The complete guide to Affinity Designer 1. 7 Volume 1 - Basics of Affinity Designer and Shapes

1. Introduction to the series : all right and welcome to Affinity Designer. The Complete Guide of Affinity designer here on skill share. We've taken our most popular course highly rated, and we've broken it down into six individual lessons here on skill shares so that it's easily digestible. So there is a hierarchy here, and we started off with Volume one, where we talk about the basics in the shapes. Then we're gonna get you into vector art. Then we're going to get you into pixel art, and eventually you'll get into text. Now, if you dropped into the middle of Siri's don't worry, you can still learn the techniques you need to learn, but we will assume that you've got somewhat of a grasp on affinity. Designer. Now, if you need help with affinity, designers certainly check out Seven Seasons studios. We've got a basic tutorial out there to get you up and running. It's about an hour long. Other than that, let's go ahead and get into affinity. Designer. The Complete Guide of Affinity Designer 2. Opening and resizing your first document: Alright, folks. And welcome to Affinity Designer. My name is Jeremy Hazel on him with Seven Seasons studios. And I'll be your instructor for this course. So when you open up a finicky designer, I'll tell you what you are embarking on one of the coolest software programs out there. I've been an adobe user for quite a while and I'll tell you, a finicky designer gives Adobe a run for their money, they better watch out. So let's go ahead and take a look at how a finicky designer actually dominates the world of digital art so that you kind of see how digital artworks we're gonna make the assumption you know very little about the digital art world. So if you are to know this, go ahead and skip into the next area. So when you first open affinity designer this what you're gonna be greeted with, We're gonna go ahead and we're gonna open up a new document. So that's right here. Let's go ahead and open up a new document. Now, affinity designer is like a really cool hybrid. There's something called vector art which, if you're doing digital art, we're gonna talk about vector art for ***. Another lesson. But when you open up the first document, the first thing you're gonna want to choose is which media you're going to want to work in . So if you're going to go into print notice we're up in the type area. You can choose print, or you can choose Web, or you can make a device sized document. So we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna work in Web. Now, when you take a look at Web as we go through the course, we'll take a look at what some of this stuff is. Webb is all about working on digital screens, and so your unit of measure is going to be pixels now. Color format. And when you're working in Web, RGB stands for red, green, blue and the dash is the number of colors. So all of your computer to mothers are RGB. So if you're ever working in the Web in digital art, you're gonna want to be in RGB now. If you're gonna do print print cartridges, on the other hand, let's go ahead and just change the print. Come in a lot of different colors and you can change that up to a C m y que you see there see m y que And that's also in a bid and notice in print. You can swap over two millimeters, and you can make it a certain DP. I now dp I stands for dots per inch, and if you are going to print this image, you wanted to be at least 300. Now. If I swap back to the Web persona, notice it flopped back to RGB, and now it's measuring me in pixels. Now, your standard screen side to side is 12 80 by 800. Actually, no, it's actually bigger than that. So let's go ahead and create a preset. Ah, look that the presets. So you go down the page preset, you can choose the size of documents you want to create. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna work in a full HD so F h D stands for full HD 10 80 p, which is 1920 by 10 80 this is your aspect ratio. This monitor is 16 by nine most the time, folks, you will end up working in a 16 by nine ratio and you notice the DP I is dropped down to 72 . That's because in web you don't need 300 d p I in order to communicate your image and then when you're ready to go, it's just go ahead and hit, OK? And kaboom! It comes into existence. You're ready to go Now let's say that you don't like what you did here. You can always come up, go to the documents set up, which is up here in the file menu, and you can always change it. Now if you wanted to make it say a square document, you uncheck this. Let's make it 1000 by 1000. Make it square, right? Gonna keep dp I at 1000 by 1000 DP I've 72 It okay and Pau square. There you go. All right, so that's a little bit about how to open up a document. How to resize the document. And now let's go ahead, get it in the next one, and we're gonna start putting some stuff down on the document. All right, We'll see in the next 3. Fundamentals of vector vs pixel art : All right, folks, welcome back to offended the designer. Now, this less is just gonna be a really quick introduction to the different pipes of a digital art that offended the designers capable of. Now, if you're familiar with the Adobe product line, Adobe Illustrator works in something called Vector Art. Now, vector art is really cool because it's based on math, and it avoids the problems with scaling up your art. Now let me show you where this is. An affinity designer. If you come up here in the tool palette right to what's called the draw persona all of these tools along the right hand side deal in vector art. So let's go ahead and just grab a rectangle. Click and drag. Now, the cool thing is, this rectangle has a stroke. And Phil, which we can click on the squares here and adjust. All right. Perfect. Now the cool thing is here. If we wanted to resize this rectangle from the 1000 pixel square that it is now all the way up to infinity, right to go on a billboard because it's based on math, it will scale just fine. The same thing is true. If I was to come down here and grab this pen tool and draw quick line. You'll see that there's nodes and it's plotting the math between this node and this note, so that if I scaled this line, there's no issue. So in short, folks affinity, designer equals Adobe Illustrator and both of those work on what is called Vector in the drop persona. Now, where affinity designer kills it right is in the adobe product, there's not really a great equivalent for what's called the pixel persona. So now this is the pixel persona right here. You see where my cursor is and pixel persona works on what is called raster based art. So let me just show you kind of how this differs if I bring up in image. So I've already got this image here and I zoom in and I make it super duper small. You'll see the pics elation here that's beginning to occur. Each one of these little squares right here is known as a pixel, and when you put enough pixels together, you get an image. You remember when we started this? If we go to file documents set up and we had 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels. That means there's 1000 of those little dots all this way and 1000 of those dots all up and down. Now the problem with pixel art is that it will not scale well. If you took this 1000 pixel image and you blew it up to 10,000 pixels, it would do what's called pixel eight, which means it would get all sorts of crazy because in these little pixels here, that's where all the data is stored. So you really can't blow up Raster art Very well, You see, Like this pixel has this particular information, however, with affinity designer, you go into the pixel persona and now notice that all of the tools along this toolbar have changed. So you could theoretically go on a pixel by pixel basis and change each pixel. Now what does that do? Let's go ahead and zoom out. Look what that just did, so you can actually go pixel by pixel and you can paint. So let's grab a brush. Let's go ahead and minimize the brush size. We'll deal with this a little bit later in the course, and let's go ahead and paint that's going to draw in pixels. So what affinity designer is, And what makes it so powerful is the fact that it's part illustrator, part photo shop, right? So you get the vector art plus the pixel art. And the coolest thing is here. You also have what's called the export persona. So if we had something we wanted to export, we could export it on almost continuous basis. Very, very simply so in wrapping up Vector art is based on math, and it will scale very nicely, irrespective of the size pixel art. On the other hand, you really want to work if you're doing pixel art in the size of art closest to your final output and affinity. Designer does both wonderfully, and that's one of the reasons why we love it so much. All right, let's go ahead and get into the next lesson in the fundamentals of affinity designer here, Sweet move into a project 4. Basics of the Interface : All right, folks, back again with our 1000 pixel by 1000 pixel workspace. So what? The last fundamental lessons here before we get into doing something is I want to just walk you through the basics of the interface. So along this area here at the top, you'll find the file menu and then what you're going to see across this area here is the tools menu, and now over on this left hand side, you'll see the toolbox. So in order to find this, we go to view, and then we come down here and we go to tools. Now, see, you've got doc tools and show tools. Watch what absolutely de selected. And the tools disappear. View tools come back. Awesome. Now, the next thing I want to show you here is if we go down to the toolbar watch, we can customize it. And now I know you don't know what all these tools are. By the end of the course, you absolutely will. You can take bits and pieces that you would want to add. So let's say I want to add flip vertical into here, and I can place it anywhere that I want now I'm not going to do that because you'll see it's right here. So I don't want to of those. So if there's something that you see in the toolbar that we're using all the time that you don't see currently you can absolutely come in and customize it through customized toolbar , which is again present in the view tab. So you've got the tool bar up top. You've got the tools on the left hand side and now watches. I flipped through the tools. You'll see this area right here. Change. So when I select my node tool, you see that this changed. I have new options. My corner tool, My pen tool. My pencil tool. This is what is called the context to a bar, and you could think of it is being whatever tool I use like this vector brush. Here are all the options that are available to me in the vector brush. So find the tool. These are all the options. This is called the context to war. So you've got the file menu, the toolbar, the tools and the context to a bar. The last thing that I want to show you is called the studio, and this is over on the right hand side and the studio is composed of studio panels. So you see, I'm moving these across the top, and I even have two layers of them. So you just grabbed the tab you want, and we're going to go through all these in due time. But in order to find them, if you don't find the ones that I currently have that we're working with, you come over to the view menu, you go over to the studio and they are all right here. So if you ever find a panel that I talk about that you do not have in your context to a bar or I should say in your studio, check out your studio in the view menu and you'll find it there. And then you can grab these things and you can click and drag him and pull him out. You can adjust them, and then when you're done with them, you can put him back in. And then, if you ever delete one, let's say accidentally, you can always come back to view and in studio it will be there waiting for you when you get back. All right, So wrapping this quick lesson up, left hand side tools up top here to a bar. The tool that you have creates different options here in the context toolbar. And along the right hand side you have the infamous studio, which is composed of panels. And if you don't see a panel or there's any questions you have go to the view menu and just make sure that whatever you're looking for is selected. All right, folks, that's a little bit on the interface. I'm not going to spend too much time on it. Let's go ahead, hit up one more lesson on layers and let's go ahead and start drawn. All right, folks will see the next. 5. Basics of layers in digital art : Alright again. Welcome back to affinity Designer. So it's time to talk about the most fundamental thing in all of digital art. And when I say all of digital art, it doesn't matter whether you're working with Adobe Illustrator. It doesn't matter whether you're working in sketchbook. It doesn't matter whether you're working in photo shop after effects thinning the designer affinity photo or any other program. All digital art is based on something called layers. Now, in order to find out about your layers, you go to the studio over here on the right hand side and you look for the layer tab. L why are now I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna click and drag this out. So now it's sitting out here and there are two types of layers over here You can add a lair or you can add a pixel air. Now, in an earlier lesson, we covered the difference between vector art and pixel art. So if you wanted to add a layer, you could over here. And if you get to the point in which you want to remove a layer, you just delete it like this for the purposes of this lesson, This is all you're going to need to know. So let's go ahead and actually make our first marks. Let's grab the Ellipse tool and let's go ahead and drag out and ellipse. Now I'm clicking and dragging and we have our first mark on the page. Now you'll notice that this shape has a fill and a stroke, and a new layer has been created. It's called the Ellipse Lair. Now I'm gonna show you how to rename a layer first thing off. Just click on it. We'll call this the Red Ellipse. Okay, got it. So that's how you rename a lair. Learn something new right off the bat. Now let's go ahead and adjust the stroke on this thing. Come over to the stroke and click on the Red Square. Let's go ahead and move the black over here. Perfect. Now you see, that's a big fat stroke right there. In order to change the size, click on the line right next to it. Go ahead and drop that down to something that's a little more pleasant. Maybe eight point or so. All right, cool. Now let's go ahead and draw out another shape. We're gonna come to the rectangle. Now hold the shift key while dragging out this rectangle and you'll notice it creates a perfect square. Holding the shift key is how you make a shape symmetrical. Now, let's go ahead and just the Phil. We grab the fill button and we're gonna come over around the middle of the circle and we're gonna call this the Green Square. Now, look at the layer structure that's created. How do you rename Green Square? Okay, perfect. Now look what just happened. The green square is on top of the ready lips. You see that? They're layers. Let's go ahead and do 1/3 and final one. Now, you see that? There's a little arrow down here. Go ahead and click on that arrow. You got a lot more shapes. Let's grab the triangle. All right, hold shift and let's go ahead and create a yellow triangle. Now you've seen this show, folks around the outside of the circle. Beautiful. Now what's the layer structure look like? If you want to move these and you can't figure it out, go up here And you see this is the move tool. We're gonna use this. Ah, whole bunch Now, Why is that not showing up? You see how the green is obstructing it? Well, let's look at the layer structure the tribals underneath it. No wonder it doesn't show up if you move the trying allowed. It does show up on the red because it's above the red. So my next question is, Well, how do you adjust the layers? It's easy. Click, hold and drag. Okay, so now you see, the red is on top of all on top of the green on top of the yellow. Now the red is in the middle. Notice that it's gonna be under the green, but on top of the yellow. And then if you wanted to bring the triangle forward, click and drag. Move it there. All right, now be careful with this. Let me show you something that's gonna happen eventually to you. You grab the triangle and now you see that it just disappeared inside the green. Where is the blue line? You see, the blue line is on the side of the green or the blue line now is nested inside the green. When you see that the triangle still there. But the reason you can't see it is because it's nested inside of the Green Square. This is what is called a parent child or a nested relationship. You see the little creation here. It's a little twirly that twirls down so you won't see it. Now you toilet down. There it is again. Well, what if you don't want that click drag and just pull it out, pull it in. Noticed still there. And if you don't want that, pull it out. All right. Now let's say you don't want the triangle It all you have two options. Click and drag down to the garbage camp and away it goes. Now, if you don't want to do that, we'll show you how to good to undo it. Edit, Undo And let's say that you just wanted to lead this right click. Make sure that it's selected there, and you can cut it. That's another way to do it. Let's go ahead and undo that or you with the triangle selected. Just hit. Delete. Alright and away it goes. So in this lesson you learn how to create a new layer. You learn that layers stack on one another. You learned how to adjust the order of layers, you learn how to rename a lair. Now let me show you one last thing. This is how to create a pixel air. Come over here and you see add pixel air. Let's go ahead and select it. Now look at the layer that's created. It's his pixel. I call this draw. Draw one. All right, so you see, draw. One is a pixel air. Let's go to our pixel persona. Now we're in my layers panel. Go! It's still there. They just nested it back in. So let's drag it back out and you'll see Draw. One is still there. Grab your brush. Grab any color you want and just paint. All right. And now you see your painting over top of these. Now you see that the assistant added a new layer for you, so well, thank you, assistant. Which means we don't need this draw layer. How do we delete it? Just hit the delete key. Perfect. Now how do we drag this to the bottom? Click and drag? Now it's on the bottom. All right, Perfect. That's enough about layers to get us started. There's no substitute for working with the program, so Let's go ahead and get into our project and explore layers as we go. All right, we'll see in the next one. 6. Creating a smiley face in Affinity Designer - Step 1: All right, folks. Welcome back to affinity, designer. Let's go ahead and get right on end of our first project because there's no substitute through actually doing actual projects. You can sit here and watch videos all day, but it won't help you. You want to begin applying this, So let's go ahead and get into it. Now I'm gonna hold shift notice. I've got my lips tool selected, and I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna pull down a circle. All right? Perfect. So let's go ahead. Now and now you'll notice the little green and red lines that's snapping. I have snapping. Turned on to turn it off. Just click there. And what is this, folks? That's the toolbar. All right. So noticed this ellipse has been created, so that's gonna be the basis for our smiley face. No, it's drawn. I I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna create in the lips, but I'm gonna make it kind of it all belong this time and you'll see a second lips has been created, and we're gonna call that I base. All right. Perfect. Now this yellow Phil is not gonna do us much good. So let's go to Phil and let's go ahead and make it bright white. All right? That looks pretty good. Oops. And if you ever get stuck and you go back to the Hugh, just turn that little inside backed white. All right? Perfect. Now, let's go ahead and I'm gonna show you something new. We're gonna go to edit, and we're going to go down to duplicate. Now, look what just happened over on my layer panel. Let's go ahead and pull this out because we're going to use this quite a bit. We're to call this pupil. All right? Now, I don't know about you, but my pupils aren't necessarily white. So we're gonna come down here and we're going to grab the Phil, and we're going to come down here and we're gonna make that black. And now what we're gonna dio we're gonna grab the corner to make sure that we hold the same size, so to speak, and we're gonna go ahead and make this a little bit smaller. All right, now see what's happening here. Pupil. I base the pupil is above the eye base. Okay, let's do this one more time with the pupil selected Edit duplicate. And now let's rename it reflection. All right, Cool. Now the reflection again, That's not gonna be black. So you're gonna want to take that. You're gonna want to make that bright white. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna shrink that down. I'm gonna hold shift so that it's roughly the same size. Actually, I want to make that a little bit round or someone released shift, and I'm in a position that where I want it. Okay, Now, the stroke on that is a little bit heavy for me. So let's go ahead and reduce the stroke down a little bit. All right? Looks good from here. And now we're gonna want to nest These. So this is key. You see where the I basis click on the pupil, drag it until the blue line is where Minus. See this and release it. What just happened? We created a group. Now let's do it again. Reflection now goes inside the eye and you see where my blue Linus power just like that. Now it's key in digital art that if you do this part correctly, you actually only have to do one. I because watch what happens if I wanted to duplicate the entire group Now? I absolutely could. So this is absolutely key to making this work. Now I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna give this guy green eyes. So let's do this. Let's grab the pupil right click and duplicated and you'll see where it duplicated to inside the group. Still, let's go ahead and zip this guy up a little bit and over. And now how do we, Philip Green, come over here, swing our hue over to green and now bring this over to green? Looks good. And now what's going on with that right? You want to now bring this down below the pupil just like that? So let's look at our layer structure. Let's call this a green base, followed by the pupil. Now I'm gonna change the fill on that, cause it's not quite fully black, followed by the reflection Now, the reflection. Now that I think about it, I don't want any stroke on the reflection. So how do I do that? Click on the stroke and make it no stroke. Perfect. All right, so it's a pretty good I there now. The cool thing is, is one last thing. I'm gonna show you how to do this. Take your reflection and we're going to apply an effect to this to find your effects. You're gonna find it in the studio tab and I don't see mine here. So I'm gonna come up to view going to go to the studio A There it is the effects. All right. Cool. Now, I haven't shown you effects yet with the reflection layer selected. Click on the go shin blur. Now watch what happens up the radius. Look at the softness that it creates on that I That is pretty cool. And if you don't like the reflection there, you could move the reflection anywhere you want. I kind of like it right there and noticed that when I twirl this down in my lair, I've still just got my eye. So let's go ahead and rename the group. We're gonna call this I all right now, last thing before we cut this video, right click on the I and duplicate. Now, make sure you have your move. Tool selected. Over here. You see where my cursor is. Let's go ahead and position those eyes where we want him. on our smiley face. So you see, folks, that's part of the power of the vector is you can create the image once, and then you can duplicate it once you get it the way you want. All right, folks, let's go ahead and take the next step. Are just coming along. All right, we'll see in the next one. 7. How to create a highlight using a curve-Step 2: All right, folks, welcome back to our smiley face. Now, I assume we got this far. I think that it's worth it now to save it. Let's goto file save, and now it's going to save it is an infinity file. Let's call this smiley face one. Now, this is gonna be included in your downloads in case you want to follow along. In case you didn't get this far, we're gonna go ahead and save it so that you could take the next step along with us. All right, Now, let's go ahead and make this thing a little bit three D here, right? We're gonna go ahead and we're gonna add some embellishment here to make this thing stand out and look pretty cool. So let's go ahead and move our layer panel over a little bit. And now this is a circle, right? So we wanted to have a little bit off highlight. Now, there's a lot of different ways you can do this. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna grab my pencil tool, and I'm gonna come over here now. Watch the layer structure. Good. I'm gonna click and drag on my tensile tool now you see this little thing? Looks like a rope that's coming along here. That's what's called the stabilizer. And I'm working with my mouse. Usually, I would use my graphics tablet for this, but you don't need one. All right? Now, what just happened? We had been dealing in shapes. This created what is called a curve. Now I used it, creating my pencil tool. And that little rope looking thing that you saw here was what is called the stabilizer. So what it did, it drew a path that was full of these little things that are called notes. And in order to be just a note now we're going to go to the node tool. And in case I didn't hit the point exactly, I'm going to combine this. I have to get a little bit closer to close this path. Now we're gonna grab the no tool, Come down here and today. Ah, there we go. We've closed the path. Now let's go ahead and see what's up. All right, Now you see how we crisscrossed apple sauce. That's not good. We want to click this guy here, and we want to adjust this until we've got that now all I'm doing, I'm just adjusting the nodes until I've got him. Kind of where I want him. Okay, that'll work. Now, you see, that looks absolutely atrociously bad. That's fine, though. Watch this. If we select the curve, we're gonna turn off the stroke and we're gonna fill it with white. Okay? Now you're saying Wow, that looks awful. Jeremy, that's completely fine, cause watch this. Now we're gonna find our effects again. So we're coming up to the view coming up to studio now. My effects tab is somewhere in the mix. Hey, there it is. All right, let's pull out our effects tab. Let's add ago, Shin Blur. And let's go ahead now and blur this thing out just a little bit, okay? Now, if you don't like the way that's looking, you can always grab your no tool and you come up and adjust the notes, Not what I'm going to do with my node selected. I'm just gonna delete the week the leap delete. And now I'm gonna click and drag that line in so that it's nice and smooth. Okay, so this is the power of working with notes. Now, let's say I want to take this one. I can drag that bad boy out. I can drag this bad boy out. You know what? I don't think I need that one, so I'm gonna go ahead, delete this one out, too. Oh, you think I need that one? Go ahead. Delete that one out, too. And then I'm just gonna pull this down until I get it kind of the way I want it. All right? That looks pretty good. Let's go ahead and check out what we got here. All right? That looks like a pretty good highlight. Now, let's take a look here. We got curve. Now I want to drag this down inside my lips. So you see where I'm putting this blue line, and now the curve is inside the Ellipse. Awesome. All right, so that's a little bit on how to do a simple highlight using the pen tool. So you've been exposed now, two curves. You've seen how to adjust, noted a very base high level, and we got this really cool highlight going on here. Let's go ahead and cut this video here, and then I'm gonna show you how to use a pixel air to create shadow. All right, We'll see in the next one 8. Adding a pixel layer to shade the image- Step 3 : All right, folks. Welcome back. So let's go ahead and check this out. Now I'm gonna show you. So the brand new, we're gonna go over to the pixel persona here. All right, now, pixel persona, brand new set of tools. Let's check out our layer structure. We're gonna pull out our layers so that you can see exactly what we're doing, and I'm gonna drag that. And now I want to actually paint. Now I'm gonna use a mouse. I'm not gonna use my graphics tablet. And now, if I'm looking at painting on yellow, right, I want to be in the yellow area, but I want to paint it a little darker, so I'm gonna go over to a neighboring orange, and I'm gonna grab kind of a brownish color. So again to adjust this, you swing over to your color panel and I'm gonna be right about in here. Now, when you paint, I'm gonna go ahead and turn the opacity down to around 60% and you'll see this is the context to a bar. Four the brush. I want my flow to be down low roughly 60 to 40% and I want my hardness to be zero. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and drop that 20 All right, Now the next step here, I want to choose my brush. Now, I'm in the brushes. Tab, I'm gonna come over here to my let's go basic brushes, and I want to choose something very, very, very soft, So I'm gonna choose something very soft. And now when I come over here, you see the opacity changed again. Every time you re select a brush, you've got to re select Europe acid E, and you'll see the size of this brush. Now, that's way too big. In order to change the size of the brush, you want to come down here and adjust the width of said brush. Now, the circle is only about 100 pixels. But now I wanted to be a little bit bigger, so I'm gonna make it about here and now I'm gonna try Elice, all right? I think that I'm pretty good there. Actually, I'm happy with that. That let's do this and you'll see that I'm taking it very, very slow. And now why aren't I over shooting? And over spring, let's take a look at my layer structure here, and you see how I'm just shading it like a sphere, folks. Okay, let's look at layers. The reason that I'm not over spraying is because this pixel air is nested inside the Ellipse. Watch what happens when I pull it out? I've actually over shooting it by quite a bit, right? So if I keep painting, I'm actually painting over quite a bit. But now watch what happens when I bring it inside. All the over spray. Dawn. All right. Now, any time you do a circular object, you're gonna have a little bit of a halo on the outside right where it shows the circle. So to do that, we're going to erase. I'm gonna turn down my hardness to zero. I'm gonna turn down my flow to roughly 50 and I'm gonna turn my capacity down also to around 50. And I'm going to increase my brush size, which is done over here. And now I'm just going to rim the side of this thing ever so slightly. You see how I'm not touching it directly? Like I'm not hammering on it. So what I'm doing, I'm technically I'm erasing my brown that I put on there, all right. And a little goes a long way. I think I'm pretty good. So that's a little bit on affinity designer using this particular technique. Let's go ahead, get back in the vector, and we're gonna create a mouth for this thing, and we're gonna call it today. All right, We'll see in the next lesson. 9. Creating the mouth and detailing Step 4: All right, gang. Welcome back to affinity Designer. So in the last lesson, we added in this pixel air inside of the Ellipse to show you how to use a pixel air to shade out your material, you also learn how to use a brush. So let's go ahead. Let's save it. Goto file, save as it's called, a smiley face to on save. All right. And we're gonna go ahead, include this affinity designer file in the downloads in case I got lost. Or you just want to skip to the steps so that you know what you're doing. Now, the last thing I want to show you here, we're gonna go and we're gonna make a mouth for this thing. So let's go back to Vector Art and we're gonna come over here into our shapes, and we're gonna find a shape to use. Now I'm going to go ahead and I'm gonna grab a segment tool. Looks like this, actually, Let's grab the crescent tool and we're gonna come in here and we're gonna pull a crescent shape. Now, this is a shape layer. Let's take a look at this notice here. You got the crescent. We're gonna call this mouth, okay? And we wanted to be above the pixel layer and everything else because we don't want the highlights and shading to get in the way, and we want to rotate it. So to rotated, you grab this handy, dandy little handle and you swap it over. Now, hold shift, and you get it in nice 15 degree increments that when we move it over. Look at that. Perfect. Now, let's go ahead and fill it black. So I come over to my fill. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna fill it black. Now, let's say that I want to change it up a little bit If I select the tool here, and then I come over and I select the crescent tool. Look at this. I get some different context shapes so I can adjust this way. I think that that's kind of cool. And I also get somewhere I can adjust this way, and I could make him pretty surprised. All right, let's go ahead and do that. All right, look. Super cute. All right? We're gonna go ahead and position this where we want it. Now we want to put some teeth in it, and we want to put a tongue in it. So let's go ahead and let's grab a heart shape. Heart tool. Perfect. Let's go ahead and drag out a heart. All right. Looks good. Now, how do we make it pink? Well, let's go ahead and swing around here with the bill and make it bright pink. And now how do we move it into the mouth? Folks? You guys know this. Click and drag the layer. Beautiful. Now watch this. With the move to a selected we can reposition 100 different ways from Sunday. And that looks pretty good if we wanted to make it even a little bit more round a little bit more curvy. Awesome. Just like that. All right. Looking good looking really good. Now, let's go ahead and make a row of teeth. And again, I'm just working in shapes, folks, I'm not showing anything that's crazy or anything like that. Let's go ahead now and we're gonna use another segment. Let's go ahead and use this segment. So we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna make a segment, and we're gonna flip this guy upside down. We're gonna make this bright white and we're gonna go ahead and with their move to a selected A let's go and do that place that kind of down where we want it. And now we grab it and let's move it front and center into the mouth. Beautiful. Now, you see, we've got some of those edges there. Let's go ahead and fix that. Groups. Why did that happen? Because I had the entire layer grabbed. I didn't want that. All right, we go up, grab the segment. There we go. Problem solved. Problems stay unsolved. All right. Cool. Now hearts a little bit too close to the teeth. I want to manipulate that just a little. Okay, Perfect. Now we can go in one step further. Let's go ahead and take the next step. We're gonna zoom on in here now. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to switch over to my pixel persona. I'm gonna grab a brush. I'm gonna grab my a soft brush. I'm gonna grab my paintbrush. I'm gonna shrink down my brush. Remember, this is how you shrink down the brush. I'm bringing my opacity to roughly 40%. I'm keeping my flow in my hardness down and I'm gonna choose a color that's kind of in the same vein of pink. But I was gonna be a little bit darker, All right? I think that we're in pretty good shape. I wanted to be a little redder. I think that's good. Okay, Now, making sure my brushes down, I'm gonna make sure my heart is selected, and then I'm gonna go ahead, and I'm just going to paint a little bit. And you see how I'm just kind of shading this thing in a little bit, Okay, Now, let's do the same thing here. Now, see what just happened there? You've got the pixel there. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna nest it inside the heart. All right? Perfect. And lastly, here, with the teeth. I'm going to select the segment. I'm gonna keep the same brush. And now I want to make this kind of a light ish blue. I want this to kind of just be maybe a little bit bluer here. There we go. All right, let's go ahead and make that just a little bit dark. There we go. All right. And now I'm just gonna go ahead and just caressed the top of the teeth. Now, why aren't I painting on the yellow? It's all in the layer structure, folks. Remember? All right, Perfect. And now where am I gonna drag this into Inside the segment. So the heart has a pixel air. This segment has a pixel there. Both of those are included in the mouth, and the mouth is wrapped up in the Ellipse. All right, folks, I think that's pretty super cute. Now, you could do a lot of different stuff with it. This is just the bare bones basics. We're gonna take the next step. I'm gonna show you how to save it, how to export it now to share it. All right, we'll see in the next one. 10. Exporting saving and placing a document: All right, folks. Welcome back. So we finished up our smiley face here. Let's go ahead. Let's save it one more time. File save as Smiley face three. Perfect. All right, we're gonna space that out. This will be available in your downloads. If you want to follow along now, on some of these lessons in this course, I'm gonna ask you to submit a screenshot. So the way you do this, let's go ahead and re nest are layers panel. The way to submit a screenshot is to simply come up and hit the print screen button on your keyboard. So here, I'm gonna go ahead, and I'm gonna hit the print screen button. So this will now hold the screenshot, and then it will save it is a J peg for you. Now, in order to share this, you come over here to file you go to export. And now the easiest way to export this. Let me show you two ways. Here, we're gonna save it as what is called a J peg. It's gonna be 1000 by 1000. And then you set the quality level and it will tell you how many kilobytes or How many megabytes? Now you can choose here the whole document. You can choose some of the document with without the background. We're just going to submit this as it sits. So let's go ahead and export. I'm gonna call this smiley J Peg perfect over to the desktop. It away it goes. Now, let's say you wanted to create a p n g, which has a transparent background because some of you might come over here to document set up. This is how you create a PNG with a transparent background. You go to your documents set up, you go to color. Click on transparent background hit. Okay, now you see what just happened here. You've got all of these little checkerboard patterns. That means there's no color to the background. All right, so another we got a transparent background. Let's go ahead and exported. We export. And now with P and G, if you're gonna export with a transparent background, you want PNG because J Peg doesn't support that and notice that we don't have a selection. So this whole area is not selected. What I'm gonna do, I'm gonna close this out with my move. Tool selected I'm gonna grab just my smiley face. And now if I come in to export, it will allow me to export the selection without background, and it will tell me how big that file is now. So not the 1000 by 1000. It'll just do my PNG and let's go ahead and export it. Let's call it Smiley, PNG and save. All right, beautiful. Perfect. All right, so now that being said, let's go ahead and go to place. And let's grab that smiley PNG that we had come down to the smiley PNG Open up, click and drag. Perfect, transparent smiley PNG file. All right, success, folks. So you now know how to export. You know the difference between J. Peg and PNG. Hope you learned a little bit about a finicky designer. Hope he enjoyed what we did there. Let's go ahead and your continuing on. Let's go ahead and get into the next list. And if you're not, I hope you learned a little something. All right, folks will see in the next one. Have a good one 11. Applying Fill and Stroke to shapes : All right, welcome to affinity designers. So in this section of the course, we're gonna talk all about shapes, so this could be considered an introduction to shapes. Now, as we cover before some of these lessons of mechanical that lead the challenges, challenges stack up to projects. So let's go ahead and get through one of the mechanical lessons. So what I'm going to do here, I'm gonna go ahead and clean my canvas off. Now, just in case you're not sure how to create a canvas, you go to new I'm working in the Web persona. I've got 1000 pixel by 1000 picks workspace and I hit OK, and that folks brings me to hear. So when we talk about shapes, I'd like to go down here. Let's go ahead and grab the tear tool and let's drag out a tear. Now all shapes have three characteristics. The first characteristic I want to talk about is stroke. Now, The stroke of a shape is the outside area and the stroke panel, which is here in my studio. You see, I'm highlighting it here. It's present into the studio. Now, if you don't have that, you go to view, go to studio and then we go over to stroke and turn it on and you'll get this panel. No, we make sure the move tool is selected, so we select our shape, make sure that's happening. And then what I want to do is I just want to crank up this slider. Now you'll see that change the width or the weight of a stroke. And right here, I've got a solid line style. Now let's say I wanted to take the stroke off. Just click on the little red line there with the box. Very simple. So stroke is measured in with the second characteristic that a shape has is a fill. Now you see, there's nothing in my shape here. There may be something in your shape, depending on what you defaults were. We get to the fill of a shape through two ways. There's the color tab or the swatches tab. You see, I'm flipping between these two here in the color tab, you'll see that there is a hollow circle, and there is a filled in complete circle. The filled in circle is the Phil I know. Shocker, huh? Now, if you want to create a fill all you have to do make sure that the big circle is at the front to toggle. Um, just click on him. That's how you do it. And then just go ahead and move to the color that you want. Now we've got entire lessons on color coming up. But fundamentally, around the outside of the color wheel is what is called the hue. Inside the color wheel, you adjust the darkness and the lightness of color and what is called saturation saturation is caused by how much color there really is. You see, this is fully saturated. There's no saturation there. All right, so that's how you change a fill on a shape. Now, if you do not want any fill, you see this little circle with the red line, the red lines, a common theme. Click on it and feel goes away. If you decide you want to fill just moved to a color and the field comes back. Now the last thing that I want to show you all shapes have adjustment properties. To do this, you must select the shape. Now when you select the shape you see, I've selected it over here these little orange dots come into existence, and they're different for every type of shape. So here we can adjust different properties of this tier. We can make it a little more subjective, weaken, blow it up and bloated a little bit. You see how that's moving? What happens if I grab this handle? It shifts it from one side to another. That's pretty cool. And then if I take this orange area, I didn't go through. And I can shift where the center point ISS so you'll see that these red handles or orange handles as it were, are the adjustment points. Now let's check out the context to a bar notice up here in the context toolbar. We have all the same properties that you and I just talked about from here. I can adjust the Phil from here. I can adjust the stroke from here. I can adjust the curve size, so let's go ahead and make that 15. You see how that got a little narrower. I can also use a slider to adjust the tail position, and I can also adjust the bend of the shape. So whether you want to use the context toolbar whether you want to use that handles in the sliders whether you want to use the color or the swatches tab and the stroke tab totally up to you, for the most part, I'm gonna go ahead, and I'm gonna use this stroke panel and the color panel to do a majority of our adjustment in this course. I will, however, use the context toolbar. I'll make sure to show you and don't worry about getting it. All right. Now, there's no substitute for simply working with this. So we're gonna keep this lesson of five minutes. We're gonna get into a couple more lessons, and then we're gonna begin applying shapes. All right, we'll see the next one. 12. Adding multiple strokes to a path in version 1.7 : All right, folks. Welcome back to Affinity Designer 1.7 update. Now, this is one of the most useful things that I've seen. And it is a really easy way to offset a pass in affinity. Designer. If you're familiar with illustrator, offsetting a path is super easy. There's a selection for it. Affinity designer was not easy up until this point. And it still does require you to do a little bit of adjustment. But let me show you how it's done. We're gonna come in, and I'm just gonna draw any old shape known to man, right? We're just gonna grab this shape. Okay, so I had closed that shape up. Now, I'm gonna adjust the note here because I don't want it to double back on itself, All right? And I'm gonna close that up. All right, So there's my weird shape. Let's go and fill it. We're gonna fill it bright red, and I'm gonna take the stroke down to nothing. I'm gonna make it zero. No stroke. All right, So now what we're gonna do is I'm gonna show you a brand new panel that's available in 1.7 . You're gonna go to view studio appearance, and now this appearance panel. You might be familiar with it from illustrator Select the Object, click on the stroke and then just bring the stroke into existence. Now, you want to make sure to make this offset work? The stroke is behind the image. Okay. Make sure the strokes behind may see where that layer went. It was above. Now it's below the fill strokes work just like layers. And I'm gonna turn this thing up to 50 points. That's a big stroke. So now we're gonna go ahead and click off it, and I'm gonna add a stroke. Now, I'm gonna make this green just so you guys can see it. All right, so it's green, and it's one point if I want to change the point, I can change it here. Let's make it 25. And now you can bring these strokes above or below, just like you would layers. Now, why did the green disappear? Well, because it's covered by the black one to bring it back to spring it up. So you could create some really cool 19 seventies psychedelic strokes with this simply by doubling the stroke with each time However, what we're going to dio is I'm to change the blend mode of this stroke. So I come down here and I'm going to erase and boom just like that. Instant offset. Now, let me show you how this works. We're gonna come down. I'm just gonna grab a square. I'm gonna turn off the stroke on this square, and I was gonna make it blue so we can see it. Now watch this but dragon below. Notice how the offset is awesome because you can see blue around between the black and the red. That's cool. That's the easiest way to offset a stroke with the addition of 1.7. Now, for my people that do patterns, right, let's say that you look into creating a cutting line. Watch this. If I select my image again, it's still got this stroke. I come in here and now I do a dotted line. Look at that. Now I'm able to play with this line and I'm able to adjust all of the lines so that I actually have a cutting line out around the pattern that is huge. And if you ever wanted to adjust the offset of this. You could always come in here because it's still there and you could make it 40. There you go, 40 points between the black and the red. That is huge. That is how to offset. Align in, affinity designer with 1.7, or how to apply multiple strokes to the same shape in affinity. Designer. Alright, folks, let's go ahead and get after it and learn something new about affinity designer. 13. Filling a shape with the gradient tool : welcome back to affinity designers. So in the last lessons, you learned in a shape how to adjust simple pills through using the color wheel or the swatch panel. So now we're gonna show you something new. One of my favorite tools and one of the most powerful tools and affinity designer is going to be the bill tool for Grady int. So we're gonna show you how to do ingredient, Phil. So we're gonna come over here, Let's grab any shape whatsoever. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna grab a simple circle so we'll just grab the Ellipse tool and we're gonna drag out any lips now Notice. I don't want a perfect circle. It's better illustrated with the lips. So you're following along at home, Grab the lips. Now, see, over here, I'm gonna start using the context toolbar Little, we go over to Phil and we can adjust the fill that standard, or we can come over to swatches and we can adjust the fill through using swatches that standard. But now we're gonna grab the fill tool over here in the toolbox. And now you'll see that snapping is on and you see this little circle and a little icon. This tells you that the fill Grady Int tool is enabled. Now let's take a look at the Grady and Tool. Every Grady and Tool in one way or the other has two circles. There's this circle and there's that circle. So if I click on this circle, watch what happens up here quick there and you'll see it broadcasts the fill off that circle. So if I want to change that filled to say a pink because I recently used it, I can Pau Instant Sunset, Grady it right right off the bat. Now, if I wanted to change this circle, I could do that. Now I can change it to a different color, so it doesn't even have to be one of my recent I could come over here and I can make it really warm, and I can highly saturate it. Now I've got a saturated Phil using the Grady in tool. So to adjust the Grady int, you simply click on the circles and then select the color that you want. Now, the position of the Grady in is a completely different animal. This little slider here positions the Grady int so if I wanted a little more yellow and a little less pink ice position the slider this way. And if I wanted a little more pink in a Little league, a Cielo ice position the slider that way. Now let's say that I want a three stop Grady int. I know we're gonna blow your minds here. All you do is you find a spot on the timeline here and click once. Now, look at what happened. Brand New Circle has created. And let's say that I want to make this a blue right now. That's not a really please ingredient, but for illustrative purposes, works just fine. And now you see, I've got to position sliders. So now I can make some pretty complex Grady INTs off from this. Now, in the event that I don't want this anymore, all I have to do is I just come up, select my circle. You see how the big one is in the center, and I just click to the delete key on my keyboard. That's it. So you know how to now create ingredient? You know how to adjust the color on ingredient. You know how to add a stop to the Grady int and you know how to adjust the position on ingredient. Now with ingredient tool selected, you can come up and change the position. And now let's say that I wanted to reverse it. We can go to the context two of our here and just click reverse. That's super easy. And then we can rotate the greedy int around one of the points. You see how it's rotating around the yellow, and then we can lock the aspect ratio. Now what is that? Notice how this ellipses narrower this way than it is this way. If I lock the aspect ratio and I go through and I rotate it, watch this. It will keep the aspect ratio set. And this is key. Now, when I change the type of greedy it now, this is a whole different animal. Solid fills our solid fills linear Grady INTs we just covered. Let's look at elliptical because after all, this is any lips right now notice here, there's two legs. Now this leg control the up and down this leg controls the in and out. Now watch this. You see that they're both moving at the same rate. That's because we have the aspect ratio checked within the lips. You don't want that when that is not checked. Now I can move this leg independent of this leg. Ah, 100%. And what happens when I change the fill on that leg? It changes them both, but the aspect ratio is distinctly different. So let's go ahead and drag out ingredient. Let's go ahead and change the color of said Grady int in an elliptical Grady int. Let's go ahead and pull this to the center. And now you see how down here and up here you're getting good. Grady int You want to pull this leg in, and now you really begin to see the elliptical properties of that Grady Int come together, and if we center it a little bit better, you can get a really nice transition through. So that's an elliptical Grady int. Now what's a radial? Grady int? A radio Grady Int only has one leg. Watch this. Now you see how, though in an ellipse, this area and this area aren't the same. Transparency and white is that area. That's because it's not a perfect circle radio. Grady INTs are best used with perfect circles as an example. If I pull out a circle, that's a nice radio Grady int. So you know about the different types now you can also adjust the radio ingredients or any Grady and, for that matter, up here in the context toolbar. It works exactly the same. Pick your color, pick your ending color. And then when we go ahead and we drag out an image that's now the Grady Int that's created all right, so that's a little less in ingredients. We're gonna cover bit map, greedy INTs and conical Grady INTs in a separate lesson. So I want to keep this one short. We're gonna go ahead and cut this one here, but you know how to change the color. You know how to change the direction. You know how to add and remove steps, ingredient. And you know a little bit about the different types and how to adjust the different types. We're gonna be using these in the project coming up. So let's go ahead and cut this lesson. Do a couple more solid lessons, and then we're gonna get into a challenge. All right. See, in the next one 14. Adding transparency to a shape with the transparency tool: all right, This lesson is all gonna be about the transparency tool. Now, the transparency tool is extremely cool. The transparency tool could be used as a masking tool. We'll talk about that later, or it could be used to create some really cool graphics and special effects. So we're gonna show you a little bit about that now and then in the lessons were absolutely going to use this constantly. So let's go ahead now and drag out a shape. I'm gonna go ahead and drag out a basic shape, and I'm gonna fill it with a straight up black. Now, you remember how to fill. You remember how to create a shape, so you should be good bye now and then let's go ahead and create a perfect circle. So I'm gonna hold shift and I'm going to make sure my snapping is on, and I'm going to position it in the center for no reason other than were practicing snapping. Now let's go ahead and fill this thing. Make sure you're Phyllis selected over here with kind of like a greenish blue. I think that's kind of cool anywhere in here. It's fine. Whatever color works for you find when you like. So when we do this now, we're gonna come over to the transparency tool, and it looks like this little wine glass over here. So when we do this, let's look at the context to a bar. When you click on the wine glass, you see, you have all sorts of different options. Let's go ahead and pull down a transparency, just like we would ingredient. You'll see you've got a black and a white circle. Now, this is something that you're gonna use all the way through. Affinity designer and every other graphics program Black conceals, White reveals. So notice the black circle up here is concealing all of the background from your view. But the white circle down here is actually revealing the background, and if you adjust the slider, you'll see it reveals more of the black ground. So again, black conceals, white reveals, and transparency works much like ingredient. But it's not about colors. It's about black and white. Now the options are the same because this is a perfect circle. I'm just going to use a radio Grady int, and I'm gonna go ahead and from the middle section, snapping on. I'm gonna go ahead and grab my magnifier so I can see my area. So now, once I've got a kind of zoomed out where I want it Now I'm gonna come in, come back to my transparency tool. You see, it's still there, and I'm gonna move that kind of whatever I want it That looks pretty good, actually. And I'm gonna just this slider. That's kind of cool. We can use this with stars, nebula, a lot of types, space stuff. Or you can use it to get some really cool masks and some background effects. Now, let's go up to the context toolbar. You know how to choose the type. You can adjust the radiant, or I should say the transparency the same way you could ingredients. You could just the mid points, the opacity. So if you wanted to insert a stop, if you wanted to copy of stop, you certainly could. You could also use these buttons. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and rotate this and now it doesn't make much sense because it's a radio ingredient. But now you know what it does. This is what I'm finding on doing the here. This kind of cool. Let's go ahead. Reverse it. Now what do you think's gonna happen if this is opaque and this is transparent power? This is really cool for, like, force field effects and such. If you've got a force field, say around a planet, you're doing like a sci fi theme or a heads up display, there's some really cool stuff that we done with this. Let's go ahead and check this out. I'm gonna go ahead and pull another circle. I'm gonna hold shift and I'm gonna go ahead and create a plan it and I'm gonna go ahead and put this bad boy just like that. And then I'm gonna go ahead and change up the look of it over here so you can absolutely create another style of planet somewhere inside of this. Now, I know this isn't quite a planet. This is just a circle. But I want to show you how the layer structure could make a difference. So if I come down here and I bring it below, you'll see now how the transparency impacts the circle. So that's a huge piece of awareness. You see how there's a little bit of blue tinge to that. This is how the transparency effects. And if you understand this, this is a power play every time. Individual effects. All right. I think we've gone far enough on this lesson. You know about transparency. You know how to create a transparency. You understand the idea of black conceals White reveals you understand how to adjust the position. And you understand the context to a bar. How it works. Very similar to ingredient. All right, let's go ahead and cut this lesson and get into a challenge. All right, seeing the challenge. 15. Challenge on transparency and shapes: welcome to the first challenge. So this challenge, you're going to create a transparency image using three spheres to make something that sort of looks like this. Now again, the challenges are not designed to say Yours has to exactly look like mine. However, if you get stuck, go ahead and skip past this introduction and go ahead right to the solution and we'll show you how I do what I do and where applicable. I have included the working files so that you can follow along, look at the layering structure and figure it out. One of the best ways to learn folks is to reverse engineer work that was done by other people. So if you want to see how I did it, use the working file and reverse engineer the working file to figure it out. Other than that, let's go ahead, pause the video. Here, let's get into the challenge. And after you're done, I'll show you how I did it. All right, we'll see you on the other side of the challenge and welcome back to the challenge. Now. These challenge solutions are not designed to be the be all end all of everything. If you went off book and did your own thing That during the challenge. Awesome. That's the point. If you wanted to kind of skip to the end and you were unsuccessful in the challenge, that's OK, Follow along. And if you thought you did the right submitted and you just want to see how I did it, go ahead. Followed along. Now, I included the working files for each challenge, the downloads for this lesson. So let's go ahead and it started. So the first thing I'm gonna do I'm gonna come up here and I'm gonna pull a circle. Or I should say, a square. Hey, let's get my geometry right now. We're gonna go and we're gonna make this black. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna pull out a couple objects. We're gonna go ahead and pull out a perfect circle and the first thing I'm gonna do I'm gonna choose the color of this circle that I want. I'm gonna want a red circle and now I'm gonna go ahead and apply a Grady Int Phil to this circle. So I come up to my fill tool, I grab my Grady int tool and I pull us radiant down. Now, you see, there's my Grady int. Now I'm gonna go ahead and want this to be a radio ingredient. So I change the type and I move over to radio. Now, you see, nothing really happened. That's because I now have to move this centre over and swipe this thing where it goes here , all right? And what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna push this up a little bit because I wanted to kind of look like a sphere. And I'm gonna go ahead and adjust this sphere down into the dark a little bit. All right? Perfect. Now let's do this. I'm gonna go for bonus points here. This might bite me. Who knows? I come over here and I click on this to add a space. Now I'm gonna click on my outermost circle and I'm gonna come down here and I'm gonna put a little bit of halo on this thing. You see how? Making this super red. And then here I'm gonna go ahead and create one more. And this is going to be Oops. Not too. This is gonna be the darkest part. This is shading a sphere 101 right now. I'm gonna move this that way. I'm a move this that way, and I think I'm pretty good. I'm gonna push this out quite a ways. All right, Let's see what I got. That looks pretty good. That actually looks like a shaded ball using just Grady INTs. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and zoom this out. Maybe in a little bit. All right, so we've got one. Now, if we've got one, guess what we could do. We can now apply transparency, but I want to create three. So I right. Click, Duplicate, duplicate. All right, So once they're duplicated, all we're gonna do for this section is we're gonna come down here and we're going to begin placing them on top of one another. Now, you can do in a couple different ways. I'm gonna go ahead and place this on top of that, and I'm gonna go ahead and place this on top of that. And now I'm gonna go ahead and expand. Now, how do you expand hold shift? Make sure you're consistent, and I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna put this guy about halfway down here. Then I'm gonna place this guy about halfway down here and I'm gonna expand a little bit holding shift, and then I'm gonna go ahead and put this guy right about half way down here. So you see how we're stacking? It's totally non scientific. But we are stacking now to shift this folk just a little bit down. And you can make a many of these as you want, right? But you see the effect that we're beginning to get here. Now, once you've got these three things in position, you played the perspective game because this one is obviously smaller than that. Let's go ahead and shift this one up just a little bit. I think there we go. It's not really good perspective Game. If the one in front is not larger now, the time has come. If you so wanted to, you could make them transparent. Now watch this. This is kind of cool. You don't have to do this, so I'm gonna start with one of the farthest back. I'm gonna come over to the transparency tool, and I'm gonna drag a transparency Blair over it there, and I'm gonna go ahead and move that in to right about here now with this one again. Transparency Black conceals white reveals I'm go ahead and place that right about here. And with this one again, transparency Black conceals white reveals. So I'm gonna come on down over here now, This actually adds a tremendous amount of a visual interest to the peace because no longer is it three solid spheres. Now you've got the transparency on top of the other. And there's just a peek that these three things are coming over. So what I'm gonna do now, I'm not. Come over here and I'm going to group all the spheres. Make sure we get him all hold shift and I'm gonna come over. And what we're gonna do here, right Click group. Beautiful. Now, what's the group? I don't think we covered this in depth before. A group means now that I can move these altogether. But yet, if I did want to adjust any one of the spheres, I could always come back into it. And I could theoretically adjust my particular transparency. So the group allows you to modify the spheres while maintaining the independence of each sphere. All right, let's go ahead and call this challenge Done. Let's go ahead and zoom back out, and I think we're in pretty good shape 16. Adjusting the size, and rotation of shapes : All right. Welcome back to affinity. So this is gonna be all about how to work with shapes, in adjusting, re sizing and rotating. So in order to do that, we need a shape where we can see the rotation. So let's go ahead and grab one. Let's grab the polygon tool. And now I'm gonna go ahead and drag this bad boy out. Now, I'm not holding shift, so you see that the aspect ratio is all over everywhere. First lesson. You know this if you hold shift, it locks the aspect ratio in one toe one so that it's perfect. You see the way, the width and the height. So if I do this, let's move it into center. Was front and center right here, So snapping Zaun. Beautiful. Okay, I'm gonna show you the non scientific way to do this. You can adjust things by either grabbing the handles, grabbing the corners or if you hold shift, it locks the aspect ratio. So you've seen that? And now when we rotate it, go ahead and move this back to center. The non scientific way to rotate a shape is up here using this rotation handle, you can slide this over. Now watch this into the studio. There is what is called the transform panel, and as I rotate the shape, you can see the rotation move through, and you also see it with the are at 45.6 degrees. So that's the Freehand rotation. Now watch this hold shift while rotating. 15 30 60 75 91 051 2135. If you hold the shift button, it locks it in 15 degree increments. Now I think it's important to note, Where is it rotating around and by around. Where's the origin? In order to see this, you go to the rotation center right up here in the context to a bar, and a new little widget occurs. If you wanted a hand, drag this widget down to this corner and rotate it. Watch where it rotates from. Ah, okay, there you go. So now you can change where rotates from. This is extremely crucial, with multiple shapes, so that's the non scientific way to do it. Now, with that little center selected, let's hold shift and re size. Now where is this re sizing from? It's re sizing from that lower right hand corner. Now, if I take this and I move it up to here, watch this. I hold shift. So the aspect ratio was right. Where is it re sizing from? So that changes the re sizing options. Now let's go to the transform panel. I want to show you this. Let's go. To transform this diagram is extremely important. This shows what is called the anchor point and the area that is selected. All right, You see, all these nine boxes will tell affinity designer where to execute your commands from. So in this particular shape, this Pentagon. If we click on this, you see how this box got a little bit bigger and we rotate. Look at the rotation point of the shape. Now it's rotating around this point, which translates to this point so you can adjust the rotation. You can also adjust what's called shear. This shears the shape, and by the way, there is no distortion in affinity designer shears as close as you get. Now, if you want to adjust that by hand, you can add in zeros you can add in exact coordinates. Now you can lock the aspect ratio also through the transform panel by clicking this on and clicking this off. Now watch this. If I go through and I make this a let's add 90 pixels to it. So we're gonna make this 6 79 see how the height and the width both changed. Now, if I go through here and I unlock this so I destroy this and I make this 200 pixels watch how this is going to narrow down. That's how you control the aspect ratio using the transform panel and the same thing is true with position. If I want to move this over in the X direction, which this is X by, say, let's drop it 200. So I'm gonna go 569. Notice how it moved to the left, but it didn't adjust the why. If I lock the aspect ratio, it might have an effect. It might not. Let's go ahead and check 600. No, you see that the aspect ratio Onley applies to the width and the height. If they wanted you to be able to do with this with this, they would have included one of these brackets here. So that's a little bit about the transform panel. If you don't have the transform panel, you can come into view studio and there's your transform panel. But you know the scientific way now and the non scientific way to adjust the variables on your shape using anchor point rotation and one of my favorite tools showing the rotation center. All right, let's go ahead and cut this. Listen here, move onto the next one. 17. Power duplication and expressions : Welcome back to affinity designer. So this is actually gonna be one of the coolest lessons and one of the biggest time savers for your professional workflow. This is all about duplication and more importantly, power duplication and expressions. So let's go and get started. What we're gonna do, we're just gonna grab a really simple circle. We're gonna hold shift to lock the aspect ratio. By now. You guys know what that is. And now, the way to duplicate a shape, I'm gonna show you the non scientific way the hard way, and I'm gonna show you the good way. If you select the shape layer right here and you come up and you duplicate Now, watch this. That allows you to create a second shape. No biggie, right? We've done that 101 times I'm gonna show you the pro way to do this. Now, when you go through and create another shape, you hold Ault and drag. Now that creates another shape. Release the button, released the all So you can do this again again. Ault, Drag Ault drag. So that is the easy way to duplicate. But you see that it's not really locking anything. It really kind of just goes wherever it wants to go. Watch this. I'm gonna show you something called Power Duplicate. Once you've got this hold, Ault, drag it out where you want it and then released the all Release the mouse! Now you see, You got that second shape. Watch this. Hands up! Hands off! Control J Control J Notice how affinity designer is so super smart that it recognized what you did with the first duplication. And then it powered. Duplicated that exact same transformation on everything else. Now, if we wanted to, we could take thes up, set him in here and then holding them all. You see how I've selected them all? Hold the ault, Drop the group, Get it kind of where you want it. Release them. And now control J Control J. This is powerful folks. You can create an entire pattern through power duplication without having to sit here and painfully organize all of them. All right, so you've seen the unscientific way through just grabbing Ault, trying to get it right and then trying to duplicate it 16 times. You now know power duplication, which is about positioning it the first time and then using control J to make that happen. Now I'm gonna show you the next step. This is what is called an expression, and this is the highly scientific way to get it done. So we're gonna grab the same lips. And now what we're gonna do here is we're gonna ault and drag. Now you've seen that show before, but here's the trick with the transform panel open, you see, X Why, w and H you're gonna use these variables. I know. I just use math term variables right to say, every time I do this, I want to go X waas 100 pixels and then I'm going to go. Let's say I want to shrink down the width and height. Now I go through and I make sure the aspect ratio is locked. That is true. I make sure my rotation center is locked. That is true. And I go w multiply. So use a little ass trick by 0.8. Now, what is that going to say? That's going to say, take the width multiplied by 0.8. So what should the circle do? It's to get smaller, right? Oh, I didn't. Why not don't use capital letters. Lower case W by 0.8 not watch this. Now it works. Realize when you use expressions, you use the variable you want to change, and then you use the lower case of that variable. Now watch this. Hands up. Hands off! Control J Control J. You'll see how every time you did this and make sure the center is on or else it will resize around this left hand corner because that's where your anchor is. It then shrunk it. 0.8 point 8.800 100 100. That's the power of power duplicate, no pun intended. Let's do this one more time. So let's go ahead and do a second power duplication here. Okay, so we got our original circle. Make sure that move center is right front and center with my move. Tool selected. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna hit Ault Looks good to me. Now, let's go ahead and change some stuff. Remember, the variables have to be lower. Case X plus 100. So what should happen? It should move to the right. Correct? It does. Let's go. Why make sure the wise lower case plus 200. Hey, that looks good. So I went over and down, and then with the aspect ratio locked, let's make this w multiply so used. Little Astra. Make sure that is the W 0.8 and it enter, and it did reduce. Now, if I make those three changes, what should happen? Control J Control, J Control J. That looks pretty good. So my expression worked. Now Aiken Group Thumb and I can come up here, and I can kind of create a really cool background. You guys might be familiar with the trash polka. As an art movement, Trash Polka uses a lot of geometric design of varying circle sizes in bright red. We use this a lot when we do trash polka style designs, which will actually do in the course here later, once we learn pixel art. All right, that's a little bit on duplication. You've seen the simple way you've seen the better power duplication way, and you've seen the most exact way using expressions in affinity designer. One thing that I'll mention here, even in graphic art like after effects after effects, uses expressions as well. So if you get used to the expressions, you're gonna have a good time in graphic art. All right, we'll see in the next one 18. Aligning and distributing shapes in AD : All right. Welcome back to this lesson on distribution and alignment. Now, this is relatively complicated for some. I'm going to show you the easiest way that I've found to get you up and running immediately with this concept. So let's go ahead and create a couple shapes we're gonna create. I'm gonna hold down shift, and I'm gonna create a perfect square. Get a green square. We're going to go ahead, get a perfect circle, and we're also gonna go ahead and grab a rectangle. So I'm gonna go ahead and make this a blue rectangle. And again, these operational lessons having good, clear shapes is absolutely essential that cutting out all the clutter we can get more complicated once we get into projects. So let's say that I have these three shapes and I kind of organize them. Now, let's put the green, and then the red and then the blue. So that's gonna be my current work space. All right, so in your toolbox over here, there is an arrange panel. Now, if you only have one shape, the workspace is what it aligns to. So, as an example, you can align, you gonna line center you can align to the right alignment is about the perimeter. I want to make that extremely clear. Alignment is about perimeter, and you're going to the line to this selection Bounds. Well, since you only got one shape, you really don't have a selection bound. So let's go ahead and create a selection bound. Now, watch this. We're gonna create a selection, and we're gonna grab the Green Square first. Now, the Green Square first was important. Now I have a couple other options. I can take all three shapes and I can align them left. Now the selection bound is here. Right? So if I lined me to the left, where does it go? And you notice it aligned at the perimeter? I can align them all to the center of the selection bound, or I can align them all to the right hand side. That's pretty easy. So let's go ahead at it on do. And now if I come down here and I change it, which shape did I grab First? The Green square and I grabbed my first selected and now I want to align to the first selected shape. Where is it going to go? it's going to go to the right hand side of the first selected shape, so that's what that box does. It allows you to say how you want them aligned. So I'm gonna go ahead. I'm going to go to edit undo because I don't want that. And then the last thing that I want to show you here there's an option when you do the alignment in which you can space them horizontally. So let's go ahead. We're gonna go to the selection bound, and then what we're going to do is I'm gonna space them horizontally. So let's go ahead and click that. Now you'll see that it just nudged that red circle over. Now let's take a look at this. This is key. We're gonna grab a ruler as I call it. This is just a rectangle that measures from here to here. And now if I take this gap and this gap, you'll notice they're the same from the triangle to the circle and from the circle to the square. So that's what alignment does and notice that it really doesn't take into account the center points. It's all about perimeter. So if we go Centrepoint to CenterPoint. We can see that the distance is not quite the same. You see how there's a little more distance from here to here. So when I select this now, this is key. If I come in and I want to space them horizontally, which I did auto distribute was on. But let's say I want a specific number of pixels. I can turn it off and I can tell affinity designer, give me 20 pixels of space and now it will take those three things. And when I pull out this ruler here, make it around 20 pixels just to show you we could get. Now let's make it transform. Okay, let's go ahead. Make it 20. All right. Now, if I do that 20 20 that's how you set custom spacing when you distribute. So if I want to go ahead and align these all to the center, I can. And now you see that the red circle is all gapped up around this blue. So now I come to the vertical alignment and I want to equally space, and now we'll make the space the same. And now, if I wanted to, I could click off auto distribute their zero pixels in between, and I can set it again to my magical 20 pixels. And it will place 20 pixels worth of space in between these three things, so you can align vertically to the top. You can align vertically in the middle. You can align vertically to the bottom, and you're aligning to the selection bound or you can distribute. And if auto distribute is on, you can select any number of pixels that you want. All right, this one piece of knowledge will help you evenly space all your shapes in the coming lessons. I'm gonna go ahead and cut it here. Let's go ahead and get into a new lesson. 19. Snapping - What is it and how to use it : all right, This one's gonna be all about the function of snapping. Now, you've been using snapping as you've gone through the lessons so far. So it's nothing that you haven't seen before. But I'm going to show you kind of how you can adjust and customize some of the tools because sometimes snapping is awesome. Sometimes it is a huge pain in the backside. So let's go ahead now and drag out a couple different squares. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna call this one Red. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna call this one green, and then we're gonna leave the other one just as black. All right, So to find snapping, As you know, you find snapping up here in your toolbar. If it is unchecked in grade out, you do not have it on, which means I can move this. That's close to the black as I want, and it won't tell me how far I am and it won't help me get there to align it. The minute I turn it on notice the red line that's created and the 63 that comes out. That's how many pixels I am away from the Black Square. And because it's red, it's aligned horizontally. It's snapping horizontally now. If I decide to do this, you'll see the green line that's created a 132. That means it is vertically snapping at 132 pixels between the green square and the Red Square, So there are certain things you can do. If you have moved by whole pixels on, you can turn that on and off. Sometimes if you're doing extremely precise work, like for user interfaces, moving by whole pixels. Make sense sometimes. If it's on and you just can't get those two things right, turn it off and see what happens now For the other one, you can turn force pixel alignment on or off. I tend to leave both of these. Usually I use force pixel alignment. I leave this on the whole pixels you could use. You could not, so you could do either or you can do one of the other. All right thing. I wanted to show you here. When you come up to the snapping tool and you come down to the drop down, you can have screen tolerance and then, as you increase this tolerance, it will try to snap to candidates. Now, what is a candidate? A candidate is a thing that it could snap to. So as an example, you look at the candidates list. It can snap to immediate layers immediate and child layers or it confined objects on every layer. I tend to the work that I do to really work with the immediate and child layers, because sometimes if you're doing it advanced vector piece, you don't want it snapping 10 layers down. There's the force, the pixel alignment. And then there are things called grids and guides, so we haven't covered any of those. But if you have a grid up, you can absolutely ask it to snap to a grid. Or if you're using a guide, let's say, because you're doing a layout for, say, a pamphlet, you can ask it to snap to a guide. Now you can snap to spread. You can snap margins if you have margins enabled, and then you could snap to the bounding boxes, or you can snapped the gaps and sizes. There's a lot of stuff with snapping. I will tell you that 99% of the time, your default is just fine. I tend not to adjust this much. If you find that it's super sensitive to snapping, you can turn down to the pixels so that you have to get pretty close. That's about the only adjustment that I do as an example. All right goes through. It looks for anything. Here, go looks for anything here, and then when it gets close to there, it will snap to those particular candidates. That's really it. That's what snapping is doing. And there are certain presets so you can go through and add a preset. If you want, you can create a preset. Let's say that you're working in object based art. You consisted, Elect, one of which it does only certain objects. If you're doing icon based art, you absolutely wanted to snap to the grids that you create. All right, that's a little bit on this one. I don't want to go too far with this. Just no snapping is a thing. Now you know how to adjust it. There's gonna be no substitute or shortage of opportunity to practice this when we get into the lessons. Speaking of that, let's go ahead and get into the lesson, all right, have a good one 20. Creating complex shapes using Operations: All right. Welcome back to offended designer. This is one of my favorite tools in affinity designer and as an artist, when you sketch almost everything that you could potentially sketch is made out of primitives. And by primitives, I mean square spears triangles. Everything in nature is created from primitive shapes and building vector art is no different. So if you get down this idea of primitives, you can use primitives and what are called Boolean operations in order to create some really advanced shapes. So let me show you how this works and we're gonna just do a very simple one. So let's go ahead and create two shapes. I'm gonna grab a square, and I'm going to go ahead and grab a circle. Now, let's go ahead and make this circle red. All right? So the first thing we're going to do, we're gonna click off the rotation center. I don't need that on I align it. My snapping is on. And then let's look at our layer. We've got the ready lips and the blue rectangle. Now, to do this, I hold my shift button and I select both. I come up here and now you could do this a couple different ways. You can find these in your layers panel when you go through and you take a look at some of the transformations that some of the geometry here you see, add, subtract, intersect, divide combined or you can find them up here. I like these because it tells me graphically what it's going to do. So I'm gonna show you how to anticipate what is called a subtraction operation. Now you'll notice in the layers panel. Here I have two shapes. Watch this. I come to subtraction and I click on it. And now I have one curve. You see, the shape actually occurred that's created Two things happened here. This operation took two things and it subtracted the top layer from the bottom. It also is no longer a shape. It is a curved. It is a completely different animal because now I can move this as one unit. And if I wanted to create something, notice how this whole that's created, let's move it to the top shows through everything in the back. That's pretty cool. So now we can align this so the subtraction operation takes what is on top and it subtracts it from what's on the bottom. And now what do I have? I have a whole different shape, actually. Sorry, Curve. So that's a subtraction operation. Let me show you. In addition, I take a square and let's move this square over. I take a round orb just like this and I'm making it lips. And now I hold shift. I select them both, and I hit the addition Operation. Now watch what happens to shapes. Pau one curve. Now let's go for bonus points and create a subtraction. I can take this shape. Now hold my shift key And you see how I created a circle? I can select both these lairs and I could subtract. Now I have what begins to look almost like a key. So this is huge. You see how when we shrink this down and almost kind of looks like a key, I realized the aspect ratio is not perfect to be a key. I get that. So let's go ahead now and bring this out. Now you know how to do. In addition, you know how to do a subtraction. Let's go ahead now and start cutting some teeth into this key. So I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna drag out a circle. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm going to just bring this in his blue. And now I'm gonna go ahead and position this halfway in halfway out. Okay, So you got a blue dot on top of your red shape, right? Here's the thing. You can do what is called a divide operation now a divide operation. If you select all of these and you hit divide now, a whole lot of weird stuff has been created. What divide does is it just makes ah whole bunch of different shapes. So divide, as the little blue thing implies, will take all the shapes and just create a whole lot of different curves. You'll see it actually multiplied before we had two shapes that became one curve. Now we had two curves that became four. So divide will just create some weird odd shapes. And now some of the other ones that you might experience. Let's go ahead and just drag out of Blue Square and we'll drag out a red circle. And the reason I use blue and red is because sometimes layer on top matters. Now, if I create these two and I select them both. You know, the addition. You know, the subtraction. Let's look at the intersection. All right. What do you think's gonna happen if this little blue triangle here is the only thing that remains? Plop. It took the intersection shape. When a control z to undo that, you see how the little bounding box was showing through. So it kept on Lee this area. But what color did to keep it kept the color of the base layer. Which is why I show you in two different colors. Let's do it again. Ah, red circle became a blue half circle at it on do and the last thing that I want to show you here, let's shrink this down just a little bit. Let's bring this over here. Select, Select. So you got both your shapes and let's go ahead now and combine. Now, you see, this is blue and this is blue up here and it takes out the combination. This does some weird stuff. I don't really have a lot of use for this, but I'm gonna show it to you anyway. Now the curve that is created is X ing out what is combined. This is crucial. When you start talking about more complex shapes, let me show you how you can make something kind of cool with just these primitives. Come over here and I grab a rectangle, and then I'm going to grab another rectangle and then I'm going to grab a trap. Is oId I'm gonna position these right there, kind of run him out, And then I'm gonna create another rectangle just like that, and I'm gonna create another rectangle just like that. Now, I might go ahead and align these out just a little bit. Like to spend too much time on it shifted just a little. I want to align it with the centre staff there and I want a malign this with center there gonna line that You see how snapping is your friend with this? There we go. And then I'm gonna come through and I'm going to hold shift put in. And now I select them all, and I add, I now have a curve for upon on a chest set that is created simply by the use of primitives . Now, from here, I can adjust the color and lastly, for bonus points, going to show you something brand new because it's now only one layer. I can apply a three d effect to this no knock ocean blur. Let's not do that. And the three D effect can absolutely change the entire look of this. And I can then change into a custom profile. There's a whole lesson on effects that are coming up, folks, but profiles are absolutely awesome. And three D is a lot of fun. All right, so that's how you create a very simple chess piece out of primitives using operations. Now, I realize this is not the correct profile for this particular piece, but in short of a 10 minute lesson, we're gonna go ahead and call it good for this one. All right, folks will talk to you next one. Have a good one. 21. Challenge-Southwest turtle : bar I'd welcome to the Southwest Turtle Challenge. And again, the challenge is yours does not have to look like mine. Used these challenge lessons to give you an opportunity to create the technique and create an image in your own style. Now, if you get stuck, certainly skip along to the solution. And I've included my working file down below so that you guys know how it's done. Let's go ahead, get into the challenge, pause the video here, do the challenge, and when you're done, skip to the solution and I'll show you how I did mine. All right, welcome back to the challenge. So a majority of this course was recorded while I was in Arizona. So Southwest Native American Indian art is absolutely an influence for me right now. Well, because, quite frankly, it's everywhere. So I thought is part of our shape Lesson are complex Boolean operation lessons and some of the snapping and some of the adjustment stuff that we've done. I thought we put together a really cool, Southwest inspired turtle, but you could do a lot of really cool things with the greedy inside the transparencies. So let's go ahead and get into it. In order to start this out, I'm gonna work in my primitives. And I'm gonna come over first and foremost to the cog because the turtle shell is going to be first and foremost. Now, that cog is not extremely impressive. So we're gonna come in and we're gonna open that inter hole. We're gonna go ahead and drop down this adjustment. We're gonna come in and adjust this middle. Let's go ahead and do this right. There we go. That's looking good. And I think that we're pretty good, actually. Look at what we did with that cog in a very short period of time. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna make this black. So now we're gonna come through here and I'm going to create another Ellipse, and I'm gonna want to make this a little bit bigger, and I'm gonna go ahead and convert it over to a doughnut, which means there's a center hole and I'm going to come over here and reduce that size. This is gonna form the basis of my turtle shell and then I'm going to shrink it down with the aspect ratio maintained until I'm just slightly bigger than this. Now, how can I align these two click and drag come up to my alignment, Align horizontally aligned vertically. Perfect. Now let's go ahead and group thes two were to go appear selecting both right click group. I'm going to call this shell, All right, That looks good. All right, Shell done. No pun intended. All right, so now we need a neck. So let's go ahead and put a neck to it. And then for a head, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna choose a diamond. So I'm gonna make the diamond. I'm gonna make the head a little bit bigger than it needs to be there. Put this align it in. Noticed snapping is on. And then what? I'm going to dio I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna create some eyes. Now I know we can't see him real well, so let's go ahead and make them white. And let's go ahead and make one. I Let's position the one I on the diamond, and then we're gonna come over here and we're going toe layer. Let's go to edit, duplicate, And then let's go ahead and do the second I That looks good. You see how snapping Zahn. So we've got the candidates. Now watch this. Select the eyes and perform a subtraction operation. Now, what's just happened there? Why did that not work? All right, let's go back here. Stew this I Ah, that's why. All right, I gotta do one eye at a time. Select holding shift. Grab the diamond. Ah, grab the ellipse immediately above the diamond. You can't swap layers. Forgot. All right, Now you see the curve worked. Now I go over here, I grab it there and I subtract again. Now I'm going to do In addition, Operation. I grabbed the curve, I grabbed the rectangle, and I do in addition. All right, let's see, we got here. All right. Movable neck, moveable head. Awesome. We're gonna call this head. So now we've got to create some legs. In order to do that, we're gonna drag out a rectangle, and I'm gonna make it kind of a black. And then what we're gonna do here because we're gonna position him right about here and now what I want to do, I'm gonna come up. I'm gonna make a trap. Is oId because I want the hand to be a little bit bigger. So I swipe it down this way and I shrink it down. Aspect ratio wise, until I get it relatively the right size, I can keep shrinking it a little bit until I get there. All right, let's zoom in. Because if you can't get it right, you've gotta zooming in until you dio all right. That ought to do it. So now let's go ahead and merge these two. How do we do that? Addition? Operation. Now we've got a leg. And now let's go ahead and cut some fingers out of this thing. To do that, we come over to the triangle, swing the triangle over here, and let's position the triangle right about here. Let's duplicate it. I'll do it the hard way would come over to duplicate. And now I want to select these two, and I want to shrink them down just a little bit in here. All right. I think that's pretty good. Now watch this. We're gonna grab the triangle in the curve. We're gonna subtract it. Cool finger, one triangle and curve subtracted. Cool finger to All right now. Let's go ahead. Now let's add a couple. Cool dots to this just because we can. And let's go ahead and make those white. Now we'll zoom in here and I'm just adding a little bit of ornamentation to my turtle, right? It's nothing that you gotta go through and do. Copy Paste and let's go ahead and duplicate that. So let's go ahead and go up to edits duplicate Let's go one more here. I think we're pretty good there. Select Beautiful. And now we're gonna go ahead and oh, I don't know. Let's go ahead and grab the Ellipse. Grab this lower layer. Oops, Don't want to select and subtract and subtract and subtract. Okay, Perfect. How's that looking? Looking good from here. All right, let's go over here. Let's go ahead and duplicate this and let's go ahead. And now we're gonna flip it cause we want to keep the angle the same right. We want the angle to be the same. Grab the move tool. Bring it down where you want it. You see how the snapping is going to assist us in locating it, selecting both edit. Let's go to duplicate and now we flip horizontal and let's have snapping. Help us orient This into the area here. Things that were pretty good. All right, cool. Now we're going to select it all. I'm gonna right click and I'm in a group. I'm gonna call this turtle. And now I'm gonna go ahead holding shifts. So the aspect ratio is maintained. Their go ahead and center that and then what I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna put a nice little Grady int background on it of the rectangle of the base. And let's put a nice Phil to it. Let's go ahead and make it a Grady int fill with a radio. Sorry. And the radio Phil we're gonna want is maybe a little bit deeper. And that should ideally work, folks, that's a very simple way to pull off a very simple southwestern turtle using Onley advanced shapes. Now, if you find that it's a little bit jacked up here, right, you see that the turtle might be a little bit different shade of dark There, you can always come in and you see how it looked kind of gray because you've grouped him. You can always come in and up the level of black into these items because maybe you just didn't hit the black the first time. Every time. I'd love to tell you I do every time. I'm not gonna tell you that, because it would be a huge lie. All right, let's go ahead. And in this challenge here, good challenge will go ahead and get back into shapes and we'll take the next step. 22. Using symbols with shapes : all right. And end of another lesson in affinity. Designer. So this is one of the most powerful professional tools that I can teach you early in this course. This is the ability to use symbols. Now the symbols are caused or created, I should say, in a panel. So we're gonna code into the studio, and we're gonna detach the symbols studio. So now the basics of symbols. It says what you do to a symbol you due to every other instance. So there's two terms symbol, An instance. Let's grab a star. So we're gonna drag out a basic star. And now, once we have a selection, we're gonna go ahead and were to create a symbol. Now a symbol is created. And now let's look at the layer. There is a very faint orange glow right here where my cursor is, and it tells you straight up that is a symbol. So now if I change the color on that symbol, say, change the color in the star that's just the same is changing it just like any other shape . But now if I come over here and I copy and I paste, let's go ahead and move it out. Now, watch this. If I change the color of the star, it changes both instances. This is the power of the symbol, what you do to one you do to the other because they're all symbols. So if I decide to add in effect to a lair, I've been showing you a little bit. Let's add a three d effect to the lair, and let's crank that up a little bit. Notice the three D effect has been applied to both instances. All right, so now if I come down here and I come to this symbol there and I go ahead and I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate so last time we cut and paste it right, let's go duplicate. Well, now I want to change it to pink. All right. Swing over the pink. So duplicate, cut and paste works exactly the same way. Now, let's say that I want to take this instance and I want to the tach it from the group. You see that the oranges present? Watch this. With this instant selected, I can go ahead and I can hit to detach. Now you see how these air orange But this one is not now if I change the symbol again, this is no longer affected symbols. Folks have a really powerful effect on professional work flows. If you get these down and you have multiple instances, say of dots of stars, if you're doing a flag, you don't want to go through and change 50 different stars. If you get it right the first time and you use symbols, you can absolutely work in an effective, efficient manner. The last thing that I wanted to show you if you have symbols of multiple documents, you can always sink. If you have the documents open, we're not gonna do anything with that. Sinking is a whole different jam right now. All I needed to do is be able to create a symbol realized that the symbol creates multiple instances, be able to detach the instances you no longer want to be affected. And then when we get done with this symbol, we can right click. We can have the rename it or weaken delete. Now, if we delete the symbol, it will detach everything. That's all it's saying. Yep, Don. Now, if we wanted to come over here to the group and create a new one. We could create it. But now watch this. If I change it, it only works on itself. It won't work on the other two because the link has absolutely been broken. Alright, folks, let's go ahead and take the next step. This is going to be key Because of the next lessons, we're gonna show you how to set up a template for a seamless pattern in affinity. Designer. All right, let's go ahead and get into the next lesson. 23. Grids in Affinity Designer : Welcome back to offended the designer folks. We're gonna be taking a look at grids now. Now, grids are terribly complicated or they could be super easy. I'm going to show you the super easy version of a grid. And I'm also going to show you the application of a grid. So usually I would say your workspace. For the purposes of this course, the size doesn't really matter. However, in the next lessons, it absolutely is. So I'm gonna go ahead and run a 1000 pixel by 1000 pixel workspace, and I'm gonna go ahead and hit. OK, so now this is what comes up, and grids are found in the view area and you'll see in view it says show grid. So a grid comes up Now you can turn this honor off by not showing the grid. It's always there. It's just a matter of whether or not you show it or not. So when we do this part, you can adjust your grid and the grid is very important. If you do precision work like user interface work, video game art, that kind of thing, we're not gonna be terribly that precise. But if you're an icon development, which shapes your prime for grid's matter. So let's go ahead. Go to view and I'm gonna show you then how to get to the grid and axis manager. This is in the view menu now. This is pretty simple, but it's not as intuitive as you would think. There's your show grid. You can toggle it on and off, and then by default, it's gonna ask you if you want to use an automatic grid for right now, I'm going to say yes. Now we'll talk about spacing and divisions, but if you're using automatic grids, you don't have to worry about that. However, you can adjust the grid lines. Now there's these air preferences, right? You can adjust the opacity of the grid line. You'll notice how are major grid lines? The big, thick black ones just disappeared. Now we can reduce or remove the opacity of our minor grid lines. And if you are visually impaired, which some people are changing, the opacity absolutely has an impact on how effectively you can use them. I would highly recommend you play with that, so to change the color, you can come up here and If I wanted to make my major grid lines red, I could. Whoa. What just happened? It changed the subdivision lines. That's because the aspect ratio is on de Select that. And now you can adjust the two types independently. So now you know how to turn your grid on. You know how to adjust the style of the lines. You know how to adjust the opacity of the lines of an automatic grid. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and click this off. Now, what just happened there? We're gonna use a basic grid now, spacing. Let's say that I want to make this 100 pixels. Okay. Now, this is why the size of your workspace matters. If you have 1000 work space or 1000 pixel workspace and you have 100 pixels of spacing, how many of these squares do you have? 123456789 10 Because 10 times 100 is 1000. Now you'll notice there's no divisions or there's one division. All right, now you see that the divisions are equal to one. That means that there's no divisions or one big division in these major squares. Let's create a grid with five divisions and let's go ahead and hit. Enter. Now, here's the thought process. We're gonna do a little bit of math if each one of these major red squares a square and turned this down a little bit is 100 pixels and you have five divisions. What does that make each one of those squares the little ones 2020 times five equals 100. So you have to do a little bit of math and then once you've got it where you like it, you can close it down and away you go. So if I'm going to use this grid, I can come in here, I can draft a circle and I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to snap to the grid. You see, snapping is there. Let's see if snapping is an option there for the grid. Yes, it is. It is included right there. Now let's go ahead and turn that off. Now what happens if I drag another circle out notice? It's not snapping to the grid. I'm trying and you don't see it happening. That's how snapping ca NBI adjusted snap to grid back on now we're back in business. You see it when green. This is a nice way to make sure that you have a circle that is exactly 100 pixels by 100 pixels. So that's pretty much what the grid does for you. It allows you to space out your materials, and if you customize the template, you can make some pretty cool stuff. So let's go back to our grid and access manager. Let's now look at advanced. Well, that just changed a whole bunch. We're not gonna make this a huge hold lesson, but what I do want to show you, you can go through and create multiple grid types. We're gonna create a uniform grid type and the first axes. There's your 100. There's your five. There's something called the gutter. Now let's look at the gutter. You'll notice there's no space between this line and the very next square. See where my cursor is moving. If I add five pixels in for the gutter on Aiken, selected 5.0, notice how now this distance from here to here is five pixels. If you do icon design for user interface, this is a very common thing because I want this circle to be very different and separated from this circle when I export. So theoretically, if I had one button that was red and one button that was green, I could create a magical icon sheet that would have all my icons there that I could then customize. This is huge. And for professionals that do this for a living, this is how this works. This is about as far as I really want to go into the grid, because I think this covers most of it Now. If you choose to use other forms of grids, there are a ton. I'm not going to go through them all. They are used for perspective, drawing that you're used in a variety of situations. I'll tell you, I am not great as a perspective artist when it comes to perspective drawing in this course , we won't be doing a lot of it. I guarantee you you can have triangular grids. You can do a lot of really cool stuff with grids, and you can even turn on multiple axes with grids. So if you had a second axes or an up axes like in a triangular grid, you could absolutely do that. Two axes custom. And now you could adjust the different axes for the different angles on the grid. What? I'd like you to just get down. We're going to use the basic old everyday grid with the spacing and the divisions with gutters in this class, that's we're gonna dio. But that's where you find it. If you wanted to take next step. Alright, folks, let's go ahead and get into something else. 24. Making a template for a seamless pattern 4x4 : All right, folks, welcome back to Infinity Designer. So in the version one point over this course, I asked people about a year after it came out what they wanted to learn in affinity designer when I re recorded, and my Facebook group said seamless textures kept coming up as one of the things they wanted to learn a little more about. So I thought in this version 2.0, now that we know about snapping, now that we know about symbols, now that we know about transformation, why don't we make a seamless texture? Now, for those that don't know what a seamless texture is, it's a texture that you can use that the pattern almost that repeats, which really doesn't have a beginning or an end so you can tile it as much as you want. Now, my practical advice for you use a biggest or used the biggest file I should say that is practical. So I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna open a new workspace. No apps. Let's go file new. Uh and I tend to work in 2000 by 2000 pixels I go and I create the workspace. Now I'm gonna show you how to do a basic four by four. So to do that, I'm holding shift. I created square. And now if I want to make four boxes across the 2000 pixel space, how big does each box have to be? 500. So, making sure my aspect ratio is locked on the transform. I come over here and I go 500 and it goes five by five. They see I got this often g gray. That's by design so that I can illustrate this, and then I snap it into the corner. Now we have to take advantage of symbols, so we create a symbol off from this box. Okay, that's key. If you don't do that, the rest of this doesn't work. Now, with this layer selected, you see that the orange boxes there to make this symbol, you're gonna come over, you're gonna duplicate and were with our move tool. We're gonna move it into position. Awesome. Now, because affinity designers, super smart control J control J power duplicates and we then grab all four. Come over here to the layers panel, right, click duplicate, and then we move them down. And I see how they snapped into position. Now, if I had control J what affinity designer does for me, it recognized at all. Now I tend to work just my own preference in this upper right hand area here, which, in my layers panel is right here. So I grab every layer. That is not that. And you see, I selected him by holding shift right click, and then I'm in a group. So I now group them. And what? To call this copies making copies. All right. So once I have this, I'm gonna lock those, and I'm gonna rename this one origin. Okay, cool. So this is how this works. I'm just going to show you how this works so that you see what happens. Because this is a symbol. Whatever is done to the origin will be done to the copies. So watch this. If I move my background, every station moves or every square moves. So that's gonna be the fundamental basis of doing a seamless texture in affinity. Designer, we've included the four by four download in this lesson. So if you want to follow along in the next one in the next one, we're gonna show you how to do this? Really cool plaid texture using only vector art shapes in affinity. Designer. All right, folks will see the next one. 25. Making a seamless Plaid pattern: all right. And welcome back to our seamless texture file. Now, in the last lesson, you should have gotten to this point. We're making a simple four by four texture. So now, with this done, we're gonna go ahead and in your downloads. We've included a plaid reference file that we're gonna use for the rest of this. So let's go ahead and place and let's go ahead. And wherever you found that, let's go ahead and move that in here. I put that right here in my downloads, and I'm gonna bring this up just like this and move it over to the side. Now, why did you do that? Because I had it in the wrong spot. I'm gonna go ahead and move it up to the top. All right, so this is just a common J peg file, but this is gonna form the basis for what we do. I'm gonna position it next to this square because the Onley square I'm gonna be working with is this one. Nothing else is going to matter. So in order to simplify this, this is a technique you could use. You can turn off every other member of the group. Now, if you like to see it work awesome, I'm gonna go ahead and turn it off because it confuses me. So I have my Origins square and I have my reference file. All right, let's zoom in and get to work. So the way that I see this done first and foremost it looks like there is a black border around this plaid file. So if I've got my origin square selected and it is a shape, therefore, I should be able to adjust the stroke. Let's go ahead and turn the stroke in. Now, if I wanted to do this, there are different ways you could do this when you align the stroke, will you be doing this throughout the course? You can align at the center to the inside or the outside. I'm gonna go ahead and align it to the inside. And the reason is I wanted on the inside of the shape. Now, if that's true, I only really needed about half Aziz Bigas. I think I'm gonna want it. So you want to turn it down a little bit and then the color of this shape if I go here, I don't want to blue anymore. I wanted red. So the first step. Get your colors right. Cool. Now, second step, it looks like in the center of this square, we've got a couple different rectangles. So let's go ahead and drag out a rectangle. Let's fill It is black. And now in my layers panel, I want to drag it down inside the origin. Perfect. All right, just like that. Now, with the origin selected here with this rectangle selected, I want to go ahead and I want to turn down the opacity. I don't want it to be large and in charge. All right, Maybe a little bit more here. I think that would probably be a good thing. All right, let's go ahead. There we go. And then I'm gonna go ahead and just but this up to the actual square, it doesn't really matter, because it's not gonna show, but I'm just that way. All right? Now, notice how this line and this line are all the same. So I'm gonna come up to rectangle, and I'm gonna duplicate because I don't want to make it again. And I'm gonna go ahead, hold shift and make sure that I'm 90 degrees. Beautiful. All right, that looks pretty good. So now here. What I'm gonna dio is I'm gonna grab this rectangle again, and I'm gonna duplicate it, and then I'm gonna shrink it down, because what I'm creating is this line. Let's go ahead and shrink it down a little bit, and then we're gonna pull it up inside, right to about here. And you know, is here is here. God looks pretty good. Let's do it one more time and you'll notice how once you got the shape right the first time . Whoa. Look at that power duplicate because I reduced it and moved it. Power duplicate worked out. So if you do the work once, you're gonna be in really good shape. Now, we're gonna duplicate the thin line one more time because we've got this line now. Now we want this line and we want that line. So rectangle duplicate and I'm gonna swing it over. Now, what do you think? Here. We're gonna go shift right 90 degrees, and then I'm gonna bring this up just a little bit because I wanted a little bit bigger, and then I'm gonna bring it into position and because snapping is on. Think that we're gonna be pretty good here. Okay? And then one more. Let's go ahead. Now that we got it done. Once duplicated over Oops. Controls said this one. I'm gonna copy. I'm a paste. There we go. I didn't want a horizontal one, and then I placed this where it needs to be. I'm pretty good with that. All right, so I got the black line. I got the black lines. Now I got to do this white line. Now let me show you what you can do. This is new. You haven't seen this coming to my pen tool. I click once and then outside the box, I click again. Now, what just happened? A curve has been created. We haven't talked about that. I'm gonna come up to my color and I'm gonna make it white. Okay, so this is what is called a curve that is different than a shape you could have gotten by by creating it out of the box. So it's not working for you. Create a box. Philip White. So now I've got this white line. Now I've got to create these four yellow lines in order to do that since I already have it once and white. Let's go ahead and duplicated. And now with the white line selected, let's go ahead and move it over and I'm gonna start right there. And now this line needs to be yellow. So let's shoot it over his yellow. And now I'm gonna show you something new on this curve, right? You're going to want to dot it. We hadn't talked about dotted lines before, so if you do this, you see that creates that really cool type of dotted. Look to it. Now, that's a little bit too pronounced. I want to change that yellow up. I don't really like it that bold. So I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna darken it just a little there. We g o all right now with that line, the way I want it. Right. Click on the curve. Duplicate. Swing it over here. Now it's a 214 pixels. You see where that is? Up top the red line. Where is this? To the center. Alright. Right about there. I think we're in pretty good shape. And now I want to duplicate this one more time so to do that duplicate. And now what do I want to dio with the move? Tool selected. Swing over and I want to rotate said line, hold shift to get your degrees right, and then bring it in. And then one more time, folks duplicate, Swing it over. Hold shift to get your line right, put it where it needs to be. Now here's the last step. Watch this. You see how all the curves, some holding shift I'm selecting all my curves and I'm dragging them down inside my origin file. I accidentally selected stuff. Okay, so that looks pretty good. What we probably need to do now is zoom out, remove our base image, shrink our lair and check out our completed plaid pattern. And the reason we call it seamless is from here on out, you can take it over and over and over, and it looks like it never stops repeating itself. All right, once you get to their let's go ahead and practice one more thing, let's get to export. We go to J Peg and then we can export the J peg and I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to just go ahead and export my J pagan in my file because I got to anyway. And I'm gonna go to the plaid texture, and I'm gonna put it in my images, and I'm gonna go plaid completed. All right, And save and then file save as you guys now will have this in your downloads if you wanted to follow along so that you have the template and you also have the finished file. All right, that's a little bit on how to make a seamless texture in affinity. Designer, we're gonna be using this technique later on. Of course, when we make mandalas, the symbols panel is extremely important. All right, we'll see in the next one folks to take the next step.