Transcripts
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. Introduction to nodes part 1: All right. Welcome back to affinity designer. So we are leaving the world of shapes behind, and we are gonna be all about vector art. Now we're gonna talk to you about curves lines, the pen tool, the pencil tool, all of this crazy stuff. So let's go ahead and get started here. We're gonna come in. We're gonna open up. Any new document. Doesn't really matter what the sizes were in. Good shape there. All right, we let this come up there, and now I'm gonna introduce you to the pencil tool to begin our exploration of line. So when we come to the pencil tool, it's over here in the toolbar, there in the draw persona. So let's go ahead and select the pencil tool. Now, let's look at the context to a bar. You can set the stroke color. You can set the whip. I'm gonna go ahead and set the with this line up to about five point so we can see it Now. There's something called the controller. If you do not have a stylist or a fan tablet, leave it it none. But if you so wanted to, you could adjust and control through pressure or velocity. Even if you're really good with that mouse, you may be able to control through velocity. I'm gonna go and I'm gonna put none down and the stabilizer. And it is an interesting thing. Let me show you what the stabilizer does when it's off. So when I draw this line notice as I'm drawing here, I'm going up. But I'm going down and it looks a little bit sketchy. Right? Let's add the stabilizer. Now. I prefer to use the rope stabilizer because I do a lot of switchback type designs. You can set the length of the rope. I'll show you what that means here in a second. And then when you do this now you see this little rope with circle. Now let's follow the same flow. 1234 Right. Look at how much smoother this line is compared to this line. Whole different game. Now, if you so choose, I just want to get some basic terminology out of the way. If you were to take the pencil and draw any old image here when I say switchback, I tend to do a lot of tribal designs, so I get kind of these swooping arcs here. If I created this design just like this, it's composed of nodes. So your first vocab lesson lines or curves because the line is a curve are composed of what are called nodes, and you've got start points and endpoints and you see how there's a gap here. This is technically called open path. Now, vector art cannot handle open path. It has a huge problem with it. So if you were to say enable use Phil and let's turn the fill over to a color, it's going to instinctively try to fill this. Now watch what happens if I do this here and I have turned Phil on you see how it kind of screws you up. I tend, unless you get really good at it, to not use the fill until I've completed my shape and closed the path. Now, how do you close a path? This is probably one of your best tools. It is called the node tool. And if you have an open path, watch what happens. I'm gonna zoom on in here. When I hit the no tool and I joined this note in this note Chadha. Now I have a closed path I now have. I'm going to call it a shape, but it's not really a shape. It is a path and it's in the form of some shape. So here's what I need you to understand. At this point, curves are different than shapes. Curves are composed of nodes, and if you click on a curve, it won't show you the nodes. You have to go to the node tool. Look at all those nodes. Now with no tool selected, let me show you something here. When you click on a node, little blue lines come up these air called handles and you see how they make your No, to go really wonky. So if you're going to adjust any of these things, you want to make sure that you're adjusting with the handle, or you can grab the no directly and adjust the position. So new piece of awareness nodes have handles, and you can adjust the nodes position directly as well. And I'll tell you, if you get good at this, you can get anywhere on any shape using just the nodes and handles, and I will prove that out in a couple lessons Now let me talk to you about different types of notes. Let's go ahead and zoom on in here for a second. If I bring up the node tool, you'll see that this is a square. But this is a circle. Why is that? Because there were different types of nodes. A square denotes what is called a sharp note, and you'll see up here in the context to a bar for the No. Two tool that you convert a round node to a sharp note. So let's do that. I select the node to turn it blue, and I convert to a sharp note. Well, what just happened there? So now I got this really nice sharp corner. Now the inverse is also true. I can take a sharp node and I can make it smooth. Watch this. Now I've got a smooth corner. And now, if you wanted to delete a note, all you have to do selected to turn it blue and hit the delete button. Now let's say you want to add a note, go over the line with the no to a selected and just click on it. That's it. It's back. All right, I'm going to go ahead. I'm gonna cut this year for the vocab lesson. In the next lesson, we're gonna give you some practice to give you an opportunity to see how to actually make this happen with the no tool. All right, folks, let's go ahead and cut. This one will see in the next one.
3. Introduction to nodes part 2 : All right, gang. Welcome back to affinity, Designer. So with this lesson here, we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna introduce you to somebody, right? We're gonna grab the pen tool here, or I should say, the pencil tool, and you're gonna just draw a line. Now, make it a squiggly, ugly, ugly type of line. Right? All right, cool. That's pretty ugly line. Awesome. So now what we're gonna do here, we're gonna come over to the no tool, and you're gonna join the beginning and end points. And now what you have. Let's look at the curves panel here in the layer. You have a curve, right? So what I'd like you to do here, we're gonna practice some stuff in the downloads for this section. We're gonna go ahead and we're going to place an image and again in the downloads for this section. Let me get there. We've included a couple sets of eyes from earlier in the course, so it's going and grab a set eyes and let's bring the eyes inside of the curve. Now we're gonna go ahead. We're gonna rename this curve. We're gonna call him Bob. All right. Perfect. Bob comes to life. We're in good shape. So now the challenge is going to be Bob isn't quite sure what he wants to be when he grows up. So let's go ahead and grab a rectangle and let's go ahead. Hold shift, move. This over here. Looks good. And then let's go ahead and make a complex shape. Let's grab a triangle and combine it with a square. All right. Now, how do you combine shift? Hold ad. All right. Perfect. Now these air to once very simple, these air to very complicated shapes Here. What I would like you to be able to do here, I'm gonna show you how to do this once. And then we're gonna go ahead and have you do it on this one. So let's go ahead now and make Bob conform here. Now, how would we do this? Let's bring involve up to the top. And let's make Bob first and foremost read. Write that way. We've got red and green. So in order to make Bob fit here, what we have to do is we have to come over to our move, tool. We're gonna move Bob over to here, and then we're gonna grab the no tool. Now, you see how many nodes affinity designer has put in? Bob, let's not do that. What I'd like to do here now is I would like you to grab that node delete, delete, delete. And I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna take this square node and you see how Snap ings on. I'm gonna marry it up, delete, and then I'm gonna make this a square node. So you see here that I am changing the type of node and then all these others I don't need I mean, in reality, how many nodes do you need to make a square four, right? Cool. Delete. And the last one G o. All right. Now, this one here, we're gonna make sure we converted to a square. And perfect Bob is now a square. You see how we took a round shape and we were able to make it anything we wanted to make it . Now what I'd like you to do, go ahead. Positive video here. See if you can make Bob into this shape. Now, if you want to follow along and we'll just keep going Absolutely. Let's go ahead and keep going I'll give you a second. All right, seconds over. Let's get back to it. So here, we're gonna probably grab Bob were in a stretch, Bob out to there. And then what we're going to do is with our no tool selected, we're gonna have to add some nodes in. So I'm gonna put a node right here, and I'm gonna make it a square node, and I'm gonna make that square. I'm going to adjust the handle over here. I'm gonna make this square, and then I'm gonna add a node right here. I'm shifted out and I'm gonna make that square, and then I'm gonna add a node right here. I'm gonna make that square. I'm gonna pull it out that I'm probably going to need a node right here and I make that square. Now, I'm gonna move this over here, and I'm gonna just the handle who this over to here and now I'm gonna need another node, and I'm gonna need another node. And then lastly, I'm gonna need one more note. There we go with just the hand a little bit to get that straight, okay? And we're in pretty good shape there now. Bob, in his infinite wisdom, is now the same shape as this. The purpose of this lesson, folks, is to give you a chance to add, modify and change node types to get to the idea that you can take any shape from anywhere and through just in the sheer position and type of note, along with the number you can achieve any sort of object that you can think of. So don't make your pencil sketches terribly precise. Don't worry about being terribly accurate because there's a lot of modification in vector art as soon as you're done. All right, let's take the next step and we're gonna show you about the pen tool and how to kind of work through with Bob to make some of these things happen. All right, we'll see in the next one.
4. Introduction to nodes part 3: All right. Welcome back to offended the designer. So this is one of the things that people on the Internet want to know. This is one of most challenging parts of a vector. Art. This is how to join two different curves. So in order to do that, let's grab our pencil tool and will use the people that we've been working with before, right? We're gonna grab our buddy Bob. I'm gonna zoom in here, though, and I'm gonna make sure that I closed that path up good and tight. All right, that looks good. Now, Bob is not green. Bob is red. So let's go ahead, make Bob read, and let's go ahead and go to file place and put some eyes in Bob, and we go inside the curve. And now Bob is ready to roll. So now let's give Bob a buddy. All right, Let's make it a shape, though, where you make Bob a buddy. We're gonna call her triangle. Tina. Now, where's triangle? Tina? Right there. And we're gonna go ahead and make her green, and we're gonna give her red eyes. All right. Good deal. Trying Latina. Ready to go, Bob. Blob. All set up. Move these two over. All right, So Bob decides one day that he wants to become a triangle, right? So he's gonna try to fit inside the triangle mold. The thing here is you can combine two curves, So let's go ahead and get these curves close. Let's grab our no tool. And now if I use my no tool and I come over to the triangle and I try to use it noticed nothing happens because the triangle is a shape, it is not a curve. I mentioned that earlier that a shape is not a curve. If I want to use my no tool and adjust it like a curve, I must convert the shape to a curve. To do that, I come over to layer and I converted to curves Pau, see what just happened in my layers panel. It's now two curves, and now I'm gonna show you with the no tool these things called actions these air right here. So the action that I'm going to do first, I'm gonna do some surgery and we're gonna break the curve. So we select the no. We want this blue note in this case on team to the triangle, and I'm gonna break the curve. Now. It doesn't look like anything happened right up until I can now move these two nodes independently of one another. That is a broken curve. Now, if I go to Bob, Bob had some nodes there. I can select one of Bob's nodes, and I can also break the curve there. Now, it doesn't look like much happened right up until I'm now able to move Bob's nodes around. And now I have to completely open shapes. Notice how this is surgery. So now you know how to break a curve. Now I'm gonna show you something called Join Curves, and this is right here. This is how you now reconstruct him to put him back together. We're going to zoom in on Bob and Tina. I'm gonna grab my no tool, and I'm gonna grab both Bob and Tina. So you see how both layers air selected, And then I'm gonna draw a blue box. So I'm clicking and holding on these two nodes. And from here, I'm going to join the curve. How? But what just happened? Let's go ahead and zoom out. Where did Tina go? Here's the thing when you join curves, affinity, designer and vector, our programs in general cannot handle two curves in the same area, so you can't have a red in the green curve. That's ridiculous. So what it will do is it will take the color and one of the shapes will consume the other. So when we call this Bob the Blob, much like the classic horror movie The Blob consumes everything in its path. That's exactly what Bob did. So now we still have an open path over here, right? Let's go ahead and kind of What do we do with this? Well, in order to do this, we click and drag a blue box around these two nodes and then you've got your option here. I'm gonna go ahead and close the curve. And now we have a complete closed path that we can modify in to say something like this. That's how you take two shapes and adjust to curves in order to form one object. Now, the last thing that I want to show you actually to If we have the know tool you see how many nodes we have involved here? If you select the shape and you hit on smooth. Look at how many nodes affinity designer is going to try to add to smooth this shape out. It's added a lot. I don't use this function often because, quite frankly, I think they put in too many nodes to begin with. But if you wanted to, you could Now the last thing that I want to show you and this is just showing you we have another lesson for this. The last thing here is called reverse curve curves. Have a direction. So let me kind of illustrate this through the stroke panel. If I turn up the stroke because we know shapes have stroke, right, that's a given. I'm gonna show you in the next lessons how to adjust what's called the profile. Now the profile. You can adjust a profile to make one in super teeny and one in super thick. So you see that this is the beginning of the curve and it's the widest part, and this is the end of the curve right here, which is the skinniest part. Now. If I wanted to reverse that order, I could click there, and now I've got the thickest part here in the curve is running this way over to the thin part. This is very, very good when you're doing inking, because sometimes you draw the line a certain way, and if you've got a custom profile, it could be running the wrong way. So the reverse is a good thing, all right, so that's a little bit on this lesson. Now you know enough to be dangerous when it comes to curves. You know a lot about the pencil tool and you know a lot about the no tool. So let's go ahead to take the next step and let's give it into the challenge. Actually, no, let's do one more. I'm gonna show you how to do this fancy pressure curve here in the next lesson to show you how to bring some artistic flair to your inking. All right, we'll see the next one
5. 1.7 update Sculpt function and the pencil tool : All right, folks. And welcome back to affinity designer. Now, this is the 1.7 update. This feature was not available prior to 1.7. However, this is one of the best features for vector artists in 1.7. And this is the ability to sculpt. So what I have here is a very simple Japanese water sketch. This sketch is available in your downloads. If you wanted to follow belong, but it is not essential. So in order to find this feature weren't come up to the pencil tool and you'll notice I've got my stabilizer on. I'm going to drop the length down, dove out probably 24 25. And now this is the key. This is the sculptor button right here. Now what sculpt does? If I was to take this image and I was to trace it out, let's say run around this area here and now I'm coming up over here and I'm going to scallop this edge. Now I'm going to get to this point here, okay? And then I raise my stylists. All right, This is a line, and you'll see that this creates a curve. Now watch this If I was to drag this point now and grab the Redpoint and continue on, let's say and go down into here, watch what happens. A separate curve is created right now. Why is that? Let's go to our pencil tool and our sculpt function wasn't on. So now let's go ahead and hit sculpt. Delete out that little bit of a line And now with sculpt function on, Watch this same thing Make sure your Linus selected Come over to the no tool. Make sure the sculpt function is on. And now, with the pencil to a selected drag this line, you'll see what happened. Now notice that there is only one curve. The sculpt function allows you to pick up where you left off so I could pick up from this red area again here and I could then draw, noticed this is still the same curve. Now, let's go ahead and leave this curve. Now watch this sculpt function on. We're going to do the same thing. I'm gonna come over here and I'm gonna draw a curve. I know I'm not paying really close attention to my sketch. This isn't about how to draw water. This is about how to sculpt. All right, now watch this. If I start over here and I swing back and I try to connect the dots, even with the sculpt function on you see it creates two curves. It creates this shape, and it creates this shape. And why? Because I drew in the wrong direction. So let's go controls ed extra to your pencil tool selected. Make sure sculpt is on. Make sure you grab the red dot and now let's go ahead and sculpt away. And if we did this right, we still only have one curve. This is huge when you're doing really weird shapes as an example, if I grab the pencil tool here and I just destroyed to draw this style of shape, right, if I want to come back a just and then come back off this curve, the sculpt tool now allows me to do that. So it's vector artist. The sculpt tool is one of those things I love, and I hope you love it, too. All right, let's go ahead and get into the next lesson.
6. Line weight and art: All right, Welcome back to our lesson. This lesson is gonna be one of the most exciting when it comes to vector Leinart as a tattoo artist. One of the things that you have to really pay attention to as a tattoo artist is the outline with and the consistency when you apply a tattoo. Because, quite frankly, over 50 years of life, some of your colors air going to fade, some of those fancy gradations are not gonna be what they were. And so when I had the tattoo, it was very essential that I was able to use the outline to tell the story of the peace. So as a professional artist, the outline that you create will absolutely guide the viewer's eye and is the mark of a professional versus an amateur because it tells the viewer what is important in the piece. So let's go ahead and get started. That I kind of want illustrate this. We're gonna go ahead and we're gonna grab the pencil tool Now, straight up pencil tool. We're just gonna make a really quick leaf shape. Now, I know this is the most exciting thing, right? So I just create this very simple leaf shape. And I'm gonna go ahead and pull this stroke panel out to illustrate this. There is something called a stroke profile. Now, we've dealt with wit throughout. You know that you can then modify the width of a stroke. You can modify the cap will talk about the cap here a bit later. But you could go flat you around. You can set the alignment to be on the inside the outside of the middle. No worries. Now, the part I want to show you. Here. There's a pressure box down here. Let's take a look at that. Now there's a blue line and a white box down here. And if I was to take this blue box and shifted in the downward direction, I could absolutely control the view of my line. So you see how that kind of now has an artistic sweep to it and it tapers toward the end. Now you got to be careful. You see how that in the white box and the blue box there is no dot? Sometimes when you select it just like I did there you put dots in the box. What's gonna happen if I move that line now it's going to run as a solid straight line. If you do not want that, just click in the box one more time and make sure there are no dots in the box and you can adjust the taper of the line. So there I clicked in it, so it moved together, and now I make sure that it's not there. This is key. If you are inking a comic book, if you are thinking a piece of art, line profile is absolutely phenomenal. Now let's say that you want a really crazy profile like in the middle of here. I want to add a note. Oh, you can. And now I can make this super fat in the middle still taper down near my end. That's a whole different world there, and you see how, as I move this over, it will change. I really like that look, you see how that's kind of sweeping through. I might even do that At the end of this. I'll add a node. I'll drop this bad boy down and then I'll bring it right about here. Now let's say that I want to remove a node all you got to do is click right click and now comes right back where you need it. So before we go too much further with this, I'd like to show you kind of how this might be beneficial in a more complex design. So let's say that we have this leaf and then I decide that I want to create another offshoot, Let's say, and I wanted to merge in with this. Now, the way that vector art works, let's take a look at our layer structure that is one distinct curve. This is another. So sometimes if you have an overlap, you may want to create a profile. So let's go ahead and zoom in here and occasionally what you'll get. Let's say that this curve was narrower than that curve. That's a prime example right there. You see how we get some overlap, what you're gonna want to do, select the thicker curve. Now you can. You wanted two things. You can try to zoom it on in here like this, but it's not really gonna work that well. So if you have this and this is what's going on with this selected, go ahead and create a custom profile. Oh, make sure the white dots are out of the box and make sure you got the right side of the curve here, depending on how you drew it, and then you see how we can move this down. And then as we get bigger, we can move it up so that you've got a really nice swoop in there and a nice a nice joint. All right, so that's a little bit on how to use custom pen profiles to create some really cool artistic effects with your thinking. And if you get good at this part, folks, I'll tell you, you can absolutely create some really cool profiles that will make your art stand out from the competition. All right, let's go ahead and take the next step. Let's go ahead and get into an actual project and show you how this works in real life. Seeing the next one
7. Pin stripe Challenge : are again and welcome to the pinstripe challenge. This is going to test your ability to use the pencil tool, the sculpt function and work with mine weights. So you see the image up on the screen, You're gonna create something similar to it? Not exactly. The style of pin stripe is really what you're trying to pull off. And at the end, if you understand how stroke profiles are created, that's really the most important thing. So give it a shot. Yours does not have to look like mine. But if you get stuck along the way, don't hesitate to skip to the solution and I'll show you how I did it. And I've also include the working files. So go ahead, positivity. Oh, and we'll see you in the solution. All right. Welcome back to a fitting designer. How was that challenge, huh? The world of nodes sometimes is a little bit complicated. So as a tattoo artist, 20 years, I was obligated to kind of get in the low brow art and so pin striping, the Ed Roth stuff. Rat fink coop. They were all part of my world. And so if you've ever tried to pin stripe by hand. It's super hard, but affinity designer makes it a lot easier with this invention Align with. So let's go ahead and I'll show you how I did it. We go to file place and I place in the base image that I sketched out here and putting your downloads. I'm gonna go ahead and place that anywhere on the screen. Really doesn't matter. And because I just wanted to be a reference file, I'm gonna go ahead and turn down the opacity and because I don't want to mess with my drawing, I'm gonna go ahead and lock the layer. So now this thing is locked down. Now, let's go ahead and take a look at the pencil tool here. I bring in my pencil tool and I'm gonna make this an even five point stroke. I make sure that my stabilizer is on, and I'm gonna go ahead and crank up the side of my stabilizer to maybe I Let's make it an even number 40. So I want a fairly long stabilizer and I do not want the fill on now the pressure we can set later. But this is the type of pressure curve that I have right now. Now, the key to this design is knowing where to start and end your lines. So I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna start here where I wanted to go thin. And now I'm just using a mouse. I am not using graphics tablet, so you probably see some small inconsistencies in the line that's caused by that. When it comes to this, I'm relatively surgical with this thing. But there are times, folks. There are times. All right, so that's a really nice line. You see how it starts out Thin gets thick. I'm relatively happy with that. Now, let's take the next step. I'm gonna start the next line. Oh, I'd say right about here. And that's what I was talking about. Controls said swing that down around through, swing that down around through, Swiped back up. Okay, now I'm relatively happy with that. I just want to make a few adjustments. I'm gonna take this node on. We're gonna get it out of there. Take this node going to get it out of there. Take this note. I'm gonna get it out of there and take that entire line and shifted that way. I think that it put in a few too many notes. Okay? On that note and get it out. There we go. Now we're in the business. That's something that I really like. Kind of like the way that looks. They're going to keep that. All right, Now, the next step, let's go ahead and drag out another one. Um, I'm gonna come down from here. I think I'm gonna start this line right here. And my swing this down that way. Yep. I'm happy with that. All right. Looks good. So now let's go ahead and swap up the color. Oops. We don't want Phil. No, that is not what we want. All right? Pretty happy with that. So the next step, let's go ahead and grab our brush. Make sure we're on our line. Hey, that helps, huh? And we're going to start this one from right here. Pull a huge line running down this way, and then it's gonna come back up, and we're gonna swing back down that way. Okay, Looks good. And now the last one here, I'm gonna want to start it from back here. Let's say and we're gonna tape for that guy to the end. All right, so there's gonna a couple adjustments I want to make here one I probably wanted elite that guy out. I don't really need it. Secondly, I want to straighten this guy out. It looks good. Happy with that. Happy with all of that. So I think we're in pretty good shape here. The last thing I might want to do is I might want to adjust the stroke profile here to delete that on that shape. Drop the stroke profile here so that we start out large, Then we move over a little bit. Got double nodes there. I don't want that, you know. There we go. Yep, Much better. And I don't need this note here either. It's causing angst. There you go. See how you go through and a just a lot of these nodes that you really don't need. The fewer nodes you have, the smoother the line you're going to get. All right. So once we've got it down and you got it the way you like it, go ahead and grab these. Now what I'm gonna do here, I think I'm gonna take this curve, actually and want the movie to the bottom so that we get a little bit of a head and above and below situation there. All right, good deal. So I select all of these, and then I'm going to right click, and I'm gonna group. And now, with my group selected, I'm gonna come up to my lair, actually, what's gonna edit and we're going to duplicate. And now how do we transform? We flip it right? And now from there with our move tool selected snap ings on, make sure you're in good shape, and then we can bring this thing front center and let's just go and turn off the base layer and there's are completed finished pinstripe design. Now, if I had it to do over again, I would probably make some adjustments over to this area. I go through and clean up the nose a little bit more, but you got the idea, and I would definitely hit up this little spacing here. All right. Hope you had a good challenge. Hope you got an idea of how to use line with Let's go ahead and take the next step. I'm sure we all about the pen tool
8. Basis of the Pen tool: all right, welcome back to affinity. So in this lesson, we're gonna handle the pen tool. And if there is one thing I can say that will get you better, add vector art. And one thing that you should master in your sleep and become surgical with it is 100% the pen tool. So let's go ahead and take a look at it right? This is the elusive pen tool up here in the toolbox. Let's go ahead and click on it and let's go ahead and look at some of the context. All shapes is, you know, that are created with a pen or a pencil. You can have the fill color selected the stroke and then the stroke. With were Good bye Now. Now there's different modes. You can put it on the pen mode. The smart mode, the polygon mode or the line mode now just kind of show you real quick. If I'm in line mode, click, click, click, click, click, click, you notice it on. Lee works in straight lines, so if you're doing a very simple tracing, the line mode would be your preferred. Now, if you are working in the polygon Aled mode. Click, click, click, Click. You see how it's on Lee doing straight lines, but yet it's joining them together. That's the difference between the line and the polygonal mode. Let's go ahead and elite that. And then you've got the smart mode and you've got the pen mode. Smart mode tries to anticipate what you're thinking in terms of the types of nodes I'm going to tell you that 99% of the time I am working 100% in pen mode. So let's work in pen mode for this, because smart mode is just a combination of these three. And then you've got different actions. You convert different nodes and you've got the same snapping options that you have in the node tool. So in order to do this, I think that it's important. Let's go ahead and get some nomenclature out of the way. If I click once and I click a second time, ah line is created. Now let's go ahead and crank up that line and you'll see that these air square nodes you already know this, and if I click 1/3 time, it adds to the line because it's the exact same object. One of the things I really struggled with and still struggle with with the pen tool is remembering to de select my shape when I'm done. So if you just click and draw line, you get a straight line. Now let's go ahead, go up to select and let's head de select. Now let's go ahead and click a new line you see here now a new points been created, and now I can create a new line. That's how you go through and end one shape and get into another. You must de select the line you're working on in order to create a new line. Now, if we're working through this, let's go ahead and leave that out. Let's go ahead now click, click and now click Drag. Watch this you see. Now you've got those pesky handles again, and I'm still holding the left mouse button. I can drag these anywhere I want. This creates a curve. Now you'll see where my pen tip is. This area is the next say geometry, where it's going to throw the next line. Watch where the next line arrives. I release the button and now I click you'll see how that line shot out. So where's the next line going? You see how my pen tip is to the right of the point. Click, Click the trajectory off the line. That is the direction in which it's going to shoot out. Can be guessed by the location of the handle right now where my pen tip is. So this is what I call the look ahead method. If I want this thing to swoop up into the right, I should click now. Now, I wanted to swoop down into the right. I should click now. If I wanted to swoop down into the left, I should click. Now you see how the pen follows the location of the handle. Now, these nodes you can absolutely change through the node tool again. You could make this a square node. You could make a square note into around node all the normal stuff you got. But I'll tell you the hardest thing for people to do. Honestly, please trace a complex shape. So let me show you something about how to create thes heavy, heavy, sharp curves. Okay? This is gonna be the last thing I'm gonna show you. the pen tool before we get some practice. If I click here and I pull a curve, watch what happens now? I release the pen and now see, my pen is free floating. But now if I grab the no tool, you'll see that if I move one handle this handle on the left. It moves the other handle on the right. What if I want to create something and Onley have one handle. Move! Watch this Click drag. Now if I wanted to I don't want it to do that. How do I do this? Okay, watch this. When they go controls Ed Control said fold the Ault button. Now watch what happens. You see that? It changed the type of node right here. I'm showing you that it's now square. This allows you to just drag this handle independently. And now if we know where the trajectory is going, watch what happens. Release the mouse. Released the altar that release the mounts and then released. The Ault is key. Now, if I bring another line into existence, I get that really nice sharp corner I'm looking for. So if I want to get a sharp corner, hold Ault swing the handle. Release the mouse! Release the Ault! Hold Ault, Release the mouse! Released all. And there is my curve. You can do it a lot of different ways. I find that if I handle the Ault click method while I'm drawing it saves me a lot of note adjustment. So now if we've got the pen and we want to make adjustments, you can absolutely make adjustments to the nodes with the no tool. And I'm not even gonna tell you that she hit it right? First time every time, right? Like that point there was originally abysmal. So I'm gonna go ahead and delete that out. But if you want these hard points like we see right here, it's holding Ault moving on Lee one handle so that you get a good solid point on this thing . And even here, you might go through might soften that up just a little bit. All right, let's go ahead. And in this video in the next one, I want to give you a practice sheet, and we're gonna finish this up and we're gonna go a second round on pens because pens of the most important portion of vector art All right, See the next one
9. Basics of pen tool application: All right, let's get some practice on this pen tool here. So in your downloads, we have included are pen tool practice sheet from our pen boot camp course. So let's go ahead and go figure out where you found it. Here, go ahead and bring it up out of my downloads on. Let's go ahead and bring this thing into life here. So we've got a lot of the different situations you're gonna find when you go ahead and use the pen tool. Let's go ahead. And, doc, that stroke panel, I don't need it anymore. Now, working in good layer habits. We're gonna go ahead. I'm gonna drop the opacity on this bad boy, and then I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna lock the layer. All right. Perfect. So now let's go ahead and start. Regard the pen tool, and this is just a very simple one. Follow along with me at home if you want. Or try it on your own to see how you do. Click, click, quick click. A very simple line, right? There's nothing special about this. You know exactly how to make a line. Just go point to point Affinity designer will find the shortest method. All right, now this one gets a little more complicated. Ah, Controls, Ed. Select the's select. All right. You remember what I said about making sure you de select your line? That's exactly what happens. All right. Perfect textbook case of why we're doing this. Controlled the to three four control de 1234 And I'm using the controlled these shortcut to de select because I don't want to go up to select d select each time. All right, so nothing special about those other than the fact that you had the bleep. Now look at what this does to your curves panel. Each one of these items is considered a unique curve. So you've really got 1234 unique curves here. All right, let's go ahead and try this one. Here. Lets go and try this wavy one. It's going and start now. The location of nodes is just one of those things that comes with experience, folks. There's no perfect answer as to where to put him. And all I'm doing is I'm clicking and dragging on what I think is closest to the apex or the valley of the line. Now you see where my pin is right now. When I look at where my pen is, this is what I call the look forward technique. I look at where the pen is, and I align the handle with the trajectory of the line. Come up and then I come up and you see, I missed that one. There was a hidden curve there. All right, so let's go ahead with no tool and let's go ahead and make an adjustment. Alright, Super. And you could play with this all day. You could get us close, is you want to get, But you see how my nodes are even slightly off the apex of some of these hills. So again, it comes with experience. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I get it right the first time. Every time you may have to adjust nodes a bunch of times to get him where you want him, especially in what we're about to do now. So let's go ahead here. We're now going to make some of these razor tooth shapes. Eight Swing, Release the mouse. Release the Ault old swing. Release the mouse release the Ault Ault Swing! Release the mouse! Release the Ault Ault Swing! Release the mouse! Release the Ault! I don't swing! Release the mouse! Release the Ault! Ault Swing! Release the mouse! Release the Ault! Okay, now I did pretty well there to begin with that I ran out of room here on my desktop, so I'm gonna have to pay the price for that. We can come over here now. If we were to miss that and we were to go through and do this way, we could absolutely changes up. Now if we wanted to, we could add a note which would allow us to in the valleys make this transition. And in some areas, it does make sense. You see how we were able to make that transition there? So sometimes you might go square node round node in order to make this work, and then you kind of smooth out those valleys. So this is a nice practice sheet. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna add in around note because that is a fairly deep groove. And then I'm going to adjust the position of this node. This is a nice sheet to just practice with try some stuff, see if you can get it where you want it and really give you a chance before you go into your own artwork, have some emotional investment in it and get really frustrated with it and give up on vector art. I'll tell you for me, I added the node where I didn't want one wanted to select the note. For me, one of the most important things was getting confident with the pen tool. Because once that happens, once you get the mechanics down, Oh man, you're dangerous. That's the way it works there. Once you realize that you got the skills to do whatever you want to dio now you're in the business. Bring another. No, down in there and you see how it's just a matter of adjustment controls it. I put the note in the wrong spot until you get it where you want it. After a while, you just get to know where that note is going to go. And I'll tell you that comes not today, not tomorrow, but quite a ways after all right, but they were close enough for hand grenades or horseshoes right there. All right, folks, that's a little bit on note adjustment. Grab the sheet. See if you can pull off the sheet. Do not forget to de select if you want thes gaps and do not forget to hold the all button when you're doing the pan adjustment if you want to create these sharp curves. All right, let's go ahead and call. This one will get into the next one. All right, see that?
10. 1.7 update Node transformation : All right, folks. Welcome to Affinity Designer 1.7. Now this tool, which is transformation off the nodes. I have not found a really good use for this in my workflow, but maybe you will. But because it's part of 1.7 and this is the complete guide of affinity designer, I figured that we might as well cover it. All right, let's go ahead and grab the pen tool. Click on the screen. Hold shift, click on the screen. Old shift, click on the screen and lastly, hold shift and click on the screen. Cool. We're going to start building a banner now hit Escape. This finalizes that image and let's go ahead and crank the sides of this up to about 10. Let's go ahead and make it 10 in terms of stroke size. All right. Now, let's grab the pen tool again and we're gonna click. Oops on a click. Hold shift. Hold shift. Hold shift. Hold shift. Cool. So now his escape come down here. Click and click. There is half a banner. All right, so now you're drawing half a banner. How do you get these nice little cornered ins? No problem. It escape, Come down to the node tool. Grab that image and you see that about halfway through, you can place a node, just click and pull it in bingo quarter into the banner. Done. Now here's where this comes into play. You got this thing right, and let's zoom in a little bit now. If you wanted to make adjustments, you see how this is one shape. This is one shape, and this is one. Shape three different curves. Now what you can do here with no tool selected. Let's go ahead and select all three layers. All right, we got all three layers selected come over to the node tool, and now there's a new function called Transform. Let's click on Transform, and now we will give you some options to transform these notes. But now watch this click and drag, and now you see the three notes to go blue. Watch what just happened. It now allows you to grab all of those nodes and you see the bounding box around it. This means it will treat it as one object, not three separate layers, so you can grab just this corner node off one of these curves just this corner node off the curve, and now you can begin to start twisting and manipulating. However you would like to, so you could make this a little bit bigger. You could make that a little bit smaller. You could twist the rotation. There's a lot of stuff you could do with this if you so chose and once you're happy with it , because it on Lee treated. This is a selection. You can still come up, and now you can adjust these individually so you can still make all your individual adjustments that you might want. Teoh in the independent individual banner sections so you can still adjust thes altogether . Okay, so that's a little bit on how that works. I personally in my work flows do not use this a lot. I couldn't think of a bay use for it other than, say, manipulating and twisting a banner. So if you do certainly hit me up in the comments, maybe you want to make a video and tell me how you use it in your workflow. But it's a thing and allows you to treat multiple shapes as one object. All right, let's go ahead and get into something useful in affinity. Designer
11. Basics of vector brushes and brush management: All right, gang, welcome back to a finicky designer. So it's that time where we're going to start talking about vector brushes. Now, brushes are one of the things that makes digital art so much fun, right? Just, like is an artist. When you get a new brush down there, Michael's or something, a new digital brush could make all the difference in your art. And the cool thing is, we can create an unlimited number of, um in affinity Designer. It's only limited by your imagination. So let's go through. And I'm gonna show you what a vector brush is. Now to find the vector brush you can use the vector brush tool is what I'm gonna be using over here. Now, we've taken a look at the pen tool. We've looked at the pencil tool. We're now gonna look at the vector brush tool. But the cool thing is, you can apply a brush to any of these three tools. It really depends on you. Use the tool for the application that you need for this one. I'm gonna begin showing you the vector brush tool. Now, let's look at the context. Two of our here. You've got color of the stroke, the width of the stroke, the opacity of the stroke. We're not gonna put any sorts of stabilizers on this right now, but you could. And when you go through here, you can set all of your brush adjustments from this more tab. I'm going to set my brush adjustments in the brush panel over here, and then you can use the blend modes. I tend to keep them in normal, and you can send what is called a controller. Now, if you have a tablet, you can set by pressure, or you could make it velocity. If your surgical with the mouse I tend to leave my brush defaults as just automatic. I let the brush do its thing, so let's go ahead and see how this works Now. Vector brushes are unique beasts. Let's go to the Vector brush panel and the first thing I want to show you. There are categories now. I have a lot of brushes and folks. Artists are traditionally drawn to be brushed orders, right? I have frank and tune brushes, which is a great resource, folks. They've got the SciFi starter pack. They've got a ton of really cool affinity stuff. Stroke brushes that I've used All include a couple of those in the downloads at the end of section three. Once you learn about brush management, I've usually create pallets or categories for each individual projects. So for making a doghouse, smiley face, affinity brushes I use. So there's a lot of them, like the filigree brushes that I have. I used for holidays. We're actually gonna be making one of those coming up and to create a new brush category, simply create a new category. It's up here in these lines and they called it brushes three. Now, not the most incredible name. Let's go ahead and rename that category. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna call this trial brushes because that's were doing were just trying stuff, and we're gonna go ahead and hit. OK, now, you see, we don't have any brushes in there. Let's look at the characteristics of a brush. Just so you know what we're dealing with. Vector brushes are not as complex as traditional brushes. I'm gonna come over to the basic brush and I'm gonna find something like, Oh, I don't know this brush here now along this line That's a 32 pixel brush, and you see where it gets narrow and then fat in the narrow. That tells you that it has pressure adjustment if you so choose and you see how it gets less opaque, more opaque. And unless it tells me there's opacity adjustment. So let's go ahead and open it up. There absolutely is in this vector brush. The only thing you can really change in vector brushes is the stroke with which was set to 32 point so you can move the slider, or you could just touch it. Now note on adjusting brushes. If you would just brushes, you cannot get them back to factory default settings. You cannot without reloading them, so I would highly recommend you duplicate. And I'll show you that here in a minute. You can adjust the amount of size variants that it has, and you can adjust the amount of opacity variants that it has. This is what it's called the brush preview window, and then you can adjust the pressure velocity, or you can inverse the velocity. The last thing that will show you here there is a curve that you can adjust here we're not going to do that because I don't have any control set up for that right now. And now I want to show you one that has some of this information in the more advanced brushes. Let's go to any of your textured brushes, Let's say, And these air default, by the way, you see that with is adjustable variance in size is adjustable. It tapers a little bit notice. They have no opacity. Variant set. But now this is new. Every brush is made up of one single image. So somewhere out there, somebody took affinity designer and made this stroke this shape. And then you've got the head and you've got the tail. Now, you see, there are these things called offsets. Now, let me show you how this works. I'm coming back to this, so stay with me, all right? And make sure this brush is selected. I grab my vector brush tool and I paint a stroke. All right, Now, let's look at what just happened. What this says is I'm going to stamp this section right here, and then I'm going to stretch and notice they have stretched the body. This is called the body right here and you can almost see under magnification how there's a line. And then this is what is called the tail. And then I'm just going to stamp the tail from here to here. That's how a vector brush works. Now, you can set this up to stretch, or you can set it up to repeat, and it will repeat the body over and over. You see how here on the preview, there was a subtle change when we hit stretch and repeat again. Stretch, repeat stretch. Repeat and you'll see him change up there now because you can shoot these things around corners. Let's go ahead and delete that. I'm gonna stretch the body again. I'm going to come down with this area and I'm going to now pull around a corner. Now notice here. I'm not using the same brush, so I got to find that right brush again. This is why I was saying you can apply any brush to any stroke for any tool. And when you go into the brush when it moves around corners, you can change the behavior so it can overlap the design. It can fold around the corner. You tell it how you want it to work around the corners. Vector brushes are actually pretty simple. They don't have a lot of adjustment. And it's all about the head, the tail and the body. So we're gonna be working in the next lessons to kind of show you how to make some brushes . But I wanted to give you a flavour of what was gonna happen with vector brushes right off the bat and show you that regardless of the vector brush the pencil tool or the pen tool you can always go through and apply a brushstroke. If I don't want that brush stroke, I could do that one that I could do this one. I can do that one all day, every day. All right, The last thing that I want to show you. If we went back to your trial brushes folder and we went here, we could duplicate some of the existing brushes so you can modify him. So let's do that one more time. Here, let's go to Oh, I don't know, a basic brush. Select the basic brush. Come up here. Right. Click on the brush. So I'm going to choose this one and we're going to go ahead and duplicated. Now to do that, we're gonna copy the category and we come down to trial brush Now, what just happened? Now it is copied into their make Sure you were copying folks. So now, while I know this lesson was a bit long, you've learned how to copy a brush. You know, the basics of vector brush. You know how to apply a vector brush. And we can talk about the body, the head and the tail of a vector brush. All right, I want to go ahead and cut this lesson here because that's enough lecture. Let's actually get in to make it a couple brushes in the next lecture. Alright, see in the next one.
12. Basics of Image brushes and intensity brushes in vector : All right, Welcome back to vector brushes. So the last lessons we learned kind of the basics of creating a category and working in management. Now, if you want to create your own brushes and let's be honest, who doesn't? We're working in the trial brushes category, so you should know how to create a category already. And now, if you were to click down here, you would see a couple different types. We're gonna show you how to do a solid brush. And, folks, this could not be easier. A solid brush when we look at this is simply adjusting the whip, the size variants that could be there and also the A passage variants. It has no body. It has nothing to adjust. It is a very simple brush. So this brush, if you were to bring this into existence, let's go ahead and make this a 100 pixel brush. And it's absolutely capable of taper with zero opacity and we close tadaa. Now let's go ahead and rename this brush right click renamed Brush. We're gonna call this 100 pixel flat cause it's fairly uneventful. So that's a basic solid brush. Nothing new under the sun there. However, you got to new types of brushes. There are textured intensity brushes, and there are image brushes. Now, these two function very, very differently. We're gonna show you the difference in this video. And in the next video, you're gonna make one of each. So in your downloads for this section, there are the smiley face P and G's that you made earlier in the course. Now, this is your first piece of awareness. In order to create brushes in affinity. Designer, you must have PNG files. And now let's go through. And we're gonna first start with an intensity brush. Now, in your downloads, it will ask you where you saved him. I'm gonna grab the smiley face with the black background, and I'm gonna hit open, all right? And the brush comes into existence. Now that's not exactly sexy. Let's over it up and see what's up. All right, here's the thing. Intensity brushes, work off luminescence values how bright or dark or how intense something is. That's where they call them intensity brushes. So it's essential that all of your intensity brushes that you make have a black background . Let me say it again. All intensity brushes that you make must be a PNG with a black background and whatever you want to show up, you want to make white. So now this doesn't look really good, right? Watch this. If we go through here and we hit instead of stretching the body, we repeat Now, where's the body? You see the red lines. If I was to move those in my body would change. I want to keep those out and I want to repeat. Look at that. That's kind of cool. And then you could adjust the without to make it a little bit bigger. That's really a simple as it is to make an intensity brush. Once you're good there, let's go ahead and close. Now, let's go ahead and grab a line. We're gonna use the pen so we can practice. I'm going to draw a line with the pen and then I'm going to apply the brush. There we go. Problem solved. Problems staying. So a whole line of smiley faces. All right, so that is an intensity brush. Now we're gonna show you what the difference is to stay with me. Let's go ahead and rename this category and Let's call this smiley intensity that way. You know when you go back what you got and now let's go ahead and make an image brush. Come over here. Let's go ahead and create a new textured image brush. And now here you want to use the smiley P and G without, and I say without the black background. Now what's the difference? That looks a lot cooler. Let's go ahead and open this bad boy up. An image brush works with a transparent background. The image works on a color basis. So if you were to take an image rush and place a background behind it, it will consider the background to be a color and it will get jacked up. So the PNG foreign image brush must be transparent. Let me just reiterate that the PNG must be transparent for an image brush. All right, now, I'm gonna go ahead and hit the repeat, and you see, we got something very similar and I'm gonna go ahead and turn that up a little bit, too, that we close now. Let's go ahead and create the same pen stroke. This time. We're going to apply our image brush and notice how it's a sink. Klay different. Grab the node tooling. Adjust. All right now, what's the difference? This looks a lot better than that because this is working off from the color image Brushes . Work off the color information intensity brushes, work off the luminous information. And now, if you wanted to adjust these, you could easily do so. You just select the line. You come over to color, make sure you've got your outlines selected, and away you go. So you see how an intensity brush is different than image brush and image. Rush has much bolder s'more solid color. That intensity brush is all different shades of gray. So let's go ahead now and rename this rename That brush will call this smiley image brush. Okay, Perfect. So that's a little bit on the difference between the two and on a parting shot. Just one more time. If you're making an intensity brush, you must have a black background on your PNG. If you're making an image rush, you must have a transparent background on your PNG. That being said, let's go ahead and call this a day on here, and let's go ahead and make one of each. All right, we'll see in the next lecture
13. How to make an image brush : All right, gang. Welcome back to affinity Designer. So in this lesson, we're gonna show you how to make a very standard stamp image Brush four. Affinity designer. Now, this is not gonna be terribly complicated. We're gonna be using the same techniques that we've used a couple different times, and we're going to show you how to build this thing out. Very simply, It's about the holiday time. So I thought maybe we just make a simple bell stamp that you could use on holiday cards. To do that, we're gonna make this out of primitives. Let's go grab the triangle tool. I'm holding shift so that I pulled the triangle down and then I'm going to grab the trap is oy tool and I'm going to pull out a trap is oId Now I want a position. The trap is oid right about here. So we get kind of that really cool flair out that we're used to and this is something that I haven't showed you before. Sometimes I use what's called the corner tool and I'll use the corner tool toe pull in the corners just like the name implies. And what happens here, then we get this really cool type of situation where we've got this flare. Now let's use the corner tool again. Okay? Sorry, Editor. Edit that out. And let's use the quarter tool on the top of the bell to get the bell shape, the corner tool will create some really cool effects. And you see how we get this flare out? I don't use it often, but sometimes. All right, let's go ahead and pull a circle. And we're just gonna pull this circle here, and then we're gonna pull another circle. I don't want to pull the circle here. And then what we're going to Dio is we're going to pull another circle and we're going to pull the circle here. Now, with that being done, that will work. Now the bell needs right, The ring. You piece inside of there? Yes, that's a highly technical term. All right, let's go ahead and position that where we need it. Now, here's what I'm gonna dio I'm going to select everything That is not the other piece. You see, I've got every piece but that circle I'm gonna perform in addition operation. Now I really have to separate shapes to do this next piece. Now I'm gonna come down to the fill tool, and what we're gonna do here is we're going to create a very simple Grady int and we're going to use Oh, I don't know. On that side of the Grady, it let's go ahead and use kind of a a light. And then on this side of ingredient, let's go ahead here and use something that is gonna be fairly dark. That's nice. All right, Now we're gonna drag this lips down below this section here and what we're going to do now with this, we're gonna pull ingredient on this side, too. And on this side, we're gonna make this very, very dark because guess what's inside the bell. And then over here, we're gonna make this very, very light. That looks good. The only thing I would do probably I'm going to adjust this Grady int one step further here . I wanna lighten this guy just even more than that, because I want a good separation. All right. I think we're in pretty good shape there. I'm happy with that. So let's go ahead now. Zoom that in hold shift so that it moves in aspect and then lock it down to the center. All right, that looks good. So the next step here, let's go. And what we're going to do now is we're gonna come to file documents set up. I haven't showed you this before. You're gonna come to color, and you're gonna hit transparent background. Then we hit. Okay, now we're ready to export. Exported is a PNG. Make sure that you've got a selection, so I don't want to do the whole document. Let's cancel. I want to grab my selection. There we go. File export. Now we do the selection without the background and export. Save it where you got it. We'll call this bell, and now let's try this hopes. Turns out I was making another one here. Spring up a new document. Okay. We're gonna come into brushes to make a new textured image brush, remember? That's we're making. We go with the bell now. That looks like garbage, doesn't it? We want to repeat it. All right? And that looks really cool. Let's go ahead and grab our pen tool, click, click, Apply our bells. And then let's see what we do with the color here. all right. We are all holidayed out, folks. We are ready to rock this thing there. All right? You have a good textured image that would suffice for a holiday card. Good for you. All right. Hope you learned a little something. Hope you've got another brush in your arsenal. We're gonna go ahead and include this one into the downloads at the end of the brush section here. So stay with me whence we make them all. You'll have every brush that I've made during the course in your file. Alright, folks, let's go ahead and take the next step and I'm gonna show you how to work in the intensity brush.
14. Create an intensity brush: All right, gang. Welcome back to affinity Designer. So this is one of the most exciting lessons. When it comes to vector brushes, I'm gonna show you how to make a really cool intensity neon brush. Now, later in the course, we have a neon project coming up. But this is gonna be the brush that you're gonna use in order to pull this off. So in order to do this, let's go to file new. And as I said before, I like to work in 1000 by 1000 pixel workspaces. And remember, intensity brushes need a black background. So let's go ahead and pull up a black background. And now I'm gonna show you some new things. We're gonna talk about effects to while we do this. So in order to create this brush, we're gonna make it all using the rounded rectangle. Now, let's go ahead and create a brush. Leave yourself some space on the sides here, and there's a reason for that. Don't go all the way to the edge and turned the corner radius in the rounded rectangle up all the way. You want this to be a pill, right? And then you want to make it wide. Okay, so I'd say this is probably a good size. All right? Perfect. Now what you're gonna want to do here, intensity works off black and white. So let's go ahead and create a kind of almost perfectly white shape. And now this is going to be a very similar exercise. Every time we do this, you're going to come down to effects. You're going to apply eg ocean Blur, and you're gonna crank this bad boy up when I say crank it up. I mean, probably to Here, I've got about a 46 point motion blur, and I'm gonna hold shift and I'm gonna crank down my brush until I kind of get all that blur inside there. That looks pretty good. Now the thing about neon is it casts a glow outside. And then as you get closer to the middle, it becomes mawr and Mawr solid, more and more bright. So to do this, we're going to right click, and then we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna duplicate this layer, and we're gonna shrink this bad boy down but Onley in the vertical direction and then we're gonna center it Now what we're gonna do here, we're gonna turn down the amount of glow on that so that it gets a little more solid. You see what's happening with that? Then let's do it again. Duplicate ringgit, Reduce the amount of glow. Now, if you have dukes, you don't want to destroy the effect. You absolutely can shrink it a little bit this way. And now we're gonna do this one more time here, Duplicate. Shrink it. And this time I'm gonna move it in one step. But now we're gonna change the color to the bright white. Now you see what that just did. Here's where you begin the process one more time. You come over to effects, you turn up the blur and you begin to see kind of how that glow is changing up. That is super awesome. I cannot express how happy this makes me, and then one more time duplicate, shrink. And then when you're at the very, very level there, you want to kind of make sure you turn off the go Schindler altogether and you should have a pretty good, solid neon intensity brush. Now, here's we're gonna dio we're going to take all those layers, So select all the layers gift and then group. All right, that looks good. Now, what we're gonna do, we're gonna take the selection, and then what we're going to do here is we're going to file export. Now it's a PNG, and you're going to go selection with background this time and export. All right, so let's go ahead and call this neon one. Let's try it. Save beautiful. Now, let's try this brush file new. It doesn't matter what the file is, right? Doesn't matter what the sizes. If I'm gonna check the glow on this thing, I want to make certain that I am in really good shape here. So I'm gonna go ahead and put down a black rectangle just so that I can see what I'm doing . And now I'm gonna come up to my brushes and I'm gonna create a new textured intensity brush . There's my neon looking good so far. All right, Let's see what this looks like. All right. Neon doesn't usually have any sort of opacity, or I should say any sort of size variants. Now I'm going to adjust the head because you remember on neon tubes they always have those round heads where it's all connected. Okay. And then I'm gonna look at the width. I'm gonna go ahead and crank this with up. So far that is looking sexy, and we're gonna hit. Okay, now, this looks pretty good, but you see this little tail here, you're going to see this happen here in a second. So watch this. I come to my vector brush. Let's go ahead and elite that. I want to get you a good one. The wheat. Let's go ahead and come to the pen tool. Here we go. Now the pen tools there. And then we're gonna apply this neon brush to it. Now what? Why doesn't that work in? Well, we can't see the color. Pau. That is super sexy. We are in really good shape with that. Now, let's see. We got here. Hoops control Z, let's go ahead and move this on over here a little bit. Overall, I am extremely happy with that as a first pass on a neon brush. Now you're gonna have to do a little bit more with it. It's not going to pull off the effect by itself. That's why we have an entire lesson on neon, so that is a nice looking brush. Now, when I said there may have to be some adjustments to stroke, watch this If I took aligned and I made this line here, and I applied the brush over to it. Sometimes at the end of a stroke to go to the stroke panel, you can change the cap style. Sometimes it matters. You see how, as we change the cap, it changes a little bit right there. Let me zoom in so you can see this, right? There's kind of an imperfection in the design. And if we have a square cap that will show, like a bad omen. So we go through and we then mirror this so that it shows up at the very edge. So usually when you do neon, you want a but cap it. Okay, Just a thought. You rarely want around, Cap. All right, let's go ahead. Call it a day on this. I think you guys have a pretty good solid start on a neon brush for the rest of the course . Now, if you wanted to go to Wonderland, you could easily take this pen, create another neon stroke. Make it white, and drop this down here on top of it, you see, we're doing. And then you could do some really cool stuff on that layer. If you go to the layers panel, you can reduce the opacity on that layer. And you get that nice little bleed over. Couple that with a blend mode. Oh, man, you be dangerous groups. All right, We're gonna go ahead and stop there before I give away everything else in the course. All right, We'll go ahead, take the next step, Have a good one.
Jeremy Hazel, Education Through Creation
