Transcripts
1. Welcome! | Class Project: [MUSIC] Hi, I'm illustrator and photographer Tracey Capone and welcome to my class
all about creating symmetrical floral
illustrations using the Symbol studio and
Affinity Designer for iPad. Well, Affinity Designer has a customizable symmetry tool hidden within its pixel persona. Unfortunately, it doesn't
have one on the vector side. Now, you could sketch out your design on a
pixel side and either trace it with vector
drawing tools or lay vector shapes over it. But this can be time-consuming as you still have to manually make sure that your tracings or shapes are perfectly
symmetrical. Plus makes sure that
any edits you make in one object are manually
major all of its duplicates. Wouldn't it be great
if you could create a perfectly symmetrical
illustration right in the designer persona, without having to rely
on the sketch? You can. In this class I'm going to show you my method for creating symmetrical floral illustrations
using the Symbol Studio. As part of this class, you'll receive my Symbol
Symmetry Assets pack, which has a number of floral new leave shapes
that you can use in addition to the
built-in drawing and shade pulls to add
your own design. Now, while the
focus of the class isn't about creating
flower leaf shapes, you can also follow along
with me as I create my own symmetrical
floral illustrations. I'm also going to show
you how you can use the Symbols Studio
to make an edit to one object that will
automatically be applied to all duplicates
of that same object. This class is intended
for all levels. However, having a
basic understanding of designers user
interface is helpful. If you're brand new to the app. I recommend starting with
my textured florals in Affinity Designer for iPad class as I take you through
the entire interface, as well as explain how to
use the various tools. For this class. You'll
need an iPad, a stylus. I'm going to use
an Apple Pencil, but you could use any stylus of your choice and the Affinity
Designer for iPad app, which can be done either in the Apple store or
on Serif website. I've included a link to both and the resource guide
for the class. [MUSIC]. For your class project, you'll create your own
symmetrical illustration using the Symbol Symmetry
method I teach in the class. You can draw your own flat or textured floral leaf shapes or any object you'd like or use those found in the assets
pack provided with the class. It's totally up to you. I'd love to see what you create and it's always helpful for potential students to see what they may learn when
taking the class. Please consider sharing
your project in the class project
section of the class. I can't wait to see what you create using the method
you'll learn in this class. Let's get started. [MUSIC].
2. Downloads & Resources: As part of the
class I've included a resource guide and my
symbol symmetry assets pack, which includes a
number of single layer vector shapes
that you can use along with the drawing and shape tools to create
your own designs. To access the files in Dropbox, you will need a
password which I'm going to put up on
the screen now. Once you've accessed
the files you'll see two items for download. The first is the symbol
symmetry assets pack which you'll want to
download either to your iPad or a Cloud file, as you need to access them
from within designer. Just to note, whenever
you're importing something into Affinity Designer
you can't do it simply by tapping on the file within your
files app on the iPad. They actually need to
be imported from within the application itself and I'll show you how to do
that in a moment. But for now just tap on the three dots and
select download. Again, either save it to your
iPad or to a Cloud file. The second file is symmetrical floral
illustrations resource guide. It contains information
about designer, written instructions about
downloading the assets pack as well as a list of my
favorite texture makers. I'm back in designer
and I'm ready to import my assets pack
into my Asset Studio. You need to be within
a document to do that. It doesn't matter which one, just open any document. I'm going to go to
my Asset Studio here which is the group
of nine squares. If you can't locate it
just tap and hold on the question mark and
labels will pop up. Now, I already have
it loaded into mine, but to load it into yours you'll tap on the burger
menu at the top, select Import category, and then find the
file that you saved again either to your
iPad or a Cloud file. Select that file and it will automatically load into
your Asset Studio. It may take a second or
two but it will load. If you don't see it you can
always tap in the middle here or scroll back and forth. Now, in the next section
we're going to take a closer look at
the Asset Studio, and I'll show you how to use
those in the assets pack as well as how to create and save your own. I'll
see you there.
3. The Assets Studio: In this section I'm going
to show you how to use the assets pack that
came with the class. Now in the downloads
and resources, I showed you how to
import it into designer. In this section, we're going
to take a closer look at how the Asset Studio
itself works. The Asset Studio icon is
this group of nine squares. If you can't locate
it, just tap and hold on the question
mark at the bottom, and labels will pop up. Once you're in the Asset Studio, you'll see it's broken down into categories and subcategories. Every category needs to have at least one subcategory in order to start adding
elements to it. I'll show you how to do
that in a little bit. One of the benefits of assets
are that their application, why they're not specific
to a single document, which means once I create this, I can use it in any
future documents as well. I use this as a way
of saving some of my favorite floral creations or even groups of layers that I know I'm going to use in
future illustrations. I use it for surface
pattern design. I use it to create
fill in illustrations. There's any number of ways
that you can use your assets. Again, you can save
single layer objects, which is what this pack is, or you can say in
groups of objects. Let's first take a look
at the single layer. If I tap on one of my
flowers here and hit Insert, it's going to insert
it into my document, and if you take a
look at the layer, it's just a single curve. I can use my node pool and
make changes to the shape. I can change the color, I can change the size, I can add texture to it. I can do anything that
I would normally do to one that I
created right here. You can also shade say
groups of objects. If I go back to my Asset Studio, I'm going to select one
of these little beetles I created for my next class. If I open up the
layer studio here, you'll see that this
is a group of layers that combine into
one overall group and saved as an asset. If you're going to
save groups of layers, you want to make sure that
you do save it as a group, you don't simply select all of your layers
and then save it. If you do that, it will save each individual
layer separately. Make sure that you're making a parent group that
you're saving. Let's go back to
that original pack. What if I want to add an
element to an existing pack? I've created this flower here, and I always create my assets
in either colors or white. The reason I do that is because the background is very dark. If you create it
as a dark color, you're not going to
be able to see it. I'm going to select this flower, and because I have a
subcategory setup, I'm going to go ahead and
tap on the subcategory for floral elements and hit
Add Asset from Selection, and now it's in there
and I can use this either in this document
or future ones. What if I want to
create my own category? I'll go ahead and I'm
going to turn this off. I can just go back
in my Asset Studio. I'm going to go to the
burger menu at the top here, tap Add Category, and I'm going to get an unnamed category. You can rename it by
going to the burger menu. To rename category. I'll just name this florals. Now again, as I
mentioned earlier, you need to have at
least one subcategory in order to start
adding elements. I'll go back up to
this burger menu, tap Add subcategory, and you'll see that pop up here. I can rename this as
well by going into the burger menu for this
specific sub-category. I'll just rename this flowers. Let's say I want to add
this flower into this pack. I would do it the same
way I did previously. I just go ahead and tap
on it to select it. Go to my subcategory and
tap Add asset to selection. That's how you create
your own category and subcategories. You can also delete it that way. I'm actually going to
go ahead and delete this category because
I don't need it. I'll go to my burger menu
and tap Delete category. That's how you use
the Assets Studio. In the next section, I'm going to show you how
to set up your canvas, to get it ready to
start using the symbols for our symmetrical illustration.
I'll see you there.
4. Setting up your Canvas: I'm going to start by
setting up my canvas. I'll hit the plus sign on my gallery screen and
select "New Document." Now, you can set your canvas
up to any size you'd like. Just keep in mind
that while Designer is primarily a
vector-based program, you are able to add
raster elements to it, whether it's using a pixel
brush or a raster image file. If you plan to print anything, always make sure that you set your original documents highest, the largest size
you plan to print, whether that's in
pixels, inches, or whatever measurement
you'd like to do it in, and always make sure that the DPI is at least 300 or more. I'm going to hit "OK." That's
going to place my canvas. Now, my interface is set up
for a left-handed person. If yours isn't, our screens are simply flipped
opposite of one another. The first thing I
typically do is change the background color
by adding a rectangle, and I do that for two reasons. The first is to knock back this white color that
automatically pops up, the second is because
I tend to use my background as an integral
part of my overall design. I'll start with a
relatively neutral color and throughout the
process change that, add texture, or do both. We grab my rectangle tool and make sure my snapping is on. I'm actually going to
make my background black with no stroke. I'll start from
the bottom corner and drag up to the top, and because snapping
is in place, it will automatically pop
it to the other corner. I've got that
rectangle in place, I'm going to lock it just
to make sure that I don't accidentally move it around
as I'm adding things. If you don't see the lock
in your layers studio here, just go to the burger menu
and tap "Show Unlocked." That's the quickest way to
lock and unlock your layers. Otherwise, you can also go into the layer option
for each layer by tapping these three dots
here. I have that locked. We're ready to start using our symbols to create
some symmetry. Before we do that, though, let's take a closer look at the Symbol Studio
and how they work. We're going to do
that in the next section and I'll see you there.
5. The Symbols Studio: The Symbol Studio
allows you create symbols from objects
or groups of objects and a global edits to every copy of that
individual symbol. Any changes that you
made to one will automatically be applied
to all whether it's color, size, rotation, or even embellishments
that you add to it. This makes it a great tool for
creating surface patterns, intricate designs with a lot
of duplication throughout or else will be creating in this class illustrations
with symmetrical elements. Now I want to know, unlike the assets that we
spoke about previously, symbols are attached to
an individual document. They don't carry through
the overall application. If you have a symbol
or symbols that you want to be able to use
in future documents, I recommend creating
an asset out of them. You can always pull them into the new document and then put them back in the
Symbol Studio and I'll show you how to
do that in a moment. Let's take a closer look at the Symbol Studio
and how they work. I'm going to go ahead and
grab my rectangle tool and just drag out
a basic rectangle. Now if we take a look
at the layers studio, you can see this as
a basic shape layer. I can make a change
to the color, the size, the shape, I can use my node pool on it once I convert
it to a curve. But if I make
duplicates of this, any changes I make are only going to apply to
the selected rectangle, not all of the duplicates. In order for that to happen, I need to convert
this to a symbol. I'll go to my Symbols Studio, which is this circle
with three wavy lines. Again, if you can't locate it, just tap and hold on
the question mark at the bottom and
labels will pop up. The first thing I'll
do is make sure that my Sync symbol is on and you can tell that it's
owned by the blue dot. With the rectangle selected. I'll go to the Burger menu
and tap "Add symbol" from selection and now you can see it's been added to
the panel here. Let's go back to
the layer studio. The layer has changed
a little bit, is now labeled as a symbol and it has this orange
line next to it. Anything that's
clipped to a symbol or symbols has an orange
line next to it. Anything that is not like this background
rectangle doesn't. Now the original red
rectangle is still there. That layer is simply clipped
beneath the symbol layer, and that's how symbols work. Any objects that you want
to apply to one symbol, as well as all of its
duplicates need to be clipped to one of
the symbol levels. Let's take a look
at how that works. There's a few ways that
I can duplicate this. I'm going to go ahead and I can either two finger
tap and drag with my Move tool or with it selected I can go to my Edit
menu and tap "Duplicate." Or I could go back to my Symbol Studio and tap on the symbol I want
to add and hit "Insert." Now, if I go into my Layer menu, you can see I have two
symbol layers here. Now, one thing to note, because of the way symbols work, I can't easily
rename these layers. If I rename this one, left rectangle is
automatically going to rename this one left
rectangle and vice versa. You just have to know
which one is which. Once you start adding
objects to it, especially this
symmetrical ones, they'll start showing
up in this layer studio and you'll be able to easily see which one is which, but for now, I just need to know it
then my left one is the bottom symbol and my
right rectangles the top. Now, what about adding
objects to be as well? Let's go ahead and
grab the Pen tool. I'm going to grab
this blue color and just start
tapping out a shape. Now, right now
it's sitting there on that left rectangle, but it hasn't automatically
been added to that one. The reason for that is because that curve layer sitting at the very top of the layer stack, it's not clipped to either
are these symbols and you can tell it's not because that orange line is not there. In order for it to be
duplicated over here, I need to clip this curve to my left panel because that's where it's
sitting right now. I'm going to drag it down, clip it and now it is sitting in both of those
parent symbol levels. I could go ahead
and I could grab my Node tool and I can make changes to the
one on this side. I can change the
color if I wanted. I can also go into
the other one on this side and start making changes and it's going to
change the one over here. It doesn't matter which
symbol you make changes to it's going to apply to every
duplicate of that symbol. You don't have to
worry about that so much when it comes
to making edits. Let's go ahead and delete this. Now, what about when it
comes to symmetry, well, the first thing we're
going to do is I'm going to grab my move tool
and I'm going to bump these together and with
snapping on, it's really easy. It will just snap into place. I'll grab my Pencil tool
here and this blue. Now select this rectangle
and you start drawing down. Now, when I draw down from
the right on this rectangle, it comes down from the right on this one because this panel, this symbol is currently
an exact duplicate, it's not a mirror image. In order for this
to be symmetrical, I need to flip
this symbol level. I'm going to go ahead and
I'm going to select it. I'll go to my transform studio and I'm going to do
a horizontal flip. You need to make sure you
select it with your move tool. Now, because I've flipped
the overall symbol level, this is actually symmetrical. Again, if I go back and grab my pencil tool and I
start drawing down, it's going to draw
down from the middle. Now, you need to make
sure when you do that flip that you
select the symbol level. If you select anything
underneath it, the mirroring is only going
to apply to that level. Anything that you add going forward to the symbol is
not going to be mirrored. It's going to be a duplicate
of the other panel. Always make sure that when
you flip the one panel to make a mirror image that you flip the overall
parent symbol level. Now, what about how
we can apply this to creating our floral designs? Well, the next section we're
going to start by creating a simple floral illustration using this method.
I'll see you there.
6. Creating a Simple Symmetrical Flower Illustration: I've removed the pink boxes
from the last section. We're going to use
the same concept and that we're going
to create panels. But I don't want them to have any color that's going to
compete with my objects. I already have my
background layer here. I want to create
invisible rectangles with no fill or stroke. The first thing I'm going
to do is make sure that my snapping is on down
here at the bottom. I'm going to grab
my rectangle tool. I want you to go into my
color studio and just make sure that my fill
in stroke are off and you can do that
by flipping up from these little icons or you can tap on the quick
colors down here. I'm going to start by dragging
from the top corner until it snaps into the exact
middle of the square. You can tell it's in
the exact middle by the green line that
appears because you're snapping on. I'll go
ahead and release. Just like in the
previous section, we have this
rectangle layer here. But I need this to be a symbol. I'll go to my Symbol studio. My Sync symbols is on. I'm going to make
sure it's selected. I'll tap on my burger menu and hit 'add symbol
from selection'. You can't see it because
there's no fill, but you can see that
the panel expanded, which means it is there. If I hit the fill and go
back to the symbol studio, you can see it's there. But again, we want
this to be invisible. Now, I'm going to
duplicate this, mirror it and move it
to the right side. With it selected,
I'll go ahead and tap on the "Edit, "Duplicate". Now I have two symbols. I'm going to make
sure the symbol level of that duplicate is selected, not the rectangle underneath. I'll go to my Transform studio
and hit horizontal flip. Now I can drag this
over to the right. Because snapping is on, it'll snap right into place. Now I have two invisible panels sitting on my
background rectangle, which are mirror
images of one another, so anything I add to the
one side is going to be applied to the other side
in the opposite direction. But I just need to
make sure that it's clipped to one or the
other of the symbols. Let's go ahead and
start creating a simple symmetrical
flower design. Now I'm not going to go into
the detail about how to create the flowers because this class is more
about the symmetry, but I do have a link to my first class in the
about section of this one, all about how to
create flowers and leaf shapes in
Affinity Designer. If you have an interest in
learning more about that, I recommend taking that class. I can go ahead and
deselect that. I'm just going to
set myself up to create some leaves here. I typically like to do that with my pencil tool on stroke
and I'm just going go ahead and change my pressure
settings on my stroke here and make it a
little bit wider. Now in order to start drawing
so that it applies to both, I need to make sure that I
select one of these symbols. I'm going to go ahead and
tap into this rectangle just so I can see
where I want to start. With my pencil tool selected, I'm going to start
drawing up a leaf shape. I'll do another and
I'm going to start in the same exact spot. Now I'm going to go
ahead and deselect this, I actually want to make
this a little bit smaller. I'm going to make a third line here that I'm
going to add some flowers to. I'll go ahead and I'm going to tap into that symbol again. Again with my pencil tool, I'll just start drawing
up a thinner stem. I'm going to go ahead
and use my assets to add some flowers to this, so I'll deselect that. Now you can see if you look at the Layers sheet
before we do that, we have two curve layers here. I actually want to
add that second leaf, because I had my sculpt
mode on it automatically added it to the original leaf. Then this is this thin one here. It's also showing on the
other side because again, whatever you do on
this one is going to happen in this side in
the opposite direction. Let's go ahead and start
adding some flowers. I'll tap on my Asset studio and I'm going to
choose this one here. 'll go ahead and change
the color and the size. I'm just going to lay
it where I want it, I can always move it later. Now, again, it's showing here, but it's not showing
on the other side. That's because when you
go to the Layers studio, you can see it's
at the very top of the stack and it doesn't have
an orange line next to it, which means it's not part
of one of the studios, so I need to clip it. Now because I have it
laying over my left panel, the easiest thing to do is to
clip it to my left symbol. Then it's automatically
going to add it over here. I'll just tap on it, drag down until
that blue line is over the symbol and just
make sure you stay to the right of that line. Now it's added it to both sides. If I go ahead to make changes
or add to the rotation, or the size, it's going to
change it over here as well. I can also change
the color if I want. I can make any changes
to one and it's going to change it to
the other because again, we have them clipped
to these symbols. Let's go ahead. I want to add a single line up the middle as a stem
and one single flower. I don't need that to be part of my symbols because I'm not
planning to duplicate it. That's fine, you can actually
have a mix of layers, just like we have here with
this background layer. I'm going to go ahead
and tap on my plus sign and add a vector layer. I'll grab my pen tool again
and that green color. I'm just make this
a little bit wider. I'll just tap and tap again. I think I might make
that a little bit taller with my new tool. I have my middle stem here. If you look at the layer stack, it's part of that
vector layer that I added and it doesn't have
an orange line next to it, which means it's not
clipped to one of these symbols and that's fine because I don't plan
to duplicate this. I'm going to go ahead to
my Asset studio again and select another one
of these flowers. I'm going to make
it this dark pink, I think and make it
a little bit darker. Grab my move tool
and size it down. I'll just place it
where I want it. I have my basic
illustration here. I could go ahead and I could start adding texture to this. The easiest way to do that is I'm going to go
ahead and add texture to this single one first because I don't have to worry
about the other side. I'll just pick
this, any texture, just make sure you drag
out large, release it. Then you can make it smaller, you always want
to start large so you don't run into
any quality issues. Then go ahead and clip
it to that flower, change my blend mode. That's flower is done. What if I wanted to add
texture to these two flowers. Well, I can add it to one and it's automatically going
to add it to the other. I'm going to go back
to my Layers studio. I'm going to tap on this
left flower to select it. I'll go back up to
my Documents menu, select "Place image" and
grab one of my textures. I think I'll select
this vagabond one here. This is from the grungy
side by two little owls and they are noted in my resource guide that I
provided with the class. Now, right now, because I
had tapped on this curve, you can see that the
texture is there. It's also added as a duplicate here because I was
already in the symbol. I need to clip it to this curve, so I'm going to drag this down. You'll see up at the top it'll also clip it to the
one on the right. It's clipped here and
it's clipped here. I can go ahead and I can make
a change to my blend mode. It's automatically
going to change it on the other side as well. Now what if I wanted to make one large piece out of
this leaf formation? If you have watched
my previous class, you know that I tend to do that because I find it easier to add texture to one large piece
rather than a group of layers. I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to detach these four layers
from my Symbol studio. I'll go ahead and I will
swipe to select all four. Now in this case, anything you want to detach, you
need to select. You can't just select two and it's going to do the
same thing over here, you have to select all of them. With those four layers selected, I'll go ahead and tap
my Symbol studio, my burger menu, but this time select "Detach
Symbols in Selection". Now you can see, that that orange line
is no longer there. I want to combine it
with this layer up here, but before I do that
I need to convert these strokes to fills. I still have these selected. I'm also going to go ahead
and select this one. None of these are part
of a Symbol studio. They don't have any orange
lines next to them, so I can do whatever I want to each individual layer and it's not going to apply
to anything else. With all of these selected, I'll go to my edit menu and tap "Expand Stroke" and
now I have a fill. Now I can perform an
add function on it, so I'll go into my Edit
menu and tap "Add". Again, I'll go into great detail on this in my other class. Now I have one large curve that's a fill and I can
add texture to that. I'll go ahead and go
to my Documents menu, place image, grab
one of my textures. I'm going to clip that, change the blend mode. I just want to make sure that this layer here is
actually below the others, so that it falls
behind the flowers. I still have these two flowers
connected to my symbols, which means if I want
to start changing colors or anything like that, I can certainly do that since
they're still attached. If you ever plan to
detach something, just make sure that whatever you want to apply to all
you've already done, it's really difficult to
reattach things to symbols, so I typically make sure
that every change that I want to make that I
want to apply globally, I've done before I detach them. These leaves, I had no further
changes I wanted to make. But I might want to change
these flowers at some point, so I'm going to keep them
in the symbols here. That's how you can create a very simple
floral illustration using the symbols
symmetry method. What about getting into a
more complex illustration? Well, we'll take a look
at how we can do that in the next section,
so I'll see you there.
7. Creating a Complex Symmetrical Floral Illustration: In last section, we created a simple floral
symmetrical illustration. In this one, let's try and
create a more complex one using a mix of assets and
our drawing and shape tools. I'm going to go ahead and
select one of the leaf and stem shapes here that I
have in the assets pack. I think I'll choose this one. I'm not going to worry about the placement in
the layer order, I want to get it placed first and then I'll clip
it where it needs to be. Let me go ahead
and drag this up. I'm going to change
the color of it. I like how that's looking. Now I'll go ahead and
I'm going to clip it to my right symbol because
it's on the right side, and I'll go ahead and
add it now to the other. Now, these are a
little too close together and probably
a little too big, so I'm going to make that
a little bit smaller. I actually like how that's crossing over in
the middle there, so I'm going to
leave that as is. I'm going to go ahead and
start adding my flowers. Now, I'm going to start the process and then I'm going to speed it up, otherwise, you're going to be sitting here basically watching paint dry, but I'm going to go
ahead and start adding a few and then I'll speed it up. I'll go ahead and add
one via an asset here, and I already know that's
going to be a little too big. It's going to bump
up against that one, but we will start with
what we got here. Then to make that
this red color. I think I'll start with pink. I'm going to ahead and drop
this to my left panel here, so it populates on this side. Actually, that size is perfect. I'm going to go
ahead and I think I'm going to two-finger
tap and drag to duplicate this one and change the rotation and maybe
drop the light value. I'll drop this behind this one. I'm going to go ahead
and add another flower right about here. Now, this is your illustration,
have fun with it. Don't worry about realism
unless you really want to. No plant actually exists like this where you have
different flowers on it. I just like to just add a bunch of different
flowers that I feel work together well, and I don't necessarily worry about what would
happen in nature. Have fun with it. Have
fun with the colors. I'm going to go ahead
and make this one, I think that red color. I'll go ahead and clip
this to my left symbol and I need to make them a little smaller because they're
bumping up against each other. I'll start adding
texture and things like that after I add
some more flowers, I think with this
little cluster here, I'm going to add this
double-layered flower here. I'll just do an insert and
rotate it and put it up here. I'm going to add
this yellow color, I think maybe make it a little bit lighter just
so it stands out. Then add the front of it. You can use these assets
however you'd like. If you don't want to make layers out of them, you don't have to. It's totally up to you. They're created so that you
can be creative with them. Make that a little bit darker. I think I'm going to
go ahead and group that and just two-finger tap and drag and maybe flip that just so it looks a
little bit different. Lower the size and
place it on that stem. I'll go ahead and take both of these and clip them
to my left symbol, so it flips over there. I'm going to stop at
this point right now, start adding some texture to this because I don't
want to get too far, and then have to go
back and add texture. I'm going to grab one of
my favorite texture packs. It says grungy texture
pack by two little owls, and if you look at
the resource guide, I actually give all
of the information about where I get
my textures from. I'm going to go ahead
and just scroll up. Always make sure you
place your texture large. You can always size
down if you want, but you want to start large otherwise you could run
into quality issues. I'll go ahead and clip this. The reason you can't see it is because I just clipped
the wrong one. These are actually flipped. I need to clip this one here and then it's
going to flip it. I'll go ahead and
change my blend mode. I like this weird darker color that has a gritty feel to it, but I'm just going to
keep scrolling through. I'm going to go with
overlay on that one. I'll add some more
texture to these. It's actually dropped
in that layer, so I need to go back
in here and rescue it, I'll just grab it
and drop it there. Again, change the blend mode. You get the idea
on adding texture, I'm going to go ahead
and keep adding some flowers and adding
texture along the way. Now, I also tend to
use my ellipse tools or my other sheet and drawing tools to add some
other elements to these, I'm going to make this one brown and I'm
going to go ahead and drop it to this left symbol and you can see it
already showed up there. I'm going to drop
it over the top of this flower so it's
like a middle, and maybe add a stroke to it and use one of
my flower brushes, which actually come
with my first-class. It helps you create stamens. I'm going to go ahead from
here and keep adding, so you'll get to
see the process, but I'm going to speed it
up because as you can see, it takes a while to do it and I will see you
on the other side. I'm going to call that done. I think I've added
enough flowers. I didn't add texture to
everything and that's okay. You don't always have to. Sometimes I like to
leave some undone to, again, give it a little
bit more dimension. I'm going to go ahead
now and mess around with the background and see if a different color
might work better. Grab this blue and then
drop the light value of it and see if I like how that plays
better than the black. I want it to be somewhat
of a gray-blue. I'm going to go ahead
and try and add a texture to that and
see how that works out. I'll pick this nice light one
and again make it larger. Now, you don't
have to clip it to the rectangle since it's laying over the top of that
rectangle rather. I'll drop the opacity. I like how that's looking. One final texture that
I'm willing to lay it on top of this, and I'm going to
go back here and find I have a favorite
texture that I tend to use at the top of my images and I'll
go ahead and bring that in. Once I set it large, again, I can go ahead and size down, and change the
blend mode of this. I think I'm probably
going to go with overlay and drop the
opacity a little bit. Now that I've done that I'm finding this is a
little bit washed out, so I might go in
here and since it's on a symbol layer again, I can go ahead and do
that and it changes both. Again, this is the
beauty of working with this is that I don't have to worry about going into each individual layer
and making changes. I'm going to go
ahead and make sure and even the ones I
didn't add texture to me because I have
that texture on the top, it went ahead and did that. I might just drop
this a little bit, and make it a little
more orangey. I'm going to call that done. In the next section, we are going to take a peek at the next class coming
up and wrap things up, so I'll see you there.
8. BONUS Simple Vector Leaf Shapes: I've had a few people
ask me how I create the simple leaf shapes in the simple symmetrical
illustration section of the class. So I wanted to put together
a bonus video just showing a few ways
that you can easily create simple leaf shapes using either the shape tools or the
drawing tools in Desygner. I'm going to start
with the pencil tool. It's the icon that not surprisingly looks like a
pencil in the tools section. If you can't find it,
just tap and hold on the question
mark at the bottom. I'm going to start with a fill. You can use either a
fill or a stroke with the pencil tool and I'm
going to show you both ways, as well as show you the pros and cons of using both of them. So I got a fill, I selected this green color and my stroke is actually off. I'm going to grab my pencil tool and I'm going to
turn sculpt off. I'll show you what
sculpt does in a moment but for while I'm drawing
it out initially, I want to turn it off. I'm also going to
make sure that in a contextual menu
Use Fill is on. You can tell it's on
because it's split up in blue and you can see
the green swatch there. Now I'm just going to start
drawing out my leaf shape. Now a couple of
things about this. If you are someone like me
who has a hard time drawing a really nice smooth
line and you need some help with
streamlining your lines, you can go to the contextual
menu at the bottom and tap the arrow here and there's
a set of stabilizers. The default setting is no stabilizer and if
you're trying to create something with lots
of jagged lines or waves that you don't
want help with, you can keep it on no stabilizer
and I recommend that. If you do need some help or
you want a nice smooth curve, you can choose either rope
or Window Stabilizer, they work similarly
to one another. It's just a matter of feel. I suggest trying both and just seeing what
works best for you. In addition to helping
you as you draw, it's also going to
snap it into place so it finds little areas
of too much waviness. So again, if you're trying to purposely create
something with that, make sure that's off. The second thing about
this shape is when you use the pencil tool with fill, it looks like it's a closed
shape, but it's actually not. If I zoom in closely
here you can see that my initial node and my end
node are not connected, which means I can't make any
changes to the shape here. I don't like how it's
cut off like that so I need to close the shape
and I can do that two ways. The first is in the contextual
menu for the node tool, I can tap close
and it's going to place a line between
the two open nodes. Now it did it exactly the way the shape was initially
created so it didn't make any changes to it but I can always go ahead and
I can drag this down and drag that out and just
make the changes that I want so it has less of a cutoff. The other way of closing it is to simply drag
one node to the other. Now the whole shape
is closed and again, I can use my nodes and handles to adjust the
shape however I'd like. So I have a basic
leaf shape here. If I wanted to enhance
it a little more, I could grab my pencil
tool again and turn sculpt on and I can just do
little cutouts here. The Sculpt Tool
will either add to or subtract from
your initial shape. It's a great tool for
doing quick things like this where you just want
to add some cutouts, like if you're making
a Monstera leaf or a feather or
something like that. It can be a very
frustrating tool. It takes a lot of
practice and finesse. I go into more detail on it in my floral typography class. I'm not going to focus too
much energy on it here, but if you want to
learn more about how it looks or works rather I suggest
checking that class out. You can also add
it to your shape. If I were to draw between
two nodes like this, it bumped the leaf out, I don't want that in this case. But here you have a basic
leaf shape with some cutouts. Another benefit of using this on fill is that it's
automatically ready for texture. You can't add texture to
a stroke, only a fill. So I can go into my place image and I can add
a raster image file to this. I could go into my
pixel persona and grab my paintbrush and add some
gritty texture to it. It's all set to go. I don't need to do anything
to convert it. So that's one of the
benefits of using this. One of the cons is what
we've already mentioned. If you have a hard time
free hand drawing smoothly, it can be a little
bit challenging, but your stabilizers can
really help with that. So that's the first
way to create a basic leaf shape in Desygner. Lets take a look
at how you can use the pencil tool on stroke. I'm going to grab my Pencil tool again and
I'm going to turn off, Use Fill and sculpt again. This time I want my stroke on, so I'm going to swap
with my pencil. So now the stroke is
on and my fill is off. I'm also going to make sure
that my pressure settings are all reset and I'm going to drop the width slider
to about halfway. I just want to show you
what this is going to look like from the
starting point. If I just draw out a shape, even a very basic line. This is a single stroke, that's a single line through
the middle of the shape. It doesn't look
anything like a leaf. But I can use my pressure
settings as well as my width slider to help get it closer to
this kind of shape. What I need to do is make
these two end points. Point here, and I'm going to do that by dragging
these two sliders. If I drag down, you can see that that's
starting to get pointy there and the top is
getting pointy as well. Now that also
contracted the middle. I need that bulge that
comes here in this leaf. So I'm going to add a node by tapping the middle of that
line and I'm going to drag up. Now you start to see
more of a leaf shape. I'm just going to make this
bigger so you can see it. Now one thing about the
width slider and the Stroke Studio is it ends at 100 points. You can't go farther than that. If you want to make
your stroke larger, you can do that by going
to the contextual menu at the bottom and just straight
swapping up from here. So I need that a lot bigger. There's two ways to
change the size. This one is not
limited, this one is. Now if I go ahead and start
drawing out leaf shapes, it's going to be at the size
that I create down here. Now, the benefit to me of using a stroke is that I have a
little bit more control, it's a lot quicker than
creating it with a fill. I don't have to
draw it out and for someone like me who's
not as comfortable with free hand drawing as
I am with using shapes, this is a better option for
me but the con of this is, it's not ready for texture. I need to actually convert it to be able to
use it for texture. This is a stroke and as
I mentioned earlier, you can only add
texture to a fill. Well, it's easy to convert. If I have it selected
like this right now you see that line running
through the middle of it. I'll go to my edit menu and
I'll tap "Expand Stroke". Now you can see the
nodes are all around it, which means it's a fill. If I go to my Color Studio, it's changed to a fill
rather than the stroke. Now I can add my texture
image files to it. I can go to my pixel persona. You don't have to
close this shape it's automatically closed
when it converts it. That's a second way that you can create a basic leaf shape. Also, I should
mention you can use your Sculpt Tool on this
now that it's converted to a fill if you'd like to make changes like we did here,
it's totally up to you. Let's take a look
at how you can use the pen tool to create
leaf shapes like this. I've grabbed my pen tool. I don't often use this one to create leaf shapes
and when I do, I only do it on the
stroke setting. The reason for that is
if I do it on a fill, I'll reset all my
pressure settings here, I'm going to turn
on Use Fill rather. I'm going to start
tapping out a leaf. You're going to see that
unless you're really, really solid with your
pen tool abilities, It's hard to draw
out a leaf shape. Just because of
the way it works. Now you could use it
on curves settings, prompts are smart settings
and it helps you form curves but it still doesn't
do the best job of it. I could go in and I could use my node tools to make
adjustments to it, but I don't find it very easy. I'd rather use my pencil tool on fill than use the
pen tool on fill. However, you can
use it on stroke. I swap that to stroke. I'm going turn off Use Fill. I'm going to set my leaf pressure settings
like we did with the pencil and I'll just go
ahead and tap out a line. First you want to make
sure it's on pen, the tap on a line and
just curved it like that. I can make it bigger down at the bottom just like I
did with the pencil tool. So you have a really
easy way of just making basic leaf shapes. Always make sure you de-selected or it's going to keep going. So I can just do the same thing. Now again, you need
to convert this before you can turn it
into a textured objects. I'm going to with it selected, go to my edit menu and tap
"Expand Stroke" and now I have a fill unlike this other one that's actually still a stroke. So that's the third way
that you can create a basic leaf shape
using Desygner. Lets take a look
at how you can use your shape tools to
do the same thing. The final way I'm going
to show you is to use your shape tools
to create a shape. Now, I rarely use this because I find
it to be very generic looking and I find
that I have to do too many edits to it to actually make it look like
a more organic leaf shape. But again, it's totally up to you what you feel most
comfortable with. I'm going to go ahead and
select my ellipse tool. I want to make
sure it's on fill. I'll just drag out a basic
oval shaped like that. Now this is a shape layer. It's not a curve, which means I can't use my node tool to make
any changes to this. I need to convert it first, and I'm going to
do that by tapping to "Curves" down at the bottom. Now if you look, I have
four nodes to work with so I can manipulate in the
same way I did with these. Now let's say I want the top and the bottom to be
pointing like this. I'll go ahead and drag
over with my pencil and you can see that they're selected because they
are now filled in blue. I'll go to my contextual menu at the bottom and tap "Sharp." Now, like I mentioned, it's a really generic looking
leaf shape if you want it. If you're going for that
look, it's perfect. If not, if you want to
make some changes to it, you can grab your node tool
and use your handles and just drag in and out just to
manipulate the shape of it. I do go into detail on how to do that in my
first-class about textured florals as
well as creating an entire leaf shape with
a stem using this process. Again, I don't tend to do this. I tend to use my
freehand drawing tools more but it is another option. Now this is a fill. It's not a stroke,
which means you can automatically add texture to it. So while the con of
using the shape is that it is not as organic looking, the pro of doing it is it's automatically ready
to add texture to. So those are four ways that
you could easily create, basic leaf shapes using your shape or drawing
tools and Desygner.
9. BONUS Quadrant Symmetry with Symbols: In the previous videos, we focused on mirrored
symmetry where we only use two panels to create side-by-side
symmetrical elements. I wanted to create another video showing you how you
can easily set up quadrant symmetry by adding four invisible panels
instead of two. I'm going to start the
process the same way, I want to make sure
that my snapping is on, I'm going to grab my rectangle
tool and I'm going to turn my fill and my stroke off. With my snapping on I'm
just going to drag down a square until I hit dead center both vertically and
horizontally and you'll know you're there when the green
and red line show up. I have my first panel that I
need to turn into a symbol, I'm going to go to
my symbol studio, I'm going to tap on
the burger menu and add symbols from
selection and you can't see it but it is there
and when you go to the layer studio you can
see the symbol exists. Now I want to duplicate this
three times so that I have a total of four panels. I'll go to my edit
menu and I'm going to tap Duplicate three times. Now I have four
total symbols and again because of the way
symbols work I cannot easily change the name
of one without changing the others so for
the purposes of this video I'm going
to go bottom up so my top left is going to be
my left on my bottom layer, my top right will be my second, my bottom left will be
my third and my bottom right will be my
fourth and you'll see why that's important
in a moment. First thing I'm going
to do is just drag them out exactly where
I just said I was going to place them and I'm not going to flip them
yet because I want you to see what's going to happen when we do
so I'm going to draw some shapes out first. If I were to go ahead and grab my pencil tool and
I'm going to turn on a stroke here and
tap on my rectangle, I'm just going to start
drawing out a shape. Right now they're
all coming from the bottom-right because again we haven't flipped anything, they're all exact
duplicates of one another. I need to start flipping
these three panels to make them symmetrical
in a quadrant formation with that first one
so I'm going to grab my move tool and I'm
going to start with my second layer here this works just the way that
the mirror symmetry does. All I need to do is go
to my transform studio and I'm going to do a
horizontal flip so now we have a nice mirrored symmetry there and I go back to my third. In this case, I want to do a
vertical flip so I'll go to my transform studio and do vertical and then
it brings it up. You're still symmetrical in a mirrored fashion
here but you want to do vertical instead
of horizontal. Now my fourth layer I
actually need to do both too, I want to do both horizontal and a vertical flip so
I'll tap to select it, I'm going to do a horizontal
and a vertical flip. Now I have those four elements
in a quadrant formation. If I go back in to my pencil tool and I'm going
to grab a different color here and tap back
into that first one, I can start creating designs and quadrant formation and I can make
changes to the size just like I did previously, I can change the color, I can also start adding
elements to the four panels. I'm going to go into
my Asset studio here and grab one of my flowers. This is actually the
Asset studio from the next class so you're getting a sneak peek as to what's
going to be in it. I'm just going to go ahead
and grab one of my flowers here and make it a little bit smaller and I'll
go ahead and add that to this first symbol layer because it's laying over
the top of that one, drag it down and clip
it and now it adds it to those four panels. That's one way that you can use quadrant symmetry
to create a design. Let's go back out here and I'm going to open
up this other one. This is already set up
with my four panels so I have my four
invisible symbols here. I'm going to go ahead
and grab my pencil tool and I want to grab a stroke, also to reset my pressure temporarily I can
always change it. When you tap into that
rectangle and when you're using the pen tool it gives you
these little dots as markers. I'm going to tap here and tap on this one and I get a
nice box formation. I'm going to first move this in with my move
tool a little bit, I only have to size
one down and it's going to size the whole thing down because again
these are symbols. Now I can change the width, I can change the
pressure settings, I can grab my Node tool and I can drag in and
create some formations, I can also start
dragging out and use my handles and my
Node tools to start creating a circular shape and
I go a little bit smaller. If I grab my Move
tool and I just make this a little
bit smaller to give myself some more room. Let me go ahead and reset my pressure settings
and set it up with the leaf pressure
settings that we just did in the
last bonus video. I still have my stroke selected. I'm going to go ahead into my
first one here and I'm just going to grab my Pencil tool
and start drawing up leaves. That's really simple
because as I go along it's just adding them
to the whole thing. Now you get to a point where
you bump into one another, this is a point where
you can either leave it blank like that or you can add a single layer by itself and just add it to fill that
in it's totally up to you. I also didn't take much time to measure things out as I
was to pay attention to where I was placing
things and that's why I bumped into one another but as you can see it's a
really easy way of just adding the leaf shapes
to these four quadrants. I can also grab them
and move them out. Make sure you grab
the actual shapes and I could break
it away like that, I could like the previous
one use my assets or use my drawing tools to add
some flower shapes to it, it's a little bit smaller. It's just a really easy way of doing quadrant symmetry
right and designers vector persona without
having to worry about a sketch or go into the pixel persona to
use the symmetry tool.
10. What's Next?: We're at the end of the class and these are actually a few of the additional
illustrations I had created as part of
creating this class. They're all pretty similar here, but you can actually use this same process to create anything where
you need a symmetry. In fact, my next class
coming up is all about creating these beautiful, symmetrical modern
folk art insects. I will take you step
by step through how I choose my colors, my shapes, my inspiration for the bugs, as well as how I use that same symbol
symmetry process to create these designs. If creating these
little buggy beetles is something you might
be interested in, then check out the next
class coming up very soon. Thank you again for
taking this class. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach
out and I hope to see your beautiful
creations posted in the project section.
Thanks again.
Tracey Capone, Illustrator, Photographer & Designer
