zero here, go to use fill, then I'm going to go up to our color palettes. He can have maybe orange face. Choose a starting point and tap and drag, and you want to really tap and drag on the furthest corners of the apex of any corner, and you want to use as little points as possible because the more points you have, the less smooth it is. I'm going to go to the Node tool and you can just pull the node around to adjust them. Again, you can actually pull the curves out as well. That's another way of adjusting things, that's pretty simple. Once his head done, let's go for the main body. Deselect his head. Sometimes you have to deselect things twice depending on what you've done. Now I think we can do with the pen tool is still use the corner tools, so if you're going to just tap for the main corners without dragging, then you can go to the corner tool up here, and you can drag in to get your rounded corners, and then you can use your Node Tool to certainly reshape the edges. I'm going to chose bait corners, which will then give me nodes that are connected with the Node Tool, reorder the layers so that the head is part of the body. Time to do his arms, go back to the Pen Tool. His arms are going to end up behind his body, so rather than reordering everything, select his body and then to go up to the three dots Edit menu and I'm going to choose Insert behind. So that means that the next shape I draw is going to go behind his body. Let's go for the Pen tool. At the top here, tap and drag, drag in the direction I'm going, you're going to tap and drag down here. I want this corner to be sharp, so I'm just going to tap on it again for a sharp corner, and then I'm going to go up here to the top, tap and drag, tap it again to make it sharp, and then tap on the end so that one's not sharp and it should be, so I'm going to go to my Node Tool. Make sure that node is selected and at the bottom over here in the context menu you've got various options. So I'm going to choose sharp for that one. Then doing that has changed the shape of his sleeve. I'm just going to drag my handle out until it's right, and of course I could do that with a Node Tool by just dragging on the shape too. But it's not the color I want, and doing that shows you that's it's drawn it behind. Let's go on and do his other sleeve. I don't know why my robot seems so leaning to one side, maybe I'll try and fix that a bit. With the legs it's pretty simple, it's just going to be four taps. Use Node Tool to adjust a little bit. I want his kneecap to be in front, not behind, so I can change to insert on top. Tap and drag and then close the shape using Node Tool just to move it around a little bit, and then the same for his feet with the Pen tool, and the Node tool to show up. I can pick his whole leg, then Move tool, select, tick the Add to selection, select his kneecap, lower leg and foot. Then I'm going to duplicate it by dragging with a two-finger modifier and deselect, because when you duplicate things that a hand-drawn it's kind of obvious. I am going to select his kneecap, and I'm just going to turn that round by going into the Transform studio here and choosing flip horizontal and again to the Node tool and just slightly change it just so it's not an exact copy. Now let's do his hands, and these ones we want to choose Insert behind from the Edit menu, click the pen tool again. We're going to start behind the sleeve, that is going to be a bit more tricky than a Pen tool stuff we've done before. If you feel more comfortable you could use the pencil from the fill, so I'm going to tap and drag, then when I get to the apex of the bend which is here, tap and drag, tap and drag, that is a sharp point, so we want to tap again, command here, tap again on that one to make it sharp, and then this one is going to because it's got really long handle it's going to look a little bit weird, but don't worry about that, we'll sort that out in a minute. I'm going to just go across up to the next one. When I finish I'm going to sort that bit out, tap again and down and do the same again because I want this to be a shallow U at the bottom, we've got deep U because this handle is so long. Tap again for the sharp point right around here, tap again on that one and tap across. So let's go back and fix that strained bit, so using the Node tool that handle was really long which is why it's a little odd and same on this one and make the handle much shallower. Next to his other hand which is little bit smaller at the but we can make it a bit bigger. I'm going to have to do a bit more faffing with this one I think. Move all these bits around until they look better. For some reason I didn't draw behind, so we need to just push that one back, sketch the layers palette and just take it down to the bottom. Time for his face I think, got some really easy ease; let's go back and reset the Insert behind because it seemed to stop doing that, or of course you could use a Corner tool I'll do that over here, so just four simple taps. For the Corner tool, just round these off a little bit, bake the corners when you're done to make them editable. Just a little bit of a curve, the edge is there. I don't want its nose sticking up out of his face, I want it to end exactly where his head ends. So to do that, we need to make a clipping mask. There's two ways of making clipping mask. First of all, I can select his head, and going to the three dots edit menu, and instead of insert behind insert on top, I can do insert inside, we're going to use Pen tool to draw his nose and Node tool to make it the right shape. They're high then deselect. You can see that it actually ends where his face ends. On the Layers menu you can see that it's got like little sub layer which is the clipped portion. I can choose to move his whole head and it'll all move together, or I can just choose to target the nose, and then I can take that out of the clipping mask by just dragging the layer on top. The other way to do it is very similar to this. You just make the shape without having it as a clipping mask, so this is an independent shape you've made. Then if you drag that down in the Layers palette over the shape that you want to clip it until it's halfway down on the left, you can see blue line halfway across. You let go there, it will clip it. Maybe we should do the ice free hand. I'm going to go for the Pencil tool, give it straight quits, it's a bit too thick, you can always change it afterwards. Straight colors should be gold, and the fill color let's go for blue, you have nice blue eyes, I'm going to go for control and non, and then I go to the stroke studio and just bring all of those points up so that it's going to be the same width all the way round. For the center of his eyes, I don't want to stroke, deselect that, take the stroke width down to zero and stroke and fill colors so that we've got the same dark [inaudible] , and with the Node tool, I'm going to close that shape. It might not matter if you don't close the shape, but it's good practice to have all your shapes closed depending on what you're doing it can be important. We'll go back to the shape tools just to do the eyes stalks, I'm going to choose Insert behind from the Edit menu. Then back in the shape tool, let's convert this to curves so that they're editable. Then we need to smooth and do this for the shape tool as well, then I'm going to convert it to curves and use the Node tool to just give him a bit the smile. Deselect and use the Pencil tool, line only and make sure that the fill is not selected and just draw his teeth lines in. He looks like a zombie cute I think, we just need to do his bits and pieces there on his front. Go back into the Edit menu and do insert on top. He has got three dials, which should be really easy to make with a fill and a stroke color. Let's go for the polygon shape with five sides and see how that works out. I'm going to convert that curves. I am going to just move it a little bit and rotate it a little bit, and then I'm going to go to the top menu and I want to duplicate it twice. Deselect that, and we'll do his, I guess it's called a panel. Let's do that with the Pen tool. We've got a stroke and a fill color already chosen which I think I'll stick to. I'm going to duplicate that shape because we want another version inside it, and then using the Move tool, I can just scale up, down and move it back. But I'm going to click these little whatever they are inside this front panel. Let's choose the Ellipse tool. I'm going to take down the line width to zero. Let's go to the Layers palette. Please swipe across each layer, you can select two or three of them together. Let's group those and let's drag them down into the top panel to clip them, and then we are going to do just do the same thing with whatever-they-are's, then they're going to be clipped with a clip. That's interesting. Let's start by drawing them on top, so I'm going to choose Insert on top. I'm going to use the pen tool with a fill only in those stroke. I'm going to deselect that and draw stripe. On the Layers palette I'm going to struck this stripe down halfway over the cylinder below it to clip that. Then I've got the whole object selected in the last menu, and I'm going to duplicate that object twice. Then with the Move tool, move the movement to position. This middle one could be flipped just to make it look a little bit less like I've copied them all. To do that let's go into the Transform menu down here and just flip horizontal. Let's go back into the menus. Choose all three of those, and drag those down into the upper panels. These yellow stripes are clipped onto the red cylinders, and then the red cylinders are clipped into the front panel as are the orange pieces as well, so multiple clipping masks. I think he's actually done. Let's collapse that whole robot 2 layer, and I think that might just be waiting for a robot 3.
11. Stabilisers and Groups: Let's quickly make this third robot. I'll give him a new layer. It's a Vector Layer. I'm going to switch off the other two so they're not too distracting. Let's go into the menu and rename this one. I'm just really using the same methods as I've used for the other two. I have some lovely music. While I get on with doing him as quickly as I can. I'm just going to interrupt the music to show you something about the pencil tool. If you look at the bottom here it says, "Controller, None." If I draw a line, it might be smooth if I'm lucky but it might be just a bit wobbly. If you want to smooth your lines, you can press this tiny little arrow to the side. I meant to say there's "No Stabilizer" I'm going to choose a Stabilizer. There's two different stabilizers, a Rope Stabilizer and a Window Stabilizer. You just have to try them and see which suits you best, right? The Stabilizer I like it drags your line out as if it's on the end of the little right. The Window Stabilizer is also good. It's not that different, you may have a preference and sometimes it just depends on what you're doing, is to which it's going to be the best. Our three robots are all done. The next thing we're going to do is to put some textures over them. In order to do this, we need to expand all the strokes. For example, here is a stroke and if we go up here to the Edit menu and do "Expand Stroke", it becomes a shape. In order to expand more, we need to go into the Edit menu, we are going to "Select All", we are going to "Ungroup All". Only the items that have just been ungrouped are selected. We need to deselect, "Select All" again, convert curves in case we've missed any bits and we can see we have, because those are now currently selected. Now only the items which have been converted to curves are selected. Please select those, go in again and "Select All" and this time "Expand Stroke". Now, everything on the outboard is filled shape rather than strokes. At this point, you might want to go through and organize your groups properly. Say, for example, on my small robot, I've got every little single bit. Some of these bits will work better if they're single piece. For example, his teeth, I've just got lots of separate curves. I'm going to select all of those and go into my Edit menu and use the geometry, the Boolean operations to add those together so it's one single piece. That's going to make it easy when we're adding texture. Then as far as grouping, we need to group in a way that makes sense. For example, let's go down to the bottom and we have these wheels. They happen to be all together because I've put them there. But if they weren't, you can use the Move tool and at the selection and you can select them all, so I'm going to select the four wheels plus the four, whatever they're called. You can see that will select the Layers palette and after the top I'm going to press "Group". Then I'm going to go into the three dots menu and name this group, and I'm going to call it wheels. Just means that everything is a bit more organized, a bit less of a mess. I'm going to organize mine and I'll see you in a moment. This is much better now. I'm going to show you the layers. I've got the original drawing layer, which I don't need anymore. I've got the small robots and he's divided into the two bits on his front, which I'm no sure about the name. Look at his mouth, his body, his eyes, his radar, his antenna, his arms, his wheels. That's a much more sensible way of layering things and grouping things than just curve going right on your page. You can still get hold of whatever you want in a group. For example, if I choose this group of legs and start at the bottom of my place palette, let's say I want change his foot color. I'll just click double tap on the foot. It's expanded on my group, and it's already selected the piece that I want to change. In fact I've changed the other one too. Then I can just collapse that group again, it's still within the group I don't have to regroup it.
12. Vector Brushes, Gradients & Effects: Something I haven't shown you is the vector brush tool. I'm not going to be using this for our robots, but I'll just give you a quick overview. So the vector brush tool is what it says, it's a vector brush and put it selected at the moment. Down here, you've got the vector brush studio. Because it's selected, I can change the brush. The great thing about it is you can change the appearance of your brush anytime you like. You can also change the thickness, the opacity, the color. There are whole selection pens, they're chalks and pastels. There are acrylics, there are watercolors, all sorts of things. Let's pick maybe that one. I can use the Note Tool and I can edit stroke even after I've put it down, which you can't do with the pixel brush. But what you can't do this brush is outline the stroke and turn it into shape. So if I try and do that, expand the stroke, it still line. The reason I'm not using this with this particular tutorial is because I want to be able to use the pixel brushes on my shapes and you're not going to be able to do that with this. Anyway, it's a fun way of experimenting and in other projects, you might find this really useful. Let's have a look at how to add a gradient to your robots if you want to. I probably won't end up doing this but let me show you. The first thing to do is to select the object that you want to add the gradient to. If it's something that's in a group, for example, the leg, you can click on the group and then double-click on the piece that you want to put the gradient in. You choose the "Fill Tool", which is this one here. Have a look at the context menu at the bottom. The top circle is to apply the gradient to the fill and the bottom circle would be to apply it to the stroke. I'm going to leave mine on fill. Next one along is the type. At the moment it's solid because we have indeed got a solid color on here. Scrolling through, we've got linear. At the moment it's horizontal and you can see it's lighter on left dark corner on right. There's elliptical, radial and conical, all the different types of gradient that you can add. The next along is actually bitmap. You could use a raster image or photo, something like that to add into your robot. If you choose that one, it will take you out to your Files Menu where you can choose the bitmap. I'm going to go back to Linear. I'm not going to have it going horizontal like it is at the moment. I'm just going to drag down over the image so that it's a vertical gradient. You don't have to drag within the image. You can drag anywhere over it. A square to circle gradient. Let's make it a bit more obvious, so you can see what I'm doing. While you're drawing it down, if you constrain with one finger, it will keep your lines in angles of 45 degree intervals. Now, I'm going to click on the top circle here to choose my top color. Let's make that a little bit lighter by dragging over the "Color Studio Icon" then the bottom color, I'm going to make a bit darker. This is just making my gradient more obvious. I could just change the color as well at the top and the bottom. Really that's all there is to it with the gradients, so you can go back in and edit them. I'm going to just get rid of mine because I was happy with him how he was. We can also apply some effects. We can maybe target these buttons at the Selection Tool. Let's choose all of them by adding to the selection. Then I'm going to into the "Effects Menu" on the slide here, the Effect Studio. You've got various different things you can do. Something I might do here is the outer shadow. Let me pull that across. I'm going to click on it to go to the "Context Menu" at the bottom. You've got the Blend Mode, you've got the Opacity, the Radius. Let's up the "Radius" a bit and let's change the offset to maybe like that. You can see it's giving it more of a 3D look, which can be quite nice. I don't think I'm going to use it, but I may add that in later. Let's switch it back off to get rid of it. You can just go through and have look at all of these different things that are quite fun to do and they can make your objects really pop. Now it's time to start the fun part and do some texturings and coloring and generally enjoy ourselves.
13. Painting Pixels on Vectors: We can start painting over all bits of robots. Before we do, let's go into the Layers palette, make New layer, choose Pixel Layer, and drag it up on top. Then I'm going to switch off the visibility of the robot layers and this pixel layer is going to be used just to try out some brushes. We can scale up to the pixel persona, and we're going to choose the brush tool, and then we're going to open up the brush studio on the right-hand side. This is different from the vector brush studio, has different brushes in, and these are literally pixel brushes. Pick yourself a color and have a look through the brushes. We've got pencils and charcoal, scroll through, chalks and crystals, pens, markers, inks, oils and acrylics, and the gouache. Sprays and splatters are also very useful, and grunge, and then maybe we can go to watercolors, and effects and it'll show up your recent brushes, and, of course, you've got the context menu at the bottom where you can change the width, capacity, flow, hardness, and you can change your color. I encourage you just to have a play, and then we'll come back in a moment once you've chosen your favorite brushes for using on your robots. Try using both stylists and your finger and see what differences you get, because they quite come out the same. I quite like using my finger for this. Try dabbing, you get slightly different effects. Have a look how the colors react on top of each other, how they build up. Change the size, and just make a note of your favorite brushes. Once you've decided which brushes you're going to use, we'll just go back to the layers palette and we will delete that layer, and we'll make the robots visible again. I'm going to put a background in the effect persona. It's going to be on ozone layer, so I can switch it off later if you want to export the robots with no background. I'm going to go into the Layers palette, New layer, and we're going to make it the pixel layer, I'm going to put it on the bottom behind everything else. Even though I'm working on pixel layer, I'm still in the vector persona. I'm going to choose the fill tool and at the bottom, I'm going to scroll along until it says linear, so, I'm going to do gradient, and I'm just going to drag down from the top. Then in the color studio, the bottom circle of the gradient is highlighted at the moment. I'm going to change the color of that to this darker tail. Make it a bit darker. Then I'm going to tap on the top circle and choose a color for the top and de-select when you're done. You're going to get our brushes organized, so you need to be in the pixel persona to do this. Then I'm going to go into my paintbrush tool and the brush studio, I put all my favorite brushes into their own palate. If you want to do this yourself, you can go into the brushes menu. You do add category, and they will category, whatever you like so that it's different from the others. I've called mine mixed phase and then you go back to brush that you want to put into what new category. For example, if I want to do this on the dense water color tap on it, you can do duplicate. You go down to the bottom. It would've made one called brush copy. Tap on it again and you can rename it. I'm going to call mine sample and tap on it again and you get the choice to move to and then at the bottom here will be your new category that you've made next phase. Since moved it out of the water colors and into next phase. The reason I've duplicated it and moved it is that I still want the original brush categories to be the same. Let's get painting. Using the Move tool, I'm going to select his Upper leg here. If I tap once, it's selected, the whole group of his lakes here, de-select that and it's [inaudible] for now. If I were to double tap on it, it just selects that particular piece so you can see that over here in the Layers palette. Sometimes it's easier just to go into the Layers palette and go into the group and find the bit that you want to draw on. I'm going to zoom in on that. With that selected, I'm going to change the color and the reason I'm doing this is that I want the color to end up roughly how it is now, but I want to paint on a different color, so that it slightly shows through. I'm going to change that color now while it's selected, and before I've selected the paintbrush. Then I'm going to choose My Paintbrush, come into my favorites, and then I'm going to go back into my colors studio and choose the color that I want to paint with. A little pop up that just appeared, which said assistant. The assistant added a new raster layer inside the layer you previously had selected you are now painting on that new layer. It's made a layer inside the clipping mask. Looking the layers palette. Down here we've got the pixel layer that I'm working on, which are conceptual and it's been clipped into his upper thigh. If you go into the Layer menu, and the moment this layer is visible, and if he wants to work on the layer without it being clipped, you could just pick this so low. This is what the layer looks like really and you've got other things you can do you can change the opacity, can change the blend mode and you can even add more layers if you want to within this group, so, well, you've got this one selected if you add a layer, it could a pixel layer and that's just automatically clipped it into that group as well. I could go in and change the blend mode at that one relative to what's below it without affecting the layer below it, since it's quite a powerful option. The context menu at the bottom here has changed with our paintbrush so you've got various options down there too. You can change the width of your paintbrush and you can see the cursor down on the screen for that. You can change the opacity flow, the hardness. You can protect the alpha, or if you want to work only on the pixels that you've already laid down, you've got a color picker there and in this more section, you can do [inaudible] more changing the way the brush works. You can play with that. There's so much you can do. I'm going to get on with painting my robot. I'm not going from massively realistic look. But I'm just going to put a little bit of shading. I'm going for quite a hand painted scruffy look for my robots because I think as grandpa knocks these things together in his shed, he probably would have just used any old paint on them and it's all flaking off. Once I'm ready to work on the next piece, I just choose the move tool again, double tap on the piece I want to work on and it's all the same again. Then pay attention to the edges, make sure there's enough contrast with the background. [ MUSIC ].
14. Exporting Options: I've finished adjusting my robots, they're all ready to export. The first thing I'm going to do is just export a transparent copy and this is the simple way to export. I'm going to go into my Layers. I'm going to switch off the pixel layer at the bottom. But at the moment it's not actually transparent, so to make the background transparent I needed to go into the File menu. I need choose Canvas, and Transparent Canvas. Then back again in the File menu and choose Export. In the screen you've got a lot of choices. At the top you've got all the different file types that you can export. I can choose a transparent PNG. You can change various things. You can change the size, you can change your file name here. You can choose to export either the whole document or a selection with the background or selection without the background, or for whole document. There are so many different things here you can change. It's busy generating the export file at the moment based on my choice. Then when you're ready it tells you how big it's going to be, 26.54 MEGS, and choose Okay. That'll take you out to your files to choose where to save it. It comes to that and go back at the bottom left here it says Share, and this gives you all the usual choices you have an exporting with an iPad. I'm going to cancel that and let's put the background back. The other way of exporting is to go into the Export persona. I'm going to choose to Export By Layers, but you can export by art boards, by groups, by layers, by objects. I'm going to choose By Layers. I'm going into the Layers Studio and because I've put each robots in its own layer, that's how they're showing up. I'm going to pick this bottom layer and choose Create Slice. You can see it's put a mark around that little robot and the layer's showing as purple, which means it's ready to go. You can drag out these corners and choose to export a larger area so we'll give him a little bit of a margin around him or you can go into the Transform Studio and you can change the dimensions manually. Let's put the second robot and create a slice for him too and I'm going to do the same thing, just give him a little bit more room around him, and the same with the third robot to create slice. Let's have a look in the Slice Studio and see what we've got. That we've got each of the robot separately and then there's a choice to have the whole page. That sounds good to me. Before I export I'm just going to choose all of them, although you can do this individually. I'm going to go into Three Dots menu and I'm going to choose how I'm going to export it. I'm going to export them as PNG file and you can export it as standard size, which is the size you made it at, at double size or a triple size. I'm going to leave it as it is. Up here in the menu. I'm going to choose Choose Export Folder, and choose where I want to put my robots. I'm going to select and choose Open, and then I'm going to choose Export All. They will magically appear in your folders. From the main menu, if you press the little three bars and choose Save, it's just going to save a copy into your iCloud Drive if that's what you've chosen. It saving it in its original file format, in the Affinity Design format, which means you can edit both the raster and the vector layers. It's in my iCloud Drive, in the Affinity Designer file, or from within the document, you can go to the File menu and you can choose Save a Copy. You can choose to save the history if you want to and again, it's saving neat in a native format.
15. Final Thoughts & Project: That's it. We now have a bunch of robots and even better than knowledge of how to use Affinity Designer in your own workflow. I hope you had fun making them. This is what I did with mine. Please place your robots in the project section, I do always look at them and enjoy seeing them. If you enjoyed this class, please do leave a review, it will help others to find my classes too. If you want to be kept up to date with my new classes, be sure to follow me and do feel free to post in social media, using the #nicsquirrellskillshare. Thank you and bye for now.
Nic Squirrell, Artist and illustrator
