Shape Building in Affinity Designer - Vector Graphics Fundamentals

1. Introduction: Hey, I'm Mark. During this class I will show you how to draw over 70 different vector shapes. Why do we need to focus on vector shapes? You ask? Because everything we draw using Affinity Designer or other factors, software is actually just assembled from simple shapes. So beautiful logo, I call a vector illustration you saw can be deconstruct into basic shapes. If you can deconstruct that, we can also build up. We can assemble anything we want if you know how to draw basic shapes. I have prepared our digital world book for you. So after each class you will be able to open this file and draw all shapes we have learned in lesson. One artboard is for one lesson. This way you can practice just after you finish watching the video. First few artboards are really easy and basic, but then later I will show you even more advanced techniques this way, as I mentioned before, it will be able to draw 70 different shapes. Using that knowledge, you will be able to assemble beautiful icons, illustrations, logos, and clip art. I will see you in the first lesson. 2. Lesson 1 Basic Shapes: Welcome to the lesson one of this class. Before we can start, you will need to prepare yourself. You will need to download this workbook. I have prepared for you. So you will have exactly the same document asked me. I put nice gray guidance on each artboard for you so you will know what shape you need to draw. For each lesson, we will only take care of one artboard. Alright, so don't be overwhelmed after you open this workbook, done multiple art boards. But we will do them one by one, lesson by lesson together. First, I will show you what to do. Then you will do it yourself on your workbook. And after that, you can move to the next lesson. Let's get started with the first one. In this lesson we will talk about very basic shapes. We'll start small and then lesson by lesson at more techniques and tools. Okay, here we are in very first art board called basic shapes in our digital workbook. So our goal for this lesson is to draw eight easy shapes. Before we start, let's set up a color. I'm using sliders on the right side to customize my color. I'll be using bright orange so you can see it easily on this gray color that is already there on our art board. And I recommend you to use a bright color like this as well. So I got my color here. Fill color is setup. We don't have any stroke color. Ready to start. I'm using rectangle tool right now. Holding my mouse down, I can draw any rectangle I want. If I hold shift like this, I will keep the proportion one-to-one. And I can easily make a square like this. You can always pick Move tool and click on the object already drawn. This way, you can adjust the colors after the object is already on our artboard. We can also add a stroke color here. This way you will have this outline around the shape. In Stroke panel. We can adjust the look of that line. We don't need a stroke for this project. I will kick it out and I will stick with the fill color only. All right. We can always re-select your shapes with Move tool. You can also use Move tool to transform shapes. You can adjust size, you can even tilt them like this. This talk them in few other ways. Like we got rotation. We can move them to the right side. So the move tool will provide you with basic editing needs. All right, Let's move to the second shape. As you can see, we've got circle here. We can use oval tool and it's work exactly the same. Hold your mouse down to draw, hold Shift to make a perfect circle. We can also draw the circle from the center. To do that, simply hold Command key on your keyboard. Then you won't be drawing the shape from the center. We can also combine this with shift and wrinkled perfect circle. Next is polygon. So let's open this menu over here. This one is a little bit longer. We got multiple shapes here. Let's start with polygon. Click and drag to draw a shape. So I'm holding my mouse. Here it is. The last one in the first row is star. Again, we got special tool called Star tool for that. It's really easy. And this set rectangle, circle, polygon and start as a standard set for AB, any vector creation tools. And in fact, editing program will need all of them. But here in the bottom line, We got some alternative version of edge shape. So let's take a look. First is square, but with rounded corners. We can change corners over here at the top. We could also this slider so we can control them precisely. Next thing is just half of circle. We got a special tool for that. There are three tools actually that surface similar purpose here, we will test the PIE tool first. Let's use PIE tool. Here's Pi tool, and now we can make adjustment by pulling this orange control point. And this way we can very quickly draw just half of the circle. Next is triangle. Let's use Polygon Tool again. Because this is kind of the classic approach. You use Polygon Tool then reduce the number of sides to three. And this was a way to draw triangles for long, long time. Luckily for us, Affinity Designer and got dedicated to four triangles. We don't need to do that every time. We can just use the dedicated to, and here's triangle. We can even control this triangle more precisely thanks to this dedicated to just one shape left for this first lesson. This is double star. Then take a look. There is special double star tool. We don't need to actually merge two separate stars together and we can just use double star tool. And here it is. All right, and this way you can draw all eight shapes from the first artboard. Now it's your turn. So please head to our digital world book, zooming into the first art board and draw all eight shapes before you move to lesson number two. 3. Lesson 2 Smart Shapes: During our first lesson, we covered basic shapes on our first art board. That's done. It's time to move to the second artboard called smart shapes. We've got eight more shapes here that a little bit more complex. And we're going to use smart shaped tool to draw them. So there'll be a smart control for us to alter the shape easily and quickly. Alright, let me show you. We're going to use this tool on the left here, the lowest one down multiple smudge shape beneath it. If the tool could different icons, That's because it showed the last selected shape. Today we're going to start with this square star. So it's like star, but it could score arms like this very handy tool. We can just draw it from the center as I showed you before by holding Command on your keyboard. Here it is. And take a look. There is orange point that I can drag. This is how you can alter the smart shape easily. If you see orange points on your smart shapes, means there is a way to alter the look. We can also use the menu at the top context menu will also alter the shape. We've got the slider exactly for the same thing. There's one more here. We can decide how many arms do we have here? Very quickly, quickly just by moving the slider. Alright, next shape is circle the whole insight and a special doughnut tool for DAT. We don't need to make like two circles and then do some operation. There is a built-in tool for this kind of shape. Again, hold the Shift together proportion to have a perfect circle. And if you double-tap on it with the move tool, you will see two orange points. So orange points are smart controls that can alter this mode shape really quickly. Take a look. That's really smooth process. If you see orange point on your shape, there's a way to alter the shape. Very handy staff. Alright, and the next smart tool we're going to use is super underrated and very powerful tool here. And as you can see, it is quite complex shape if you want to draw it by hand. If you use this tool regardless shape in seconds. And more than that, so many smart control points in this tool, we got five different smart controls that we can adjust. And we can turn this shape into anything we want. This tool is really, really powerful. We'll play with it later as well. Just want to remember that these to exist. So many people that switching to Affinity Designer from other vector software like Adobe Illustrator, vector knitr Enscape. And they get used to basic shapes like circles, squares, and triangles so much that they totally forget about our smart shapes selection here. All right, The next one is very unusual. One bigger, this teardrop droplet shape over here. That's also very nice. We got to stop shape quickly without altering any ordinary shape. And it's done. So smug shapes. We've got four down, four more to go. And as you might notice, most of them are actually exactly the same tool. So this is also R square ending star, but I simply modify some smart controls. I pull this down. I increase the number of arms. And this way you produce and totally new shape by using smart controls. All right, For the next one, I not going to use doughnut tool. I will use PIE tool because they got exactly the same set of smart controls. So even though this is PIE tool, we don't have whole inside here, but I can make it by pulling this smart control. And it's the same for donut to, I can open it on a tool as you saw before and turned into PIE tool. Actually done a tool by TO are very, very similar. They got exactly the same control so you can alter one to be another very easily. All right, two more to go. And this flower-like shape is actually also the same tool I used before above it. So take a look. We just need to make some changes using the controls, so reduce the number of arms here. Then we can make this holoenzyme much larger. We will make this one to be spiky like this. And then we will add the curve to it. So it's a little bit round and it's more like a flower shape now. Right? And there's one last shape for us to draw on this second art board. Look-alike flower a little bit. It's not a star. It's actually smart tool called Cloud tool. Take a look. There is something called Cloud tool here. If you use this tool, you will end up with little cloud. The edge is Bill of circles like this, but we can alter them by pulling this orange smart control down. And we turn this cloud into a flower really quickly. All right, that's how you can draw smudge shapes from our second artboard, right? Feel free to experiment a little bit with different controls. You can see controls are marked with this little orange circles on shapes. Alright, please move to your digital workbook right now and draw shapes from the second artboard. And I will see you in lesson number three. 4. Lesson 3 Boolean Operations: During this lesson, we will work on our artboard number three, all about Boolean operations. Let me get started with simple circle here. I'm going to right-click and duplicate this shape. All right, Let's move it to position. And how can we join two shapes together? First, we need to select them both and like this. And then from the top menu, select. This way, we can turn two shapes into one. Alright, I'm going to click Add. Now take a look. I got just one shape. Now I'm forming new shape from two circles. Now I'm going to show you second way, alternative way. So I got two circles again. And before I click Add, I will hold Option key on my keyboard. Take a look for this difference. I see this new shape here, but on my layer panel we've got compound shape. So I can still open that. And I see all building blocks for this shape so I can modify the circle that was there first, even after I joined them. So that's the only difference. Dot compound shapes are more editable later on. To keep this lesson simple, I will stick with normal Boolean functions like this, just joining shapes together. Alright, let's move to the second one. Here we got a square. I will make a duplicate by dragging with Control or Command key on my keyboard like this. Select both. And for this one I will use subtract. Second function and take a look subtract, helped me to cut out the whole. So the top shape was used to cut out the hole in the button shape. Alright, let's get ready for action number three. With this circle, I think I need to make it a little bit larger like this. And then I will make a copy of that at this time. Command C command V, copy and paste shortcut. Position this one here similar to the first one, but let's use different function now. We will intersect. Take a look. This way. We keep only the intersecting part. Everything else is gone here. Very, very handy function. Alright, let's move to the bottom line here we got a heart shape. Luckily for us, Affinity Designer, I got, I'm ready to use hardship tool. We don't need to draw with ourselves, so let's just put it in position over here. Then we need a copy of that. I will just drag with Command key on my keyboard to make a duplicate bit of rotation resizing. And this time we're going to use x or function Exclusive OR take a look. We kind of Meghan opposite to our previous one. So instead of intersecting this intersecting part in the center, now it's empty. So we delete the intersecting part. Right? Here's our next example. Next action, actually the last one on the list that we need to learn today. So let's create this rectangle here, the square. What kind of action should we use that will allow us to take this center part away from this shape. So the last one on our list is called Divine. Take a look. Let's select both shapes and pick the last action. It will divide this into three separate shapes. Alright, now I can pull everything separately. Take a look. Nothing is joined together. Any longer. This action will divide the shape for smaller shapes. So we know all five Boolean operations right now. So let's make one more chance for practicing. We will use arrow tool for the last one. Doesn't look like arrow tool, but I telling you this is the one that we want to use here. With few modification, we can easily changed this arrow into shape. We want, take a look. We already know about orange control points in smug shapes. So let's use that, not this one, but over here, tau. Now simply duplicate this existing shape. Alright, It's not exactly what we need to take a look. We've got this little gap here. So how can we get this effect? Very easy. So let's duplicate the one on the top. And only purpose of this duplication is to make it larger and use as Subtract Shape. That's very common practice by working with shapes. So I'm going to click, Subtract and use this shape at the top to cut the hole in the bottom shape and the shape at the top disappear in the process. Sometimes you duplicate shapes only to use them for some kind of Boolean operation later on. Alright, That's our lesson number three about Boolean operations. I will see you in the next one. Next one is our mini project. 5. Lesson 4 Ice Cream Illustration: Okay, Let's put everything we learned so far into good use. Our next outboard is many project. We're going to illustrate this ice cream here. We already know all about basic shapes, smart shapes, and Boolean operations, so we should be able to do it. On the way. I'll also show you a few new tricks as well. Alright, let's get started with our shape tool. We can detect which shapes we need for this illustration. As you can see, we got three circles and one triangle and extra rectangle. All right, so I draw my first circle and now I'm going to duplicate this with the trig I showed before. So I just drag while holding command key on my keyboard. All right, next step, our triangle. We need to add some rotation to it, hold shift for snapping like this. And the final shape when it is rectangle with rounded corners. Over here. Everything in orange now, so let's change that. I will select those two shapes and now you can use sliders, you can use, we'll ask, well the wheel is like default way of picking colors in Affinity Designer, so we'll use that here. We get a new color for con, for our triangle. Let's modify the color of ice cream. Alright, this will be something like blue, yellow, and pink. Alright, since like we got all buildings, building blocks in here. So let's reposition elements. You can say good snapping turned on so I can see additional guiding lines here under appearing. So I can position my shapes easily. This one should be on the top, so let's drag it above others on the layer panel like this. Now, we'll position this at the top here. In the center, I can see this nice extra guiding line. Here's the snapping option. You can turn it off like this. And when I turned it off, I cannot see extra guiding lines. So let's turn it on again and take a look. Now, my shapes are snapping together. Very, very useful. Alright, seems like we got basic shape here. Now we will just add a few more details. So first illustration, we got this melting ice cream here. How can we do something like this? Let's go with rectangle first. I cannot really say it, so let's drag it up on the layer panel. Here it is. All right, let's just adjust the corners now. Change forms from Steve to round corners. And now the radius to be really, really high. We got like the circle at the end. And quick duplicate of this over here. One more here at the top. Now we need to change the color of this one. So I will use color picker, pick disc, yellow, and now I can use it from here. It seems like the top part is almost ready and just one little element, this shine here. How we can do this, we can use smart shape for Dan. Let's go with the smudge shape over here. Modify the color to be brighter like this. Now, we can use orange control points as we remember, if we alter the shape, a little bit of rotation here and we tried to position this. In this case actually this snapping is pulling my shape to different positions I want. So I will turn off the snapping for a moment. I can position this one exactly where I need. Then I turn it on again. All right, the top part is finished. Let's move to the bottom part of this illustration. As you can see for this element, we should use gradient. So the gradient tool and draw the line from the top to the bottom. Let's switch the colors like this darker app. You can modify the colors from here. In my case, I'm a really happy with this color they gave me, so I'll keep it, maybe I'll add a little bit of noise here. So I go to texture. This is vector, nice, so you don't need to be worried about data, about scaling. Alright, the last element, how we can make this texture here. Let me show you how we can add texture to this element. I will zoom out a little bit and I will pick rectangle tool. Let's draw a rectangle here. I will change the color to black. Now I will duplicate by dragging this element y holding Command key. Here's my duplicate. Now I want to make one more duplicate with exactly same transformation. I want to move it down again. I can use power duplicate function here, edit, and duplicate. Command J is the shortcut for it. As you can see, not only make a copy, but also move this copy at the same distance. When you use shortcut Command J, you can do it again and again and again. Very handy feature Power duplicate not only copy objects, but also copied transformation. I will duplicate all of them and rotate. Now I select all black rectangles, the vertical one, horizontal one altogether. We already know how we can add them all together to create a new shape and add function on the top. And here it is a new shape made of multiple rectangles. Rotation, scale it down a little bit. Alright, so how can we hide unnecessary part of the shape? We just want the one overlapping web.com. I will show you one more trick called masking. We can actually drag this kind of like under the existing shape to mask it out. Click on it on the layer panel and drag it inside the existing shape, not below, but inside. More like this. This is below and this is inside. Here it is. We mask out the unnecessary part. It's still there, but we cannot see it. Perfect, Let's change the blending mode for this texture to overlay and reduce the opacity. And here's the effect we want. All right guys. So we kind of test out our knowledge so far. Plus we add few more tricks with masking, with dragging shapes inside other shapes. Okay guys, I think we are ready to move to the next lesson, but before that, don't forget to draw your own ice cream using our digital worksheet. All right guys, it's your turn now, so please draw your ice cream and then I will see you in our next lesson. 6. Lesson 5 Pencil Tool: In this lesson we're going to explore pencil tool. So let's swap our fill color with stroke color, like this. And now we are ready to draw the line. We can also decide about width of the stroke here. Maybe like this. Let's select the pencil tool here on the left. Let's try to just draw this line here. As you can see, the program tried to stabilize my stroke. I'm using mouse right now, so that's helpful. All right, Here's my line that they draw using pencil tool we have stabilized on. Let's switch it off. Now the line appear direct directly after the tool is a little bit less smooth. All right, let's delete this one and try again this time when we switch the mode, there are two modes how we can stabilize your tool. So let's switch to the first one and try again. This one is even better, in my opinion, even smoother, we've got less points. That's good frame. You can adjust the late of it. So if you just make it longer, you will have even smoother curves like this. That's kind of cool way to use this tool. It's filling like you're dragging something behind your card, line is appearing behind the tool. It's much easier when you are a mouse user. All right, and let's modify options once more for the second line. Back to this mode. Make this shorter this time. This way I'll be able to make turns easier if you've got very curvy turns like this. If the line that stabilize my tool is too long, it will be really hard to determine like this. You need to adjust. Stabilize depends on what kind of curve you want to draw with this pencil tool or you can switch it off completely if you're using, for example, tablet, who got better input device in mouse? All right, Let's try to draw closed shapes. All right, and as you can see here, the shape didn't enclose itself and dads are missing feature in Affinity Designer. Unfortunately, it was, it's still not resolved after waiting for more than four years now. So we need to do the trick. I need to click out. I need to use Boolean function to close the shape myself. The line will not close the shape. We need to click. To close the shape ourself. As you can see, I've been using the sculpture of feature. Let's turn it off for a moment. I will draw half of the shape and then I will try to continue without sculpture turned on. So instead of joining the existing shape, I end up having two separate parts. So that's what this capture feature is for. If it's turned on, you can continue drawing the line you left off. If it's turned off, you will always draw a new shape every time you use the tool. Let's do it on a draw this part first, I stop and I can continue now. This will be still one shape. All right, this is one shape but it's not close. Let me show you this is kind of missing feature in this tool. We cannot force close the shape, this little gap here. To fix that, we must click art. Boolean function art were created the line in-between. Like this. Alright. Let's draw the final shadow shape on this art board. So kind of organic, hand-drawn triangle. I encourage you to play with stabilisation to slider so you can kind of fill it for yourself. And here it is. And again, it's not a closed shape. I must click art after I finished drawing shape. That's the kind of trick that we need to use here because we got missing feature, we cannot force the pencil tool to draw closed shapes here, repeated designer. Alright, as you can see, this pencil tool is not very precise. So in the next art board, I will show you how you can go back and fix your lines and shapes with not to see you in the next one. 7. Lesson 6 Node Tool: During the previous lesson, we use pencil tool is a little bit messy and precise, so it's perfect moment for us to introduce NO2. No2 will help us to fix and customize existing shapes. It's over here. Look like white cursor. Take a look. This little white cursor can move notes, move points around. So we're not going to move the whole shape, but only nodes only points. The black cursor, the move tool on the very top move the entire shape. But the white one denote to move only one note 1. Unlike this, this way we can customize and modify any shape. Alright, so let's try to draw some new shapes using this node tool. So in this exercise we're going to draw shapes with shape tool like this. And then we will convert each shape two curves. Clicking this button at the top, convert to curves. And now we can use Node tool on it to make some custom changes like this. I can move this wherever I want. Let's position this here to match the gray shape. Alright, first one. For the second one, we're going to start with circle. I moved the entire shape with Move tool, the black cursor. Then I convert to curves. I use the white cursor Node tool to move the node down. You may notice some nodes are sharp and some nodes are curvy like this and got additional control points that I can bend 11 right, to change the curve. The first shape, as you can see, this is sharp point. But I can change that by clicking this button at the top. I can smooth that and I can convert sharp point into curvy one. This way I got this additional point to make it more curvy. Alright, I can do it other way as well. Convert this curvy one into sharp point. Here it is. All right, So there are two kinds of points, curvy one and sharp one. The sharp one is mark with rectangle and curvy one is Mark worth circle. It's time for our TED shape. Let me got our triangle convert to curves. And I don't have note, I should move here. I can add new one. By clicking here, I will add new node point that they can use to modify its shape. Not only moving existing nodes, but adding nuance as well. We can add notes so we can also remove them. Take a look, I got star-shaped here. All right, Now we're going to convert to curves node tool again. And now I can remove this node, just click on the node and hit Delete on your keyboard. And it's gone. We can remove unnecessary nodes as well. Alright, first row is finished. Let's move to the second row below. Going to start with circle here. You know the drill. Before we can modify that, we need to convert to curves and then Node tool, pull it up. And we need to convert this curvy one into sharp node. All right, In the next example, I not going to click on nodes. How going to use NO2 to pull site of the shapes that also possible here in Affinity Designer. So take a look. Cannot do anything yet. I must convert to curves first. And now I can pick Node tool. And I will not click on the note. I will just click on the side of the shape and I can pull it itself without adding new nodes. Right? Next thing, we got two more shapes to go. Here's rectangle. We're going to convert to curves, use Node tool to modify to customize the shape. I'll move this here. Alright. Now we need to experiment with this node. We can also normally, as you can see, when you're using this curvy at points, control points, it's trying to balance itself. There is a way that you can move only one and holding Option key on your keyboard, you can move them out of balance. Like this. You can simply add a new node and put it here. Alright, and the last final shape. Pretty easy. You can start with triangle or a rectangle. Now convert to curves. Move this guy over here. This one should be here. Let's transform this one to be smooth. So we got additional control points. This one should be smooth as well. And flip this here. Alright, as you can see, this node tool is perfect tool to customize existing shapes. So you can quickly customize shape that you've already got in your project. All right, Now it's your turn. Go to our digital workbook and tried to draw eight shapes on Node tool, artboard. 8. Lesson 7 Pen Tool: It's time to finally learn about Pen tool. Many people believes that this is the most powerful and most important tool for vector creation. So it's a bit similar to pencil tool. But in this case, we will not draw the line, but we will draw notes points. Instead, we will have great control. Alright, let's pick a stroke color. We can change the stroke width over here using this slider. And now I will select Pen tool from the list. Here it is. We got some additional properties at the top here. I will keep it in pen mode, the standard mode. And over here I will switch off this temporary. So I got very standard options. Turn on the basic set, and now I will draw the first line. So click here and click here, click here, here, here, and here, and the last one here. So as you can see, if I simply click, I will add nodes, and nodes will be connected with straight line. On the right side, I click and drag my mouse click and drag, click and drag. This way I create curvy nodes that are connected with curvy line. That's the difference. If you just click, you will have straight line. If you click and hold your mouse down, you will draw curvy line. All right, let's try this one more time in part with rubber band mode here so I can kind of see the line, can you see this ghosting line, the blue line following my mouse. This is helping us to estimate and location of next node point. So that's very helpful option to turn on rubber band mode. The last one here. Then you can press Escape on your keyboard. If you want to finish drawing this line, you don't need to close this shape. Sometimes you just want to draw a line. You can hit Escape to finish. I just changed my pen tool from pen mode to smart mode. In this mode, the software will try to help you out to make your shapes smoother, your curves smoother. So it's control a little bit different, but it's kind of editing the past line for you as well. So even you already put the point out, it can slightly changed even the previous line to make the overall shape looks smoother as you can see here, It's more elastic line. I'm not a big fan of this mode. Myself. I prefer the pen mode, but it's also for you to notice something called Smile mode. We have more elastic line that follow your pen tool. All right, what's next? There is one more mode here to explore Kolb polygon mode. As you can guess, this mode will only draw straight lines. You cannot make curvy note in this mode, even you click and hold, you will only make straight line. So this is something that you want to use on various core objects like this one over here. And now I'm closing the object. You can see this little circle indicating that next click will close the object and I can fill this new shape with color. All right, let's go back to pen mode. Click and drag to make curvy line click and drag. Click and drag here. Click and drag and close the shape. Now we close this shape and we can also fill it with color. Let's use pen tool to draw the last shape. This is kind of the default function for our pen tool, drawing strange, organic custom shapes. We don't need to use pen tool to draw circles or squares. We can use Shape tool for that as you know already. So Pen tool is the tool to go if you need to draw some strange organic shapes like this one over here and then close the shape. As you can see, it's not perfect. So we can use our Node tool we learned before about. And we can move our notes, modify the curve of each node to enhance our results with pen to especially when you are begging and with this tool when you will make some little mistakes here and that's normal, That's all right. Use Node tool to fix your little mistakes. And this way you'll be able to draw any custom shape unit, pen tool, super important tool, much better than pencil tool. We got great control. We placing nodes, replacing points, ourself here. So definitely it's worth to practice and learn more about this one. All right guys, we learned about three new tools, so it's time to do a little mini project again, I will see you in the next video where we're going to design our own MOG. 9. Lesson 8 Emoji: All right, seems like we are ready for our second mini project. As you can see in your digital workbook. Now we're going to design a module like this. And also at the end we will apply some Layer Style effects. You can see this plastic like glow on it. We will add this to our design as well. But first let's draw all necessary shapes. So on. Of course, we need a rectangle with round corners, That's the base shape for this emerging. We can adjust the corner using the orange control points as we just saw. We got base shape. Now for the smile, for the mouth. There's a special shape here. We can segment the circle. We don't need to draw the whole circle. That's very, very cool. And many people tend to forget about this one and they use full circle and then they tried to cut out however it we need to rotate it on. We can also flip the whole shape like this. All right, here's our Smile. What's next? Eyes? Pretty simple, just little circles. Duplicate. We need two of those glasses as well, and also tips here. So one more for the mouth. Over here, just a simple rectangle. We'll use this later on with some Boolean operators and also glasses. For that, we can use doughnut tool because we got this built-in hole inside and we can adjust the size of the hole, the radius of the hole. And we need both sides left and right, like this over here. And we got almost all shapes necessary for this little illustration. Now her, as you can see, this is very organic shapes, so we will use our newest addition to our toolset pen tool. Pen tool is perfect for strange organic shapes like this. So I just drawing something similar using my pen tool. Remember, click and hold to make the line curvy. If you just click, you will make the line straight. You must click and hold. Alright, seems like we've got almost all elements right now. So I think we can start adding colors. In vector graphics is really easy to recolor elements simply click on something and then change the color from the color palette on the top right corner. So let's start with the main color. We need this yellow here. You can use color wheel like this. Select two at the same time so you don't need to pick the same color twice. Just hold shift to select more than one object. All right, we won't go with blue her feel free to remix this design. You can make this a little bit different to match your needs. Gray here. This will be white later. I will change the color later so I can see it now. I got white background. So if I change color to white, they cannot see the element. Alright, let's position this in the center and move it here. Now change color to white. And it's time for our first Boolean operation, we will select two shapes and use divide. Here it is, as you know, I can now move everything separately so I can delete unnecessary part of the shape. We place the eyes here, select both shapes at the same time. You can kind of position them in the center like this. All right, time for glasses, we need to move shapes to get. So we will add them together again using Boolean operator. Let's add them together. Now it's just one shape. Right over here. As you may know, we can always use Node tool to modify any shape we want. So I'm using Node tool right now to make some little changes here. I can change notes to be sharp, like this. I can add new nodes by clicking on the line. All right, nice. Maybe also here I will make a sharp node. And we can move this up using totally new node like this. I think it's much better now. There's one more element I almost forget about. We got tongue here in psych his mouth. So let's use an ellipse for that. One ellipse here. Some dark red color. I will also duplicate done, I need to. So let's duplicate that by moving with Command key down together. A little bit of rotation. It should be around here. But we don't want to say it all. We just want to say it inside the mouth. So let's drag it inside the mouth. Let's mask this using other shape like this outside. Inside. Okay, this is the same trick we use with ice cream illustration. All right, We got all colors or shapes in. Now, let's just add some nice layer style to give it a little bit of plastic glow. So I will select her first to experiment with their style before I apply this to all other elements, here it is fx below your layer, panel, layer styles. It will open a new pop-up window like this. Here we've got multiple styles. We can apply them just by clicking this checkbox. You can apply more than one style. But in our case, we just need some kind of 3D like glow. We can use Bevel and Emboss here. We've got one that's inside the shape and then we can adjust the size, color, and blending mode direction using sliders, using built-in properties here is also very similar thing called 3D. This is very similar function. It will give us this fake 3D look. And also we got set of adjustments here that we can put in place. So I'm using this 3D frame, as you can see, I can change the direction, I can change the size of it. And it's also giving us this glow here we get a little bit less control on colors. We cannot change the blending mode separately for light and dark color. That's a little disadvantage here. Let's take a look. Here's my layer with Layer Style effects. Now I'm going to copy this whole layer Command C. But instead of pacing this object, I will just paste this style on other objects. So select the shape, go up to Edit and Paste FX paste style. Here is this way I don't need to start from scratch. I can copy and paste style between my shapes. All right, I will undo few steps. I'm going to modify this style before I paste it to all of my objects. So I would just changes from Tweedy to Bevel and Emboss again, because here I can kind of customize it a little bit better by adjusting blending mode. So I can change blending mode to overlay, for example. And it will blend a little bit better with the Agena color, especially for the darker color. Take a look. All right, that's a little bit better in my opinion. So I'm going to go with this one, this effect software. And this should be actually very, very bright, so may be hard light like this. All right. You can also add a profile like this. This one, we got few built-in profiles. You can also do it yourself. In my case, I will skip that. I don't need profile for this one. I need this soft fill here. All right, I'm happy with this layer style, so we're going to Command C. And now I will paste this style to all other layers. So I will select all my remaining layers here. I will go up and Paste FX. Now, all of my layers got the same layer style. I will modify layer style for eyes and mouth. I want this to be kind of like hole inside the shape. So I will modify fx here, switch this off. And instead of this effect, we will add inner shadow. Let's turn this one off by clicking on the checkbox, we add in a shadow. And again, we got sliders that will allow us to modify this effect. This will be like a hole in the shape not popping up. Alright, that's nice. We use two different layer effects. Every time you add layer effects to the layer, you can see this little icon fx next to it. All right, last thing to do is just group all of your shapes. So you've got one group for this MOG, like this. Alright, well done. Now it's your turn. Try to draw this emoji. You can even do this exercise several times. You can draw different emojis if you like to practice more. And I will see you in the next lesson. 10. Lesson 9 Cornel Tool: Next we're going to use corner tool. It's very underrated but powerful shape building tool. Let's draw a shape over here and just a simple square. Alright, and now I'm going to select corner tool from the tool panel on the left. Here it is. Now you will be able to simply click on the nodes and apply corner effect. In this case, I got round corners selected by default. You can even select two nodes at the same time while holding Shift. Then you can apply the effect at the same time. This way, we turn our score into leaf-like shape very quickly. All right? Of course you can apply the effect on all corners in the shape. You can select corner tool and you can make a selection box to cover whole shape. And then you can simply drag the corner down to apply the effect. Let's change the style of the corner. Maybe something like this will suit this shape. All right, we can also use the slider at the top, but as you can see it, good Limit 50 pixels here. If you want to extend that limit, the easiest way is to simply use your mouse and drag it to the center as you want. All right, so this is the second effect we can use with Corner tool. And we can blend those two effects, round corner and cut in corner like this. So take a look. Let's create this sheet-like shape very quickly just by using Corner tool. At the very top we make little cutouts. The button will be completely rounded until we get half of the circle here. Alright? In this way, we create this shield super quickly. Alright, let's try to apply corner effect on different shapes. And square might be triangle this time. So let me just draw a triangle over here. Now we will use kind of like negative corners, something that will just cutting out the shape inside, not rounding nicely like this, but cutting in sharply sharp corners. All right, like this, pointing into the shape. As you can see, you can also use this method to create new shapes. How to make R0 quickly? Why not to use corner tool? Let me show you. We got this rectangle. Now using coordinate tool onto right side. We can apply around corners, but we can also change the style to be straight, like this. In fact, so that you can quickly create our shapes in average a designer. Alright, I got one more example to show you what we'll start with the star shape this time. So far I was applying this corner to online outside nodes, but this time we will apply this corner tool on inside nodes. The one next to very open angle like this. And instead of cutting the shape, we will add to the shape. Take a look. We can pull it outside of the shape. So you can not only pull it inside the shape, but you can pull it outside the shape to add extra part of the shape like this very powerful tool corner TO and very underrated. Alright, so don't forget about corner tool while you're working on your shapes. 11. Lesson 10 Contour Tool: In this lesson, we will explore contour tool. It's fairly new addition to Affinity Designer. The main purpose for this tool is to extend the shapes. So take a look. Here's the circle. I select Contour tool here from the latest. Now I can click on the shape and extend the shape all around like this. You can also make this shape smaller. You can drag this inside the shape. All right, so nothing too impressive, bad. Sometimes you will need to make the shape a bit smaller, create a little bit of gap between shapes. So it's super handy in that situation. Also, we got some use cases that will lead us to an interesting effect. Let me show you. First, I will just draw two circles here. And I will combine them into one compound shape. Something we did before in Boolean operation lessons. So layers and our create compound from those two shapes. Alright, and I will, let me show you what will happen if I tried to use contour tool on this compound shape? Let's make it a little bit smaller and you can see it already. There is a connection in-between two compound shapes. I can even move them afterwards. I can even duplicate one of them and create Ted shape here. That will also be under this effect. All right, So this is how people use contour tool to get a compound shapes to create this sticky glue between shapes effect easily and quickly. Alright, so that's how, that's the one way, how you can use contour tool. The second way is to open up the shapes. So let me show you on this star. Let's create a little star with forearms here. Contour tool. We can of course make it smaller, make it larger, but we can also change how the contour act. So let's modify the option over here at the top. We want to open up. This way you will create a hole inside the shape. You are creating this content from the stroke, from the border of the shape. We can adjust nodes to be sharp like this. Rounded by default. This way you can quickly open up the shape using contour tool, right, to create the next one, as you may guess, we will create a compound shape here. So we've got two rectangles, two squares. Then we will merge them into one compound shape. This time, I will use shortcuts or I select them both. Hold Option key on my keyboard and then click art and very top here. This is shot way how you can create compound shape. Now I can extend that, I can make it smaller. Of course I can move them after I apply this effect. So if I open this group here, I can move them. And they should be sticky like this. Right? When we get to squirt stick together. And there's one more thing we can do if this contour tool, we can apply contour two strokes, two lines. So let's pick pen, tool swap, Fill to stroke color. And we will draw some simple line here. I will click and hold to make it a little bit curvy. Then I will use Node tool to adjust the line on this side as well. Alright, here's my line. I can duplicate that on, just start with one. Maybe it will be better so I can just copy the final result after Y. Alright, so I got lines here, not shapes, keep that in mind. We got stroke color, not fill color. And now I'm going to apply contour on it. And you will end up with something like this. You can fill this new shape with Fill color. Now, I can actually put a fill color inside. Even though we started with simple light and the line is still there, we can modify the line any moment. Alright, so that's how you use Content tool. It's not very popular, but in some specific use cases, you will need it. So don't forget about contour tool. 12. Lesson 11 Mixing Tool: Our next artboard is not dedicated to any specific tool. He will mix all tools we have learned so far, all techniques we know. We will do with a little bit different. Instead of you watching me first, I want you to try. Before you watch this video, go to our digital book and try yourself. Check which shapes you can re-create. Which shapes give you troubles. And after you finish, then watch this video and maybe you will notice something I did, you didn't, and you can add this to your workflow. All right, so let's do it differently for this art board. First, try yourself and don't be stress if you cannot make it exactly as it is on the example on the gray shape. All right, try your best. And then after you finish, watch this video and maybe you'll be able to catch up something. You forget about something I did, but you didn't. That can improve your workflow. Why building shapes with multiple tools? All right, I hope you are ready. So here's our first shape, looked like shield. So I'm going to start with rectangle tool, which is simple rectangle. And now I will expand this shapes so I can do some modification to it. Convert to curves. And then at very top I will use corner tool like this. The bottom I will use corner tool again. And I will beg this appearance. Now, we can swap the fill color with stroke color. Resizing. We've move tool, hold Shift to keep the proportion. We need to change the bottom part here. So I use Node tool for that. I can remove this node and I will make this node here sharp. Little bit of adjustments to make both sides equals. And we got our shield shape already. Now we just need to fill one part of the share with color. So I'm going to draw secondary shape, select them both and now divide. After that everything is a separate shape. So I can kill this out and I can fill just half of it with color. So we add fill color here and here's our first shape, a little shield. Alright, let's start with the second one. And again, I will use Rectangle tool for stud shape. I already can see that I will need additional shape here at the very top we got this circle. So let's also draw the circle. All right, and now we will need to do some Boolean operations using this circle here. Let's make a duplicate of it over here. And subtract. Duplicate here. Again, let's try subtract and we got the wrong result. We must move this above the main shape. Now we'll do subtract again and now we got correct result. Alright. Now we need to make those curves on sides of the shape. There are several methods we can use, but I will use Node tool. And now I will hold Shift and arrow. Then shift an arrow instead of dragging this point of my mouse, I use keyboard. We can make this smoother using Corner tool again like this. And we end up finishing our second shape. We could one more shape in this row look likely to MOG. So definitely we need a circle as the base shape here. We got our base so-called. Let's move it to the side for a moment so we can see some facial features like eyes. Easy, just a circle here as well. And then some kind of smile that few ways of drawing this, I will maybe try segment tool so I can just have part of circle our starting point. I can use orange control points as you may remember, to modify appearance of the smart shape. Something like this. Now, let's duplicate this whole shape. Let's make a copy of it here. Stretch like this. And we will subtract. Final touch will be to round corners here just a little bit. In this way, we create this Smiley face not we can now subtract from the main shape here. All right, so let's position everything like that and move back the main shape. We can add this together. Eyes and facial expression that all as one shape. Now, even though not connected directly, we can just subtract this using this one. Click over here on the top, subtract we make a hole in the main shape. And this way we've finished our third shape. All right, this look like little compass icon you may see before. So how can we do that? Let's start with Donald tool. This is the circle of built-in holes, so we don't need to make a whole ourselves. We got already hole here. All right, Next we will use star tool. Of course, we need to reduce the number of arms we need to adjust for. So let's change this number here on the top. You can use Slido, you can type it from keyboard as well. Using smart controls, we can modify the shape now, perfect. And a finishing touch will be to make a duplicate of this star. Then we will use this duplicate to subtract from this donut from this circle thing. Alright, so this is a little bit larger than the original one and now we can subtract. So we got this kind of gap in-between shapes thanks to that duplication, right? Two more shapes. This one looks scary. So how can we start with this flower-like shape? Let's go with smart shapes again, Coke shape here. Not like, looked like flower at all, but we will modify this shape using smart controls, orange points. Alright, this is our starting point. We can move it up, down here. There are several different controls in the shapes. And let's take a look. Let's explore what we can do here. More like flower. Now, we can move it completely Downer until the disappear. So we got this hole in the center. Now we can fill this hole in the center with additional shape. We've got our base shape ready. And the second shape is something called double star. Here on the list as well. Double Star Tool from the center. All right, As you can see, we need to do some modifications here. Move it down. This one must be kind of like go inside completely to the center. We need one more arm winning six arms. And make it up like this. And here we are. We just finish our next shape using smudge shapes, the one with orange control points. Cool. There's only one shape left here. We got kind of like intersecting hearts into locking. So let's start with a heart shape. I want to open up this. I wanted to have hollow inside gov, few techniques we can use, but I would go with contour tool, contour and then open up the shape. Now I can beg this appearance. I can make this shape permanent here at the very top bake appearance and now it's just a normal shape, not the contour tool. Rotation. We need one more copy of this, so just drag holding Command key, rotate even more. Let me adjust the color of the secondary one so we can see how they should interlock. Make it a little bit darker. We want to have this interlocking effect like one is logged to another. And even I switched the order of layers here. It's not odd, we exactly need. It's always like one is at the top of another. We cannot achieve this effect simply by moving objects on layers. We need to divide this shape. We can re-color this part to mimic the shape. This is the fastest way of doing interlocking shapes like this. All right, and this art board was a little bit more challenging than the previous one for sure, I hope you were able to do it even though you use maybe a little bit different techniques, different tools, dots or write down many different ways to achieve the same shape as you may learn so far. All right guys, now we are ready for our last final project of this class. 13. Lesson 12 Icons: You already have learned about all key tools for shape building in Affinity Designer. I'm pretty shoe, there'll be no problem with our last final mini project. Here we go into design weather icons. We need a Cloud. First, easiest way to build a clown is to use so-called shape like this. Four circles we'll do now we can adjust them slightly using Move tool. You probably guessing what is the next step here, we need to combine them together into one shape. Select all at good one shape. And now thanks to know Tool, we can remove unnecessary nodes from below. Take a look. If I select all nodes here and hit Delete on my keyboard. I got a nice straight line down here, so our cloud is finished. Now we can simply resize this element. We can decide about color right now, so we didn't need to recolor this later. So let's pick a shade of blue here from this color wheel on the right side of the screen. Something like this will do as you notice, I use gradient here, so let's use Gradient tool as well. Gradient from top to the bottom. All right, Another detail you may notice already I add some noise to the dark color so we can add it from here using the noise slider in the gradient tool itself. Here's the noise slider. You can add this nice vector noise to it. Cool. Here's our Cloud. We got to bright clouds and two dark clouds. So let's duplicate this one because we're going to reuse this bright cloud for the snow icon as well. Now we can make more copies of this, so lets me copy here. I'm going to flip this. Flip. Alright, now we will change color to a darker blue. We need to dark clouds as well. So let's adjust color in this gradient over here. This one even darker. Maybe let's modify this one once more. Here's our dark cloud. We're going to reuse this dark club phone calendar so for storm icon. So let's move it down here as well. Okay, we've got four different clouds now. All we need now just weather effects on them. So the first one is sunny. Sunny icon. So let's create a sun. The easiest way, as you might guess already is to use Star tool. So let's do that star. We draw a star here, modify the number of arms using this slider at the top. We don't need very long arms, shorter like this. Alright? You can also round it, but in this case we will not do it. This our base shape for sun. For this, we'll need some yellow color. Again, I'm using color wheel on the right side is our yellow star, I would say a yellow sun. Cool, one, finishing touch. I convert this to curves and got normal shape here. And now using Corner tool, I will select inner nodes like this. I can round them out, take a look. Now, drag them out a little bit. I got sharp arms, but the space between them is rounded. So now it's a little touch for this sun icon. Cool. Now we can position this behind the clouds so we need to change the position of the Cloud on in the layer panel here, and let's drag it up. Just be careful, don't drag it inside other shape. That's mistake. I do quite often, so drag it above, not inside the other shape. Cool. Rotation may be like this. It seems like our first icon is finished. We can move to the rainy cloud now. We need to draw raindrops. Lucky for us, Affinity Designer got built-in and drop tool. It's over here just above hardship tool. We can just draw raindrops with just one click, click and drag. And here's our raindrop. Of course we got orange control points to make shape adjustments. Just slightly adjusted and maybe more to the left like this. Cool. I will need some copies of this shape. Forest too many, maybe 33 copies in the first row. And then some more drops below done. Just using Move tool to reposition them. And then two more copies here. Here's our rain cloud icon. Nice. We've got two ionic icons ready Two more to go. Next. One will be for storming, whether we got this. Lightning here. I will start with triangle tool this time, this is normal triangle. Then pick the color from the sun's surface, the same yellow color. Now we can move control point to the right. Just like this, and let's make a copy of it. So right-click and duplicate on the layer panel. And we will flip it horizontally and then vertically as well. Like this, you can also use rotation for this overlapping. Now we are ready to join them together using add function. Cool, We got our little lightning already. This will be above the cloud around this area. All right. The last one, but the most complicated one will be to create this Snowflake for our last icon. So let's use pen tool in this case. So we will use lines, not shapes for a moment. So Pen tool and I want to create this kind of this snowflake. I don't think this is equal. So I will need to adjust that in a moment using Node tool. But first let's add color to this line so we can see it. Alright, I got non-equal arms here and they cannot snap. I cannot see where I should stop. So we will need to use manual guide for that. Let's drag out a line from the ruler like this. Then you can adjust the light of this guy and you can drag this back to the ruler. And we are done. This is perfectly symmetrical so we can copy here and flip your pen tool again, draw the line in-between. Cool. We can select all. We can even make a group now out of it. So it's easier to work with a little group here. Duplicate the whole group like this rotation. And just two more elements to a line like this. Diagonal line in the center. Again, duplication. Right-click duplicate on the layer panel. Then mirror flipped like this. And here's our flake. All right, if I want to turn those lines into shapes, will be natural to try to expand stroke. So let's try this now. If I go up to the Layer and try to expand my strokes, my lines into shapes. I got some error here. Half of this design disappear. We will ungroup it first. That's the easiest way to avoid this error. Ungroup everything is separately now, we can turn it into shapes, expand strokes done. We will do the same thing for the little cross in the center. So I got two more lines here in the center. This one and this one. Already ungrouped. So just expand them. All right, all of my lines, I'll turn into shapes so I can select them all and add together. Now this is just one shape. Cool, resizing and reposition just below this cloud. This is how you can create your own weather icons using tools that we learned about so far. Guys, feel free to stay on this last exercise. If you feel like you want to do more icons than four, That's all right. You can practice a little bit longer here. And this is actually our final mini projects. So this is the best place to practice. We already learned all about tools. Now, just practice. I will have one more lesson with some extra practice exercises for you. So see you in the next one. 14. Practice Lesson: Congratulations on completing this class. Now you know how to draw all basic shapes. You can use this knowledge to combine your little basic shapes into more complex icons, logos, and illustrations. Do you need now is a little bit of practice. It's why I have added one extra artboard to our workbook. Now it's good time to check out your workbook one more time. See that you've got some output or domains. All you want to redo to practice certain tools once more. And then under very end, you will see artboard called practice. This is what we're going to do right now. We will practice with this last artboard. As you can see, I already draw flowers here. And your first practice exercise may be to simply recreate what I did already. So you can use shapes, you can use pen tool, corner tool, and other techniques we have learned. Redo my shapes like this flower over here. Let's start with circle. Alright, What next? I'm going to go with the Star Tool. Keep in mind is always more than one way of drawing certain shape. Here is my star tool. I can now round the arms, make it smaller here in the center, we can use the slider at the very top to add more arms to our star. And this way we can form a nice little flower. All right, look alright, we can now adjust the colour of the selected shape. Assemble a little plants, so this should be in front of my star. Over here. Let's drag it to the side so we can see the tempo, the template. All right, Here's mental part of the plan that I have prepared for you. So very simple rectangle and then we will make some leaves. Again, drag this down in the layer panel. To make a leaf. And technique I like to use is to start with a circle. Actually, if you start with circle and then expand this shape convert to curves. Take a look, I will draw a circle. Then I will convert to curves. And I can pull out one note up, make it sharp. And this way you can quickly make a leaf shape, all right, scale it down. Of course, we can modify the color. We can even pick the color from existing elements like this. Duplication. Drag while holding command key to duplicate quickly. We can flip it here. Now we just need to draw some kind of flowerpot here. So let's start with trapezoid tool. This is kind of perfect tool for flower pod. Alright, Now a bit smaller. Then a finish here at the top of this pot, something like this. We can modify the colors using color wheel or color sliders. How about corner tool? Let's round some corners. This one, and maybe this one as well. Cool. I will make this a little bit brighter like this. And here's my first plant. Let's modify this leaf, make it a bit larger. All right, so what should I do if my little plant, I prepare for you a blank art board at the very end, take a look. There's a blank art board here. You can move it to this new blank art board. Then you can try again. You can draw different plants. You don't even need to follow my template here. You can walk with your imagination. You can draw any plant you like. So let's draw one more together. Let's go for the second one here. We'll start with the flower using our smart tools. So this is **** and we can just modify this tool by dragging orange points. And that's the beautiful of this smart shapes in Affinity Designer. Very quickly. Alright, we transform this flower and just in few clicks. Nice. How about the next thing? You already used the trapezoid tool before? So that's what I going to do is again, this time I will flip it like this. And how we can make this circle at the top dog, two ways of doing that. But I prefer the corner tool. So let's go with the corner tool here and rounded top. Perfect. Now we are ready to add some spikes. So for this I will use simple triangle. Darker n. Again, my favorite corner to here. We got nice rounded and of the spike. We can now duplicate this several times. Add some rotation, try to randomize those elements to look more organic. K. And we are ready to place our flower here at the top. So let's drag it to the top. A bit too dark folder color I pick. So I will modify this quickly. Cool, and we need some port for this little guy. So maybe let's start with oval like this. Then expand this shapes so we can use Node to longhand expand. And now we've node two. We can kind of make it a little bit more like It's something in-between a square and circle or an oval, very rounded shape. A little pot like this cool. Place it here. Here's our second plant. All right. I will leave it to you to figure it out more plans. You can use my template, but I encourage you to also draw some of your own plans based on your ideas. All right, so fill this last blank. Artboard width. Little plants like this to practice or we have learned. Feel free to share your little practice sheet with us on our Skillshare class project. Alright, that's all in this class. Thank you for learning with me and I hope I will see you in my next tutorial. Bye-bye.