Isometric Art in Affinity Designer V2

1. Intro: Hello and welcome to this course on creating isometric art in Affinity Designer version to my name is Ben Nielsen. I'm immediate design educator with over seven years of experience teaching creative programs. And I'm very excited to welcome you to this course. In this course we're going to be going over the basics of how to create isometric art in a fashion designer version to a feed designer. V2 is a really perfect program for creating isometric vector art because it has special isometric tools that are built right into it. So it's gonna be a lot of fun to be creating this art with you during this class. Now, you might be wondering if you need to already know something about isometric art in order to take this class. And you don't, There's no prerequisite to this class. And you don't need to know anything about how isometric art is created because we're going be going over all of that and how to do it in a fashion designer. But what you might want to already know, because we won't be going over it specifically in this course, is how to use the basic tools. And if e1 designer, like the shape tools and the pen tools, or you might just know how to do that from some other vector art application that you've used before, like a vector Nader or Adobe Illustrator. They work very similarly. If you don't feel like you have that basic understanding yet, don't worry, you're welcome to pause here and just go to my profile page and find the intro course for a fiend design your version two. And you can kind of get up to speed that way. That course uses the iPad version, but it's very similar to what's gonna be happening in the desktop version as well. Now speaking of different versions of a famed designer, I'm going to be using a fashion designer, virgin chew on desktop for this course. You might be able to follow along, okay, in version one because it does have the isometric features, but not everything went be in the same place, exactly. So it might take a little bit of translation. You'll also be able to follow along if you're using your theme designer version two or one on the iPad. But things of course will look a little bit different on the iPad. Don't worry though, if you're using an iPad because I'm going to have a video that shows you specifically where on the iPad to access the isometric functions there on the iPad. Now, it is a little bit more difficult than the iPad because of the way the interface is laid out, which is why I'm going to use the desktop for the demonstrations in this course just because it's easier to see and to follow along on the desktop, that's pretty much all you need. Just make sure that you have a device that's running a fiend designer version two, you can use version one, but it might be a little bit more difficult. Okay, let's go ahead and get started. We'll dive in and talk about the project for this course in the next video. 2. Project: Every course that I teach has a project for you to do as you go throughout the course. This really helps you to actually learn the skill that we're talking about in the course. If you don't complete the project, then it's much harder for you to solidify the information that you are learning. So please do take the time to complete the project. The project for this course is going to be to create an isometric castle seen a castle keep is a really good initial way to learn isometric art because it is very rectangular and straight in shape. So it's an easy kind of on-ramp into the world of isometric art. But don't worry if you feel a little bit intimidated by that project assignment right now, because I'm going walk you through every step of the way. If you follow along with me in each video, by the end, you will also have a completed project. Now when you complete the project, makes sure that you export it as a JPEG, as I'll show you how to do in one of these videos and then upload it into the project section for this course. When you do that, it's really important that you make sure you upload it into the body section of the project rather than just the thumbnail. Thumbnails at the top, the body section is below. The thumbnail doesn't actually show me the entire picture. And so it's harder for me to get feedback when you only upload it into the thumbnail section. But if you upload it into the body, I'll be able to see the whole thing and then be able to leave you the best feedback possible. Now remember, it really, really helps us all to learn when we share our projects. So make sure you do take the time to export your final project and then upload it. This also really helps me as a teacher to know if my instruction is working as I see what you're able to produce after having taken the course. As always, if you have any questions along the way, feel free to reach out to me in the discussion tab for this course, and I'll do my best to answer those questions as soon as possible. Okay, in the next video, we're going to go ahead and talk about what isometric art is. 3. What is Isometric Art: At this point you might be wondering what isometric art is. Now, you probably have some idea what isometric art looks like or else you probably wouldn't have searched for this course in the first place, but you still might be just a little confused about what it is. Well, there is a technical and a mathematical definition to isometric art. And while that's useful, It's not really something that we need for this course because if feeding designer has features built in to do the isometric projection for us, that's kinda the technical name for isometric art is an isometric projection and it involves a bunch of different math and scaling things. Affinity Designer can do it for us. So we're just gonna use a simple definition for this course. For our purposes, we're going to define isometric art as being two-dimensional art that is giving the appearance of three-dimensional art by being drawn on three different planes. There's going to be a top plane, a front plane, and a side plane. Now if you've ever sketched out a cube where you could see like three different sides and you've shaded each side differently than you've already done something very similar to isometric art. Isometric art can be very, very useful for things like maps, buildings, and diagrams because it can help us to visualize things in a close to 3D environment without all of the work that goes into actual 3D rendering, it also just looks really cool. So you've probably seen on social media some really awesome isometric art drawings because it's just a great way to kind of envision fantastic worlds or particular spaces. It's just a really great art form. Well, now that we know a little bit more about what isometric art is, we're going to go ahead and get our document setup and Affinity Designer with an isometric grid. 4. Document Set Up: Okay, so here we are inside of a designer and we're going go ahead and make ourselves a new document and set it up for working with isometric art on this new document screen that you can see by either going up to File and click New Document, or you'll see something like this when you open up the app for the first time, you're going to see that we can choose from a bunch of different layouts over here, but we want our own custom layout here. So just where it says page width put in 1,000 pixels, and where it says page height put in 1,000 pixels. Now there's nothing in particular that says the isometric art should be in a square format. I just find that this is a useful canvas size to work on when creating the isometric art. And it makes it easy to share to a variety of places if you want to do that. The only other thing that we need to worry about here on this screen is to make sure that this create art board box is checked. That needs to be checked so that it will make an art board that's just going to make it easier in the future to create new art boards because we'll already be starting with one, and then we'll be able to use those art boards for different iterations of our final design. Okay, so go ahead and click Create now, and then we're going to get our new document with our new art board here in the center of the screen. Now that we have our document, all we need to do to finish setting up is to go ahead and turn on our isometric grid. Go up to the View menu. You can't see it in my screen recording, but it's at the top left. You want to see view. And then you're going to come down here to show grid. When you do that, the grid is going to be turned on. Now this is not an isometric grid right now, so we need to adjust that, go back to the view menu and then come down to grid and axis. This is going give us the options to change what the grid that looks like. So here we're going to switch our mode from automatic to advanced. And under the grid type, we're going to switch that to isometric. Yeah, you can see that our isometric grid is laid out in front of us. And so we'll be able to use that to guide what we do. Don't worry about all the other settings that you see here in this menu. There are a lot of them, but they aren't important for what we're gonna do in this course. So let's go ahead and click Close. Now at the document set up, we are ready to start learning about the isometric studio, which we will do in the next video. 5. Isometric Studio: Okay, In this video, we're going to go ahead and set up the isometric Studio panel. Now the isometric studio panelists, what makes it so we can avoid doing all that math that's involved in isometric projection. To open it up, you wouldn't go up to the Window menu, which again, that's one of those taught menus that you can't see in the screen recording, but it's just in the top-left corner of your screen. Open up the window menu. Now you can see this here. We go all the way down to the middle of the menu and choose Isometric. This is going to open up a new studio panel. You can see this studio panelists free floating right now, just here in the workspace. Now just like RStudio panels, you can go ahead and drop it into these different zones over here on the right-hand side, I'm just going to leave it over here for now because that will leave it very accessible as we are using it a lot while we're creating isometric art. Now the isometric Studio panel is divided into two different sections. The first one is the planes. You're going need to click Enable planes to turn that on. And now you're going to be able to cycle between the different planes. So remember when we're talking about what isometric art is, it's artwork that is projected into three different planes. So we have our top plane, which is what we're on right now. And now if we switch this to the side plane, you will see the grid adjust accordingly or to the front plane. So you can determine which plane you are working on by choosing from these buttons up here. And so you'll be switching through these periodically throughout your project. The second section down here is the plane editing options. So these are all of the actions that you can take on different objects in whatever plane you are currently selected on. The first one is just gonna be a toggle that you've turned on or off to let you edit in the plane. The second is a button which will take whichever objects you have selected and project it into the plane. We don't have an object selected, so it's not doing anything right now. So let me go ahead and get an object so I can show you how these two work. First, I'm going to grab my rectangle tool from the left-hand side and then I'm going to turn on Edit in the plane. Now when I drag out my rectangle, it's going to drag out in the top plane. You can see it there and it will snap to different portions of the grid as well. So that's Edit in the plane. Let me turn that off. And now if I grab my rectangle tool and drag out another rectangle, you can see that it is not in the top plane, even though I have the top plane selected here. To put it in the top plane, I can now click the fit to plane. And now it just like the other one is in the fit to plane. And if I switch to my arrow tool, I can move it around within the plane. In a later video, we're going to talk about the difference between these two methods and when you might be choosing one over the other, but we'll be using both of them during this course. The other four buttons here are all of your flip and rotate options. So it's going to be very similar to these buttons they find out here only this one will flip and rotate based on which plane urine. The last thing in this studio panel is the grid settings. This is just going to open up the exact same box that we saw before. And so you don't have to worry too much about that except that occasionally when you are drawing, you may want to switch back to the standard because then you'll have standard snapping as opposed to isometric snap things. But for now you can just leave this closed and that's it for opening up the isometric Studio panel. I'm going to go ahead and delete these rectangles now so that we can start off fresh in the next video. And we'll learn how to do the isometric actions in order to create a cube. 6. Isometric Actions on iPad: Okay, This video is to show you how to get the isometric options on the iPad version of Affinity Designer version two, if you're not going to use an iPad, you can go ahead and skip this video, but just like the desktop version, after we've made a new document, we then need to enable our grid, but we enable that grid from actually the preview mode, sub-menu preview mode is right up at the top. It looks like a little windshield wiper in the right-hand corner. And we need the sub menu which is just to the right. Go ahead and tap on that, and then you can turn on the grid. So once the grid is turned on, you can see that it appears here, but we need to go into the grid settings, which are also found under that Preview menu. We're going go to Grid settings, and that's going to open up at the very top in the context menu bar. And that's where we can go ahead and choose our grid mode, which in this case is going to be isometric. And so now we have our isometric grid here set up. Now we also need to be able to access our actions. So once we've turned on the isometric mode, we can access our isometric actions from the Edit menu, which is the three meatball menu here you can see we now have two new menus that appear here on the right-hand side. This Edit menu, the first one is planes, which allows us to enable the planes and then choose which plane we're in. And then we have the isometric, many of which has the edit in-place, fit in plane and the flip and rotate options. So let's go ahead and enable the planes here. Once we've enabled the planes, you can see we can choose which plane we're working on. So this is a little bit less convenient than the one on desktop where we actually have that menu that we can drag out. You do have to end up coming up here a lot. So let me just show you. I want to grab my rectangle here. I can drag out my rectangle and make it a square. Then I can go ahead and I can choose to fit it in the plane. Now of course, if I go ahead and turn on Edit in-plane and I drag out a new rectangle. We can do that as well. If I want to change my plane, I can go ahead and switch to the side plane. And then I could drag out a new rectangle in the side plane. So it's not as convenient as it is on the desktop, but it can still be done. So you can follow along with the other videos on your iPad. Just remember that your options are up here and you enable the grid over here from your preview sub-menu. Okay, let's go ahead and in the next video we're going to learn about these two different methods of isometric drawing. 7. Making a Cube: Okay, so as you might have been able to tell from the top two options in the isometric studio, there are two different ways to go about drawing the parts of an isometric picture. The first option is to edit in the plane. This means that you can draw out each different element on the plane where it will be in the final picture. This is the first way that we saw in the video where we were talking about how to use this studio. The second option is to fit an existing shape into the selected plane. In this way, you will draw everything out flat like a normal 2D artwork and then fit each piece into the correct plane. We also saw this in the previous video. So to illustrate how these methods actually work when you are creating something though, we're going to go ahead and create a cube. And we're going to start out by editing in the plane. We're going to go ahead and grab our rectangle just like we did last time. And we'll just go ahead and go ahead and drag out just one single grid space here. And now we have our top plane. In order to illustrate this, we're going to need to be able to change the colors to different shades of gray. So I'm going to change my colors here in my swatches panel over to grace. So now let's go ahead and do one in the side. So we're just going to swap our current plan, decide and make sure edit in plane is still turned on. And now we're going to drag in our side one. Let me make this one a little bit darker shade of gray. Then we're going to go ahead and we're going to do the same thing on the front and drag this out here. And we'll go ahead and make this an even darker shade of gray. I'll click off here with my arrow tool. You can see that we now have eight cube designed here. And that works pretty well because we were just able to draw it out. Now if I turn off edit in plane, now we're going to see how it works when we do the fit to plane. So in order to do this, I'm just going to grab my rectangle tool again, and I'm going to drag out another square. But you can see that it is flat because I no longer have edit in the plane turned on. So there's just a normal square. Now I'm going to duplicate that twice the way to duplicate this, to hold down Option on your keyboard, click and drag. I'm going to duplicate that twice to create the three squares that I need. Now I'm going to project them into the different planes. Let's go ahead and change the color of them first. So my top one, I'm going to make this light color, my side one I'm going to make the second lightest color, and I will leave my third one as the darkest color. Okay, So let's start with the front plane because that's what we're already on front is selected and I'm going to with my darkest one selected click Fit to play. Now I have the first side of my cube. Now let's go ahead and do the side. Let me switch to the side, select our middle gray square and fit to play. Now let's go ahead and drag these together and snap them together. We can zoom in by holding down Option and scrolling and just make sure that we have those snapped together. Now we will do the last one, change to top, and then choose Fit to play. Now let's go ahead and drag that in. And we now have a cube again. Now you can see to make it the same size, we're going to have to go ahead and scale it down. Holding down Shift. I'm going to scale this down to be about the same size as the other one. And now we've made two identical cubes using two different methods, the edit in the plane and the fit to plane method. So you can use these same two methods to deliver the same results. But depending on what you are doing, you may favor one over the other. The benefit, the edit in the plane method is that you can work in the final form so you don't have to figure out as much. You can kind of be more free flowing with your creation process. Whereas when you are working flat first, you have to figure out how each piece is going to fit into the overall structure without seeing it. But the benefit of working that way when you're going to projected in or fit it into the plane, is that you can plan everything out ahead of time. And it is much easier to create duplicate objects like we did for this cube than it is when you are drawing in the plane because you can't just duplicate from one plane to another. There isn't a way to do that. So being able to just duplicate that square several times or say if you're doing a building, you might have windows that are going to appear on different sides of that building. You if you wanted to be able to duplicate them all ahead of time, then it's really easy to do that flat before you actually get into the plane. So we'll use both of these methods at different times throughout the course as you're working on your project, feel free to use either one, whichever one you think is going to help you accomplish your purpose better. So now that we know how to use the isometric actions, we're going to go ahead and sketch out our ideas for our castle in the next video. 8. Sketching: Okay, so now we're going to go ahead and start working on our castle keep project. And now that we know how to draw in the different isometric methods, but in order to do this, we need to sketch first always, always, always when we're designing, we must sketch first. So I always go ahead and just sketch know normally I will sketch on paper on a sticky note or three by five card. But in order to make this easy for you to see, I'm screen casting here from the iPad, and I'm just using a free app called concepts where I can sketch. It doesn't need to be anything fancy. You just go into very, very roughly sketch things out. Again, I would normally do this on paper, but for ease of you guys being able to see it, I'm doing it here, so I'll just do a thumbnail and then I'll just sketch out my ideas. So my idea is to have a castle, and I'm not necessarily going for really getting in the isometric plane here, really just getting out my idea. And it can be very, very rough. It doesn't need to be good at all. I'm just roughing out the idea of what my castle keep might look like. I might have doors, might have arrow slits, might have some windows on the side. I'm just kind of getting out that idea. And then I'm thinking, well maybe I want to put a moat around it. So I might sketch out a little bit of a moat here. And then I go, oh, well if I want a moat and then I might want to have a drawbridge, and I just add that in there, even though it might not make a whole lot of sense with the door that I have in this current sketch. I can just kind of rough out my ideas. Then I'll move on and I'll get onto the next one. Again, it's gonna be a key. So these are going to look fairly similar. But in this one I want to try out a different idea for my key. And that is I want to have another wall surrounding it. So I want to have another castle wall that surrounds the Keep. And I'm just roughing it out. And the reason that we sketch is because this allows us to get ideas out far better than just thinking about them in our heads. Again, I might want to add in emote here. We can do this so much faster than we can if we just try and ideate in Affinity Designer, we can ideate on paper much, much faster. You can get out our ideas and really think about them and decide what we'd like best and what we don't like and we don't have to worry about color or anything. We're just sketching these concepts, these ideas. That's where you go in from. So I've got a couple of ideas here. They're pretty similar. You might want to just try and do maybe 34 or five of these and really get your ideas out before we jump in and we start designing. Okay, so that's sketching. Make sure that you do not skip that phase. It's very important. And in the next video, we're going to go ahead and talk about making the castle structure using the isometric tools. 9. Making the Castle Keep: Okay, so now that we've done our sketch, we're ready to go ahead and start actually making our castle. I'm going to go ahead and just move these cubes that we made over here. And we're going to go ahead and plot out the castle. For the castle, I'm going go ahead and start out by making my walls in the two-dimensional plane, not in the isometric plane. I'm going to go ahead and turn off in plane because I want to make one wall and then I wanna be able to reuse that wall for all four sides. So I will need two walls that are front sided and two walls that are cited, cited. Let's go ahead and do that. Walls for castles are pretty easy. All we need is our rectangle tool here. I'm just going go ahead and drag that out. Now you can make this longer or shorter depending on what kind of castle keep you're going for. I'm going for kind of a mid-sized one right here. So I'm going to do that and let me go ahead and change that over here now you can see that I have my color set to grades because working in gray is the easiest thing to do when you are designing for you adding color. The reason I like to work in grades is you don't get confused by color and color can be a very emotionally driven thing. I like to just work in the grace to begin with, because then I'm able to work faster and I can try out lots of different colors later. So let's go ahead and I'm going to change this to my light gray here and I'm going to get rid of my stroke. I don't want a stroke on that. So just using the rectangle tool, I've gone ahead and drawn that out. And now I have this rectangle here. And now I'm going to use rectangle tools to do the battlements across the top. I just zoomed by holding down Option and scrolling. And I'm going to do my battlements kind of like that. Now in order to just make many of those battlements, I'm going to hold down Option and click and drag that will duplicate on hold down Shift to keep it in alignment. So I'm going to put that right there. And then I'm going to get several of those by just hitting Command J, which is duplicated. And so it will just redo what was already done. Okay, So then let me drag this one to the end, select over all of them. And then up here in my Alignment panel, I'm just going to go ahead and distribute them horizontally so that everything is even between them. And I've got this nice little castle wall here. Now, the more work that I do here in the two-dimensional plane, the easier it's going to be for me to make all four walls later because it will already be done. So I'm going to use my rectangle tool to actually drag out rectangles to make the bricks here. And the reason that I'm going to use a rectangle instead of just doing lines with my pen tool here is because the rectangle will skew better into the isometric plane then a line, well, just because it has four points that make it up. So let's go ahead and drag out a rectangle. I still want it to look pretty much just like a grout line. And I'm going to fill it with one of my darker shades of gray here. I think I wanted to actually be even thinner. I'm just going to go ahead and make it nice and thin. And then to duplicate using my Move tool, I'll just hold down option and drag. And I don't want there to be too many breaks, but I want there to be kind of a fair number of breaths here. And then Command J to duplicate all the way down until I'm right about there. Good. Okay, So next I think I'm actually just going to duplicate this one so that they're exactly the same width. And we're just going to rotate that 90 degrees so that we can easily come in here and do the sides. I just wanted to make sure that they're exactly the same width. Okay, now we can go ahead and duplicate that Command J, Command J, Command J. And then let's go over here and our Layers panel, we're going to select all of our vertical lines here, just like that. Got it, vertical lines. And we can duplicate them, right like that. And then what we wanna do is make sure we've gone all the way down and then we're just going to drag them over just so that they fit right there. Let me go ahead and drag this one back. Okay, So with that in place, we can go ahead and we can select all of our verticals here. And we can duplicate down. So we will duplicate down and then do it again and again and again. One more time to the n there. Okay, now all we need to do is select these ones and bring those up. Okay, so now we have our castle wall all ready to go. So let's go ahead and select over that entire castle wall. Let's hit Command G on our keyboard to group it together. And let's drag it off here onto the side. So that's our wall. We're going to keep that so that we always have that to come back to. And now let's duplicate this down here option and drag. So with that one ready to go, we need four of them. So let's go ahead and do one too. 3.4. And then we're just going to go ahead and put them into the plane. So let's start with our side point, fit into plain, plain y, and we'll do our front plane fit into plane. And this one will be our front plane fit into plank. Now turning our snapping back on so that we can line these up correctly. We're going to just get these to snap into place to gather here. There we go. And there we go, and there we go. Now I can select over the top of all of these. And we can just scale that down a little bit to make it a little bit of space here on our art board. You can see that we've got our castle keep going on here, which is excellent. This is exactly what we want now that we've made the castle structure by drawing out the 2D elements and then projecting it into the plane, we can go ahead and decide on our lighting source and then we can light these walls to give it a little bit more of dimension, which is what we will do in the next video. 10. Lighting Source: Okay, so now that we've got our structure here, we can go ahead and decide on our lighting. And a lot of times I'll just grab a circle to represent the light. If we try to use the same structure for lighting that we have here with our cubes. We will have light coming basically from the top left-hand side. So I'm, we go ahead and drag out a circle here. Normally I'll just set this off the art board and I'll make it light so that we can see that that's bringing the light down. So if the light's coming this way, it's going to want to drag that just a little bit over here. It's going to light up the top and what we call the side face. That means that the front face is going to be the darkest. The side face is going to be the medium or mid tone, and the top face is going to be the highlight. So let's go ahead and adjust our castle so that it looks correct now. So grabbing this first group here, which is going to be a front plane, that means it should be dark. We're going to go ahead and open our group, scroll all the way down to the bottom of our group. There are of course, a lot of colors here. Let's make a subgroup for just our grout rectangles. Group there. That way we can change just those colors all at once. And we will grab all of our other rectangles here and we'll group those. And now we can change that color with just one click. I'm going to go ahead and change that to our darkest color here. And of course now we can't see our grout lines anymore. So let's go ahead and we want those grid lines to be darker. So we're actually going to make them black on this face because this is the darkest face. Now we just need to adjust the other ones. So let's go ahead and actually, it's going to be a little bit easier if I just duplicate that one. So I'm going to delete this back wall here and just click and drag this one over and make sure that I snap that into place there. Now I can take that group and I can just drag it beneath the others. Now, these ones here, we need to change their fills. So let's go ahead and make groups for the lighter rectangle here as well. And we want to change that to our mid tone gray. And it's fine if we keep the dark gray as the grout lines there. Same thing here with this one. I'm going to go ahead and delete this back wall and drag this one into place just so that you don't have to change the color twice. So now we've decided on our lighting. And so you can see how this is working out. Anything that is going to be on the side face. We are going to use our mid tone color for anything that is on the front face. We're going to use our shadow color for anything that's on top, which we don't currently have, we are going to use our highlight color for. Let's just see how that would work. Let's go ahead and edit in plane here and use a rectangle to draw out a top for this tower. Go ahead and make sure we're in our top plane. Come here to our corner and we're going to drag out a top for the tower. Now one thing that is critical in isometric design, a stacking order things stack on top of each other. So let's go ahead and set this to our highlight color and then closing down our groups here. And let's make sure that we can drag this back behind our walls here. Want to have these walls in the proper space here, checking on her stacking order. This one in front and this one in back. Alright, and now we can position this rectangle into its correct spot so that it looks like this tower has a top on it. And that's how we go about lighting it. The next thing that we wanna do is give it more of a three-dimensional field by actually building out these walls. These walls are exceptionally flat right now. We want to build them out. So we're gonna go ahead and do that in the next video. 11. Building Walls: Okay, so now that we have our lighting source set and we kind of know what angle we're coming from. We're going go ahead and build out this castle walls a little bit more so that they look a little bit more three-dimensional. Particularly we want to get some sites onto these battlements here and tops onto them. So we're going to try and build those out a little bit. The first thing that we want to do is duplicate our walls. So we're going to use Option drag to do that. And we're just going to drag these in a little ways to provide basis for the thickness of the walls. So as we do this, you can see that we have these two sides of the wall here and we'll be able to edit in the plane on top to build out the top of the wall. Now we do want to change the color of this base wall here. Let's go down to that group and we need to change that to the correct color, whatever it would be. The part of this that we're going to be able to see is actually going to be a side plane. So we're going to change that to D darker color for now. Now, it's on top, so that's not working out. So we're going to need to go ahead and drag that below our other group. So let's go ahead and drag that below. And now you can see how we're getting that side here. But in order to make this really complete, we need to go ahead and drag out top planes for this and edit them in the plane. So make sure that we are selected on top and edit in the plane, just like we worked for this roof. And now we're going to go ahead and create these sides. Now, grabbing our rectangle tool is how we're going to do that. It's a lot of rectangles here, which makes it pretty simple. Income in, snap to the corner and then drag out. And you can see that our color is not right. So we need to change that to our top-level color, which is our light gray. Now we're going go ahead and do that with the others. So I'm just using our snapping to get in place here. Alright, there we go. Now one thing that you might be wondering about is this part right here, that's kind of the bottom of the battlements area. And why is that dark? Well, that would be likely darker because it's being shadow as the light's coming down, it's hitting the tops of these and then it's casting that part in shadow. So we're going to leave it like that for now because I think that works, but you could come in, you could do another edit in plane and try and make that a different color, which we might do when we reach the coloring portion of this. But as far as grayscale goes, that's fine. So now we just want to do that for more times. There is a lot of repetitive work in isometric design. That's just part of it. So we're going to go ahead and just work on that doing this. So I'll speed this up, but you can watch me go ahead and finish this off. So this one is a little bit funny here in that the sidewall that we started with has now become the front facing wall because that's creating this portion here that would be on the front. So we have to change that actually to the dark color. So rather than changing the duplicate, we need to change our original here. So let's go ahead and do that. And that then creates that three-dimensional fight there. Sometimes you have to come in and just adjust these a little bit. When there are this many objects, there can be a lot of snapping targets and it can be hard to make sure that you've snapped to the right thing, especially if you haven't changed the color yet. So just coming back in here and just revising those a little bit can help a lot. Just slightly off the edge here. Okay, we just have one more to do here. And this is a fairly common technique in my isometric design is to do a duplicate like this to create basically a, another object onto which you can then use a snapping targets to draw out even other side. It's a pretty useful technique in that it makes it easy for you to kind of know where you're going to. So I'll do this with left and right sides and also with top and bottom. It does require a little bit of cleanup. And it's not as fast as doing the plane technique because I can just duplicate everything, but I find that it's easier to work on for things like this. You can see we're having a slight problem here with stacking order. This is why stacking order is so important to pay attention to. We need to get this one in front of our other back wall here. So let's go ahead and we will drag this up to right here. And then we need to get this rectangle up above that. Nobody can go ahead and fix it. And now we want to change the color of this back one to be a sidewalk. Let's go ahead and grab our color here to there. Now I'm noticing one thing here where this one, you can see an extra line coming through, which is not really what we want to have happening. So we're gonna go ahead and turn the lines off for that group. And that's fine. Now we just need to make sure that we fix the stacking order here again, we pulled this one up to the front because it should be on top to create that corner. So that's how you're going to use the edit in the plane to create the tops. You could also do this with the sides depending on what you are working on. Now you can see that there are parts here where they kind of disappear. The edges just aren't there. Now we can go ahead and take care of that in the details later if we really want to see the edge. But there are things in life that just disappear because they're being hit by the same light and you can't really see the distinction between them. So I'm going to say that that is okay for now. And now we have considerably more thickness to our walls. They feel more real. They feel like they have more weight to them. Then just flimsy paper walls that we had before. So we're having a slight issue here with stacking order. And this is a good example of where we might need to use a vector crop. The vector crop tool is right here above the rectangle, and this allows you to crop out part of an object. It doesn't get rid of it, so it's non-destructive, but it allows you to just take part of it a way you can do this from either side. So I'm going to go ahead and just roll this back here like this. And I've just cropped out the edge of that one castle wall so that we can see the correct lighting here. So using the vector crop is a great way to hide part of an object, particularly if you don't want to have to take the time to get rid of that object and the vector crop can solve your problem. So let's go ahead and click off of here. And that worked pretty well on there. So we're just going go ahead and leave it like that. Now in the next video, we're going go ahead and move on to adding in details to this to try and fill out the life of the castle. 12. Adding Details: Alright, now that we have our castle built and have it shaded correctly and have built out the three-dimensional wall to it. It's time for us to go ahead and start adding some details to this basic model here. And the first thing that I'm going to do when adding details is reference back to my sketch and see that I want some doors and windows here. So we're going to go ahead and do probably some kind of a door here and the base, and then some windows up along the top to try and show that there's at least two levels here. The other thing that I want to do is open up this area at the top here so that there's kind of a way up through it and we might even build a ladder to go in there. So let's go ahead and start building out these details. And a lot of this is going to be stuff that we've seen before. So I will speed up part of it so that you don't have to watch me do everything in real time. So I'm going to go ahead and build this not in the plane. So I'm going to turn off at it in the plane. And then using my rectangle tool, we're gonna go ahead and we're going to build it and we want it to be a door that is rectangular but then has an arch at the top. So we're going to go ahead and combine a circle and a square together for this. That's gonna do it. It's slightly off here. We just need to pull our midpoint of our circle up to the edge of our rectangle. So now we have this shape that we can use, and we will probably be able to use this for both the windows and the doors. Let's go ahead and drag this one off here so that we have our shapes for later, before we combine them. And I'm going to drag it back with an option drag to duplicate. And then I'm going to go up here to the top right and merge them together using the add command. We could use the shape builder tool for that, but it's faster to just do the add command rather than switching to another tool and that doing the draw lines, the shape builder is really better for more complex things where you have lots of overlapping shapes. So we want to build this door and we want there to be some dimensionality to it. So I actually think looking at this now that this shape is going to be better for a window, so I might save that shape before later. I'm going to just make this door a little bit more thick like this. Now to give it some kind of dimensionality to it, we want there to be some shading inside it so that it looks like it's recessed a little bit. And in order to do that, we're going to duplicate the shape. Again. We want to change the other shape to black. So we can create that dimensionality by offsetting them a little bit here. And that's okay, but really it's going to work better if the shadow is on the inside of the door and it feels like they are in line with each other. So in order to make that actually work, we're going to need to use a clipping mask. So first we're going to go ahead and duplicate our original shape again, right on top of itself by hitting Command C and Command V. And then we're going to flip the black inside of that shape. So we will need to use three of these identical shapes in order to create this effect. Because we need one shape to be the base color, one shape to be the darker color, and one shape to use to clip, because we want to be able to clip it into the shape to offset it. That's probably a little bit confusing. So let's just see how it works. We want to align these shapes up so that they are all in the same spot. Let's go ahead and select them all. And we'll just use the alignment tools to align their centers and their middles. Now, what we want is for the black shape to be kind of on the base. And then we want to be able to clip the gray shape inside of that shape to offset it a little bit to create a clipping mask click and drag onto the thumbnail of another layer, and then that will be clipped inside. Then within that new clipping group, make sure you're selected on the mask layer and then you can move it around. So in order to make this work, we can create this kind of shadow effect here. Now, we can take this shape and we can go ahead and we can put it into the plane. Now I'm going to save this outside of the plane just in case I need it later. So I'm going to drag this over here. And again, when you're working, it's okay if the area around your art board gets really littered with stuff because you might need those things later. So let's go ahead and make a group and G to group them and then choose fit into plain hopes were on the wrong plane. Change the plane to front and shoes fit into play. Then we can drag this over here and it can fit on top. Let's go ahead and scale it down. Now. That looks pretty good. I think we can probably adjust it a little bit. We're just going to reassess that a little bit further so that it looks like it's sitting further back, probably change the color here. So let's go ahead and change this color to the dark. Because it's already on the dark, that doesn't feel quite right. So we may need to change this one to black and change our shadow color to be more of a highlight to set it off so that there's more like light glinting off the edge. So let's try that with our Grace. Okay, that looks a little bit better because now you have this feeling that it's going back into there and you can't really see what's happening. There's definitely more that we can do to this and we may come back and add finer details later, but let's go ahead and add some windows to the other side. And we're going to do this in the same way. So grabbing our base shape here, I'm going go ahead and make a few copies of it. Command C, Command V, Command V. Now we have these two copies and we can color one of them to black or dark gray in this case because we're going to do the side window here and we can turn the other one into a light gray. And now if we clip it inside, will be able to move it around. So then we can grab this, of course, and duplicate it. Group these together, command G, and then choose our side plane and fit into play how we can bring this over here and scale it. Let's change the color. And now we've given some windows to this top-level here. The other thing that we want to do is add in that trap door effect here. So we're just going to do that by editing the plane. We can see it's just gonna be squares to change this back to top in the plane. And we're going to go ahead and drag out a square here. Kind of give us the feeling that there's something down in this area. Now in order to really make this work well, we really need to have this show two walls, darker wall on the back and a lighter wall on the right. And that will create the appearance depth there. Let's go ahead and do that by using the Pen tool to create a triangle over the top of this square. So at that triangle in place, we can now change that to the gray of the wall there. And we can change the bottom square to the dark gray, the wall there. Okay, and that gives us the appearance. Now we can adjust this to change how it looks. And that's why we use the pen tool here, because we can adjust the angle of the wall based on where that point false. So I'm going to place it right there because I think that makes it look more like it's going down. So now we have that in place. The last detail that I want to add in this video, because we could go crazy and we could go on forever with details. But the last detail that we're going to do in this video is going to be the ladder. We're going to be building out a new shape and construction to just add a little bit of detail that will show this ladder going down into this space here. And that will just help viewers to feel like it actually is going down. So to make it louder, What do I need the rectangle? And of course we're going to do this not in the plane, so that we can project it into the plane later. And a ladder is just a couple of rectangles with rectangles in-between. So not a very complicated shape here. And then we'll just use Command J to duplicate through the rest of the ladder, duplicate it so that we have a copy merger together with the add command. And now we can go ahead and put it into the plane. So let's go ahead and say Fit to plain ups on plane again. Oh, he's got to make sure you're in the right plane. So we want this to come up through here on this light side. So we're going to put that on the side plane and then fit into play. Now we can drag it into here, and obviously it's too big, so we'll scale it down and put it right about. They're still too big. So when I scale it down further, right there, I don't really care that it's showing over the top here because we're either going to hide that orbit when a vector crop it out in a second. Now we need to work with the ladder a little bit to get it to look three-dimensional. So let's go ahead and option drag, just like we've done before, to give some dimensionality to this, drag that behind and change its color just so we can see the contrast as we're lining things up here. So this is very similar to how we did the walls. And now we just need to probably add in a top piece here. So let's go ahead and using the top plane, we will edit in the plane and make a rectangle between these lighter color for now. And now we have this ladder here. So in order to complete the ladder, we need to group all of these together and then try to do a vector crop. If we can't hide this part of the latter with a vector crop, we will hide it with another shape. Let's go ahead and group them together, change to our vector crop tool and see if we can get it to look right. And we aren't going to be able to get it to look exactly right with the vector crops. So we'll vector crop it that far. And then we will use a hiding shape to hide this out using the shape of the same color here. So this is a technique that we use just to hide parts where we can't quite get them to layer correctly. If we wanted to layer this, we would need to make a cutout of this top piece and then bring that in front of the ladder. And that would complicate our layer stack. So I'm not going do that right now because I don't think we need to. I think we can just hide it with this piece. So just drawing a triangle around that. We will then grab the same color here. And now that is hidden and it appears to be going down into the castle itself. So just so I know what that curve is, I'm going to make sure that I name it. I'm just going to call it hiding ladder so that I know what that shape is doing there in the layer stack. Okay, so we've gone in and we've added some detail. We've added a door, some windows, and a ladder, as well as this interior space of the castle. So you can spend a lot of time adding details. So that's all I'm going to add for now. And in the next video we're going to go ahead and we're going to start adding color to this grayscale image to just bring it to life a little bit. 13. Adding Color: Alright, so now that we've gone ahead and added some detail into our work, we're now ready to go ahead and add color. And I just copied this color theme from color.adobe.com. So I'm just going to use that to Eyedropper in some colors here. Before we do that, There's a couple of things we need to do to set up correctly. First, we need to take all of our shapes that are off the board and we need to make them on an art board. So I'm going to grab the art right under the Move tool and drag on an art board to hold these extra shapes. We're going to need that because it will make it easier in the long run in order for us to add in the color. So let's go ahead and drag this extra circle just onto this board for now, that was showing us where our lighting was coming from, but we don't need that anymore. The next thing that we want to do, of course, is duplicate our art board here. So by collapsing this down and then selecting art board one, we can hold down Option click and drag to duplicate that art board because we still want to have our great match when we need it. So we're going to take my first cube here and I'm going to select the top. Then I'm going to choose one of these colors to be the top. I think I'm going to start off just by using the blues here to be the colors. Switching to the color picker tool is what they call it here. We're going to use like that and that's great. Then we'll select this side and we'll go forward. The next darker shade hit I on my keyboard for the eyedropper tool, and I on the keyboard again. And now we have earths to test how those tones look next to each other. And I think that's going to be okay. Well at least try it. We can always make another iteration if we need to select everything on our first art board and group it together. Now let's give our second art board here a name. We're going to call it color one. Just in case we want to do multiple colors. We want to go ahead and select all of this here. We're going to ungroup everything. And the reason that we're going to ungroup everything is because we want to be able to modify if everything simultaneously, that's more difficult to do if it's in groups. So we're going to come up to our Layer menu, which I know you can't see in this screen cast, but it's right there where this menu has now appeared in the Layer menu and we're going to go to ungroup all. And that should make everything its own thing now. So it was really useful to have groups before. It helped us out in positioning things, getting things in the right place. But now we have ungrouped at all here. We may need to fix a couple of things just because you can see that the ladder is now appearing in the wrong spot and that's because the vector crop has been released on it. So in order to fix that, we can of course just come down here and adjust where our little rectangle is here. To hide that. Now we can do some repositioning if we need to, but let's try adding in the color first and seeing how that goes. So looking at our cube, we now know exactly what we need when we select our top color here. Then we're going to go ahead and go up to the Select menu in the very top menu, which you can't see on my screen, but you can see it appear here. So go here and choose Fill color. Now, you can see that it reaches out and it tries to grab other things that are that fill color. But because we've grouped all these things together, it will be easier to de-select them now. So come up to your other art boards and just hit Command on your keyboard and click on it to de-select that art board. Now that we have that ready to go. Once you go ahead, use our eyedropper tool to just select the color that we're using for the top. So switching to I, we will click on the top. Now all of our top colors are in place. Now switching back to the move tool, we can go ahead and select Art site. Now with that done, we have done almost everything that needs to be done, but we still have some black in there. At this point, we need to decide if we want the black to be there or not be there because we added in black as a fourth color. So we may want to try something a little bit different, to adjust things a little bit with a different color, we may want to try using one of these other colors for our highlight color and then use this darker color for the part that is currently black. So let's go ahead and try that. In order to do that, we're going to go ahead and group everything on this art board together by selecting over all of it, command G, group that all into one. Then we are going to duplicate just like we did before, Option click and drag. And now we're going to ungroup all hidden layer and group all. And now we'll do our test tube here, beige color as the highlight color here. So I dropped her that and then with the side color, we'll go with the lighter blue. I dropped her that. And then for the front color, we'll go with the medium blue. And we can compare that with the cube below it to see how we like that. And then we can keep this darkest color for what we had done in black. So let's go ahead and try this again, selecting our first rectangle here. We will go up and go to Select Same Fill color, just like we did before. In this case, it wants to select things over on color. One. We're going to go and make sure that we undo that. That's the whole thing. That's like nothing makes sure that we de-select this side here. And then we'll go ahead and I drop it. Now we just need to get our blacks by selecting one of these. And then we'll do Select Same Fill color on that. And we'll Eyedropper in our darkest one here. Okay? And then we can compare these two color schemes together. And we can decide which one we like better. And we can make any individual adjustments that we need to e.g. I. Might try the lighter color on these ones here because I think that might look a little bit better. I just gives us a little bit of a different vibe. And so you can see how you can go ahead and add color into your existing model and you can look at all of them to see. So go ahead and set up your color theme and then try color variations to get what you want. I know the process for using Select, Same as a little bit complicated, but it does save you a lot of time in the long run over actually going through and selecting each object individually and resetting its color. 14. More Details: Okay, so now we have this mostly completed here. We've done the castle keep and really we could end this project here. But I wanted to just go through and show you how I would add in more detailed, more flavor, more vibrance into this particular project. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. But you already know all the basics about editing the plane and fitting into the plane. So I'm just going to let you watch me just so that you can see me do this. And of course I'm going to speed it up so that you don't have to watch it in real time. Okay. Let's go ahead and get started. Okay, One of the things that I'm doing here is I'm adding in these little highlights on this remote area just to kinda show that it's water. Of course, using a limited color palette like I am, I don't have as much control over what the colors look like because I'm really just doing the sides. But one thing that I can do is adjust the Blend Mode. So I'm using the same color here, but to create the highlight that would kinda be shimmering on the water, I'm using the Screen blend mode here. So for highlights, I'll use screen and if I want shadows, I'll use multiply. So that just kind of gives you a little bit more flexibility in how your stuff looks. So we've kind of created this moat area here. I've given these windows, little ledges just so that they have a little bit more depth to them. I'm just going to add in a few more details here as I go along. So now I'm trying to create this bridge element here just to add a little bit more detail. And this is one of those things that's going to require a little bit of manual fudging care just to make it work when you want to change a regular shape and adjust its points, which I was doing with these windows cells here, you have to convert it to curves. When you have it selected with your Node tool that you can adjust the individual points, come up here and click convert to curves. So once that's been converted to curves, you can then adjust the individual points. So you can see here, one of the things that I need to do is really be able to move these points in to attach them to the semicircle here, because I want it to appear curved. So it's a little bit more tricky than working with flat shapes if I wanted to at least give you a little bit of exposure to the way that this is. So let's go ahead. I'm going to change this to my top color for now so that we can see what's happening. And we're using this semicircle as a guide here. But we're going to make the manual adjustments to each of these planks as we put them in. I know there's some gaps here between these boards. That's fine. There would be gaps between real board. So I'm not really worried about that matching up perfectly. But this just gives you basically some idea how you would go through the manual process of doing something that's more organic, less rectangular shape here. We can go ahead and see what this looks like without the semicircle. Let's go ahead and grab our entire block of curves here and just see if we can place them in a different area. I think we can delete these semi-circles and then we will want to come along and just add a little bit of dimension to the boards here in the side plane. So make sure that we are on our side plain color here. We'll go ahead and convert this to curves and adjust our actual points. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll just hit Command C, Command V to paste in place. And then taking my point, I'll leave these right to most points in place and then drag these out to match them. That can make it a little bit easier. Just copying and pasting each thing. They're just bringing it down here. That a little bit of depth to it there. And you give a little bit more definition to these planks. I could try adding in a stroke on them here. Give them a little bit more definition there. Then we have this little bridge that's going over the mote that is giving us a little bit more detail into our castle here. And now we have our castle here with a little bit more detail, a little bit more life to it. Obviously, there's a lot more you could do. You can spend a lot of time on your isometric designs, adding in details. We're not going to get into adding in plants or people here, which is how you often fill out kind of the scope of an isometric design because those are a little bit more difficult topics. And this is just the beginners course here, but this will take you far enough and I'm very excited to see your castles. In the next video, we're going to learn how to export this image so that we can share it. 15. Exporting: Okay, Now that we have a completed little castle scene here, It's time for us to go ahead and export this project. Now the first thing that we're going want to do is make sure that we can easily find it when we're exporting it. So let's go ahead, will collapse down our art boards here so we can easily find the one that we're working with because that'll make it easier to export. And we're going to change this one to be called color tube because it was our second color scheme. And then we're going to go ahead and actually export this art board. But before we do that, I want to select these cubes here and just move them off because I don't need them to be exploited. I just want this scene to be exported. I'm going to go up to File and choose Export. And the export dialog box will open. You can see that it's showing us what has been selected. You can see here where it says area that the area that's being exported is colored two. Now if we wanted to do one of our others, we could select a different art board. We're just doing color too for now. You can see that our size is set to 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels, which is what we set up at the beginning. Of course, we could adjust that here if we wanted to change our file size. And you can see that our estimated file size is 316 kb, which is really, really tiny because this is just a very simple vector object. With all of that set accordingly, we can go ahead and export this. We don't need to worry about these advanced settings right now. Go ahead and click Export. You're then going to get a chance to save this onto your computer, give it a name. I'm going to call mine isometric castle. Keep. And go ahead and click Save, and that's all you need to do. Then you can go ahead and open it up. And here's the opened up file in preview. You can see that it has been completely export it. And now we could use this wherever we want, including bringing it into our project. So make sure that you do. Go ahead and do that. Alright, in the next video, we'll go ahead and talk about your next steps. 16. Next Steps: Alright, you made it here to the end of the course. I hope that you've enjoyed learning a bit more about isometric art and how to make it in Affinity Designer version two. Now you might be wondering what your next steps are. Well, first off, if you haven't already go ahead and turn in the project, make sure that you export your castle as a JPEG and then upload that into the project section of the course. Again, remember to put your image in the body section of the project so that I'm able to see the whole thing and not just the thumbnail area at the top. Now what do you do after that? Well, you probably want to keep learning some more about the affinity programs. Fortunately, I have quite a number of courses here for you both for affinity version one and version two, depending on what you're using, what you want to learn. So I have courses on a theme designer, but I also have courses on Affinity Publisher and a fee photo as well, so that you can learn to use the entire suite. So make sure that you go to my profile to check out more of those courses that you might want to take. There's also a number of different classes in isometric art here on Skillshare that are taught by different teachers. So you might want to go ahead and check those out as well. If you want to keep leveling up your isometric art, some of them might not use affinity, but now that you have the basics for how it works in infinity, you should be able to take the skills they teach in those courses and apply them to Affinity Designer. As always, if you have any questions, go ahead and ask those in the discussion tab. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next course.