The complete guide to Affinity Designer 1. 7 Volume 3 - Advanced Vector Drawing

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. Basics of color -terms and visualization: All right. Welcome back to affinity, designer. So this lesson is all gonna be about color. Now, we're gonna spend the first half the lesson just about 23 minutes talking about color. So this is a theoretical lesson. We're gonna come over to the collar panel, and I want to kind of explain the three areas of color the three demographics, if you will, of color. The first demographic is that of Hue. Now, Hugh is, if you're using the color wheel, this outside circle here, it literally is the color. Then we have something called saturation. Now, saturation in the inner triangle runs from left to right and you'll see right here, this red area. If we go in here, we can de saturate or fully saturate the color. The last one is called luminous Luminosity, Lightness. Whatever you want to call it, I go hue, saturation lightness that makes sense to me. And it's dark toe light. So you see, all of our graze over here in the color wheel are in the blacks to the whites and different shades of gray. Our along this area. So using the color wheel here we can go all the way to Hugh. We could go all the way to saturation and we can control the dark and the light so every color that you could think of it's possible in the color wheel Here. Now you see that we've got HH s l h s l is a very common nomenclature. Four, this sort of thing. So if you talk about the h S, L, that's what they're talking about. The hue, the saturation and the lightness make up this unique color or what would be this unique color? So that's a huge piece of awareness there. When we start doing this now, you can look at it a bunch of different ways. Let's go ahead and take a look at this slider. You congrats the slider and you'll see that you've got our g b. Jeremy. What is that right? RGB stands for red, green, blue, red, green and blue are the colors that a monitor projects in so you can adjust thes sliders and through controlling the red, the green and the blue. Any color is possible. So you'll see here that we've got four a. B 9 84 and then we have this number here This is one of the most important numbers for me is an artist. This is what it's called the hex code. It is a unique four number, or, I should say, six number system that identifies this particular color. And if I enter this hex code anywhere where a hex code can be entered, I could get this exact number. So we can also use the CME like a values. So in the sea and y que this stands for the scion magenta, yellow and black C m y que. And through adjusting these numbers, we can get any color in the rainbow and the c m y que number Are these numbers down along the right hand side. So you got RGB RGB hex, the H S L the C M y que And then you can also go with lab or gray scale. Now, you could look at this any sort of different way. We can look at it in terms of wheels and sliders. We've already taken a look at. We can look at it in terms of boxes. This is where you choose the hue. And then again, you've got the darkness and the lightness and you've got the saturation, highly saturated, the no saturation. So if you like this, you could certainly use it. The last one that I'm gonna show you here, you could use the tent bar. Once you've got this particular color that you like, you can adjust the tent in a lot of different ways. So wrapping this first lesson up on color because we're going to get into a new one here in just seconds when you go to the color tab, These are the types of ways that you can create the visualization and whichever visualization you choose, there are numbers associated which will allow you to choose the exact same color. So as an artist, if you have the hex code, you're gonna be in pretty good shape. Because if I come over here to the sliders and I have the RGB hex code, I can enter the hex code in, and it will give me the exact color that I'm looking for. All right, folks, in the next lesson, we're gonna show you some resource is to help you with color along the way. All right, we'll see the next one 3. Color schemes and free resources for color : All right. Welcome back to affinity, Designer. So this lesson we're talking all about color, we're gonna show you what a color cord is, and we're going to show you some really cool resource is for color, because what I find as an artist, many people miss used the color palette and they don't put a lot of thought into their color. So let's go ahead. I'm gonna work in the color wheel here now, because we're working on this pallet. I'm gonna go ahead and bring this out, and I want to start out with the resource is and come back to this. So there are a lot of different resource is for color. One of my favorite colors is coolers dot c o. Now, this is actually very cool. This is a colored generator, and so if you start the generator, it will grab a whole bunch of different colors. Now, if you hit the space bar, it will just randomly pull colors that it thinks are good. Now, let's say that we like this color. You can lock this color down. And now when we hit the space bar again, it will Onley change the other colors and we'll try to find colors that you might like. So let's say I like this one in this one, but I want to see this color next to this color. Let's see how those three look. All right, Now I like those. Let's go ahead and hit it again. And then you can keep going until you find a color that you really like. Now, if you wanted to find an alternative shade, you could adjust that. Say you wanted a little darker and you like that or you gonna just Here we go H s l or RGB or C m y que? So if you have an RGB value and you think you want a little bit more green in it, you can certainly do that. And once you get this comfortable where you like it, you can come up here and you can export it as a PdF. So there's the pdf that's created. Now you'll notice that down here, each one of these has a hex code. So I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna write down 545 e 75. All right, now, how does this work? Let's go back to affinity. Designer Let's go to the color panel. Let's go to Oh, I don't know. Let's go to this sliders there and let's go ahead into that. Number 5 45 e 75. And there is the exact color as it sat right here. So that's how you make this work. Now, if you're doing a website or you're looking at your company colors, make sure you collect these hex codes and these values because you're gonna need it. All right, The next thing that I'll show you here, there's a company out there called design seeds and the cool thing these folks do at regular intervals. They come in and they take pallets from photos. Now we're gonna show you how to do this, because if you've got a fall situation going on as they did autumn here, that's a huge awareness here. So you can go through. They've got an autumn portfolio and they've taken pictures and you'll see that these colors are taken out of these pictures. So if you've got a photo that you like, you can absolutely grab. The palate is used from that photo and we're gonna show you. So for the photographers out there that are blending into affinity. Designer. This is a nice way to grab a nice palate off from a photo that you took. We're gonna do this, so don't worry. So design seeds, an absolute winner. The last thing that I want to show you that I use all the time. This is adobe color cc totally free. You don't have to have an adobe subscription And this the nice way where they represent the wheel and you can begin to change up the colors. You could adjust how saturated they are, how bright they are. You could do a lot of different stuff, and each color in the wheel has the corresponding RGB value and the hex code associated with it. So again, if I wanted to replicate F f c E 16 I could come over to my affinity designer. I could put in this hex code F f C E 16 and Pau. There's my color yellow right there. Now, this is a really nice tool because if you wanted to make it a little bit lighter a little bit whiter, you could you could address all of them, right? They could all move together in one master way. There's a lot of play you could have with this thing and creating this. And then if you wanted to manipulate one color in particular, you could move this as your master color and all the others would flow. Now what's controlling the relationship? There's something called They call it Color Harmony, and these are what we go. Call cords, strategies. Whatever you wanna call it, you could have a monochromatic color strategy, which means it's all the same. Hugh, you've just got different darkness and lightness. Values of the same Hugh. You see how these all share that purple issue, and then you could manipulate some of these inner out to be more or less saturated. You could go through and have a triad IQ color scheme. This is where they take the 360 degrees, and we break it up together, and when you turn it, it always keeps these at 3 60 then you could move some of these in to be lighter or darker . And you see this little one with the arrow has a master, so this is a nice tool to try out some different colors that you may not think about. You've got complimentary where they become almost diametrically opposed on the circle. And now how does this work in a finicky designer? Check this out. This is gonna cool. If you've got a color that you like, you can come over here and it will allow you to create what is called a color cord. Now a color court. You'll see a lot of this here we go to complementary, and then it will create complementary colors around this particular chord. If we create a color cord, let's say that is going to be Oh, I don't know. Let's go try Attic notice Here. You now have a triad of colors. You've got a teal, you've got a purple and you've got a yellow Does that kind of match we see here. Purple t o yellow? Yep, that's a try. Attic. So the nice thing is, in whatever palates you have, you can create a color cord off from an existing color now palette, brand new term. Haven't talked about that. I think we should probably get in the next lesson and talk about palates. All right. See the next one 4. Pallet management : our A and welcome back to affinity designer. So in this lesson, we're gonna talk all about pallets. Now, when we talk about pallets, let's build up from the ground up Pallets air composed of swatches. So you see these or water called swatches and there's an entire studio panel. Force watches, So swatches are the base building blocks of palettes. So to create a palette, you'll see we've got multiple pallets in this drop down. You gotta Grady and Palate. You've got some greedy int pallets that I've imported. I've created some pallets. We've got gray wash pallets and you'll see the little affinity icon here. That means that their application palettes Now what's that? When you come up to make a pallet, you've got two types. Application palettes are applicable across affinity designer. So if you open this document or another document, it has the same options. However, document pallets are Onley applicable to the document they're attached to. So let's go ahead and create a document palette. Here it created one, and you see the icon is not the little affinity symbol, but a page that's the symbol for a document palette. Now we're gonna come over we're gonna rename and we're gonna call this trial. All right? Perfect. We got the trial palette. Now let's say whatever color you have up here for your fill you want to add go ahead and add Phil to palette. So now, boom. There's the green. Now there's a lot of different ways you can add some swatches. We're gonna show you all those you could use the color picker. You could go from the color panel, right? So if we grab the color panel here, let's see if I've got it out. I don't studio color. Hope came upon Dr. That's fine. All right, let's go ahead and make red. I can then select from a color paddle and I can add that filled the palate. I could grab over here and right recently used, and I can add that filled the palate. So now let's say I like this blue right. I'm gonna add it to the palate and let's say I want to create a chord with it. You right click and I'm going to do a complimentary cord that will pull this and this, which are diametrically off the color wheel. You remember the color wheel from previous lessons. Now let's say I don't want that blue anymore. All you have to do, right? Click delete, Phil. Right click. Delete, Phil. That's it, folks. That's palette management. Now there's a couple specialty options. Let me show you these. These are really nice. You come up here and you can create custom palettes, So let's go ahead and grab a palette from an image. Now, this is extremely cool if you confined an image anywhere in your work. So I'm gonna go ahead. I've got one in your downloads. If you downloaded it, it will pull in an image and then what it will do. It'll ask you how many colors you want to create. It will read the image, pull these colors and you can see you could make a 29 a 46 swatch. You can preview it and then you can add it as either an application or a document palette. Or you can add it to the current selected one. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna add that as a document palette, and I'm gonna create brand new one. And then we could just rename it. This is huge, folks. The ability to choose a pallet off from existing photo is awesome. The last thing that I want to show you here, we're gonna create a palette from a document as a document palette. And when we do this, notice how this doesn't have anything on it. But now watch this. If I come up and I go up here to open and I'm going to go into a recently added piece of work here, So I'm just gonna take you along here and I bring up one of my thumbnail promotes here, and I come to here now watch what happens here. If I come over to palates, come over here, create palette from document as a document palette. Look at what it did. It took all of the existing palates all of the existing swatches that he could find and it named it Affinity Flare brush promotion palette. That is awesome. So that's a couple ways to engage in palate management. One of my favorites folks working off photographs. If you can work off photographs and you've got some amazing photographs, you is the photographer. You can absolutely create some amazing stuff and send off some beautiful ballots. Alright, folks, let's go ahead and get into the next lessons. Hope you learned a little bit about palette management 5. The color picker tool : dar again. We'll go back to all things color. So we're gonna talk about the color picker in earlier. Less. We talked about things like color scheme, color terms, how to work with pallets. Now, let's see how to actually do this. So what I'm gonna do here, I'm gonna bring up a square, and I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna filled with green. It doesn't matter what style of green it is. And now, in your downloads for this lesson, I've included a picture. So let's go ahead. Now grab the picture. And again, this is an unedited, un cropped, untouched photo from Detroit here. So don't judge me on my photography skills based on an untouched photo. So it doesn't have to be this photo if you've got when you like, use when you like. So now the trick here, let's go to the color picker and this is present in a couple different places. You can have the color picker tool here. You see, it's also presidents watches and it's present in the color palette. So to different places in the studio and over here as a tool, we're gonna work as a tool. Now, my advice to you in the context toolbar. I always keep apply to selection off because if you have that on and you choose the color, it will apply it to the selection, and you really don't want that. You can choose how you want it to look for color. As an example, you might have different layers. You see how we've got different layers over here. You can choose whether does global or whether it does an individual layer. And then you can also change the average. Now the averages. How many pixels it's picking up. So by default it goes 1 to 1. If you have an area with a lot of variation, you might be better off doing five by five or larger. So it will take those pixels and try to get an average color. And again, much like statistics, the more color, the more average. All right, so we're in pretty good shape there. So let's say that I got this green square and I want to use the purple. I want to match this purple, come over to the color picker tool and you see the cross hair swings over and it doesn't look like anything happened. But now notice up here. The color has changed here and the color has changed here. Now if I select my square and I touch on the purple, it then applies. That's one of the key reasons to leave. Apply to object off. So let's do this again here. So now I got a purple square. Let's grab the color picker tool and I want to change it to this color of red. Now you see, nothing happened. But over here it's red. Over here, it's red. So if I come over here to the square and I click on it Pau Instant read. So that's how the color picker works is the tool. Now it works very much the same way coming from the studios. So let's go ahead, grab the tool. But I'm gonna click and hold now. And the reason I like this to a look at the magnification that's created. Plus it gives you the RGB value of each individual thing and you can get pixel level precision with this thing, right? This thing is surgical. So if I wanted to make this blue, I can choose this blue and now you notice to the square. Still nothing happened. But if I wanted Teoh, all I have to do now is tap the blue and the square becomes blue. Now, let me show you the primary limitation before we in this video. What happens here? Let's bring up my coolers. Let's bring up my affinity workspace now. All right, so now we're working in the affinity workspace. Still, I'm gonna go ahead and zoom this in. Watch this. If I grab my color, fill my color picker tool here and I come outside of the affinity workspace. I can't grab anything. It doesn't recognize it. But now let's grab the color picker from here. Oh, we're back across the boundary. Oh, yeah. Anywhere. We have image on our desktop weaken. Grab this color. So it's grabbed that color from my coolers image. And now, if I want to come over here Pau, this is a nice way to capture anything on your desktop. So if I wanted to capture any of these colors, anything, anywhere on my screen, the color picker tool will do it. But on Lee, if I'm pulling from here or here the color picker tool as it's found in the tool box will not. All right, so that's a little bit on color picker. Color Picker is one of the best tools in an artist toolbox to make sure that they get the color they want in the area they want. All right, let's go and cut this one. We'll see in the next one. 6. Mask Layers: and welcome back to affinities diners. So we're gonna talk a lot about Mass. Claire's coming up Mass. Claire's is one of those techniques that we've waited about halfway through to really show you. And so I wanted to go through it with us so that we understand exactly what it is, where it is and why it's so important. And there were a ton of wage could do it. Masking defined is the ability to hide things. So to do this, let's grab two layers. Let's go ahead and grab a red square and then draw out another square on top of it and make it say blue. Okay, so you got a red square in Blue Square, you don't have to do red and blue. Just make sure that their contrast ing. Okay, So now let's go to the rectangle lair here, which is the top layer. And now this is a new icon right here. This is the mask layer icon. So let's go ahead and tap on it. All right. Now, I want you to get something down deep inside your soul. We talked about this before Black conceals, white reveals. So when we do this What color is this? Square? White. So what it's saying is it is revealing all of the blue to everybody. So if it's white in reveals, if it's black, it conceals. And this white square says everything is revealed. So a mass glare hides pieces of this layer that you don't want shown. Right now it's all out in the open, right? This blue squares, businesses all out in the open. So in order to work with this, we're gonna go ahead and I'm gonna just use the pixel persona here. So we're gonna swap on over, I'm gonna grab a brush. And now I realize we haven't talked a lot about the pixel persona, and I'm gonna grab the spray paints. I'm grab any old spray brush known to man, and I'm going to use black as my color. So we are now having a black color out. Okay, So regular brush gods was spray on it. Black color opacity 100%. I'll give you second to get there. All right, so now make sure you are on the mask. Claire, you must Must must be on the mask lair. And now let's crank this up a little bit. and let's paint and what is happening? Why am I painting in black? But yet the red is what is showing through. It's because you're actually not painting on the rectangle. If I was to come up to the rectangle and paint your right there, it is black. It's control said that. But you see, if black conceals what we're telling it now and you see the little black line that's developed on the preview, Black conceals part of the blue layer. Whole different way to look at it. So this is how you do it. Now let's say you go too far, right? Like, Wow, I reveal far too much of that red. It's okay. Grab the color paint in white. Now paint on the mass. Claire don't paint on the blue, and the blue now reveals you. See how that works. So black conceals, white reveals, and mass glares are tied to the layer that they're created for, which means you can't grab that and move it anywhere else, right, And if you paint black on it, it will reveal the layer underneath. Now this is key mass. Glares don't care about color mask layers on Lee care about black and white and shades of gray. So we've seen what happens if you go black. It conceals part of the blue. However, if I go halfway, let's go halfway. You see how, with the exact same brush, the exact same setting Some of the blue is still kind of visible. It's kind of somewhere in the middle between perfect and not. That's because you're painting in shades of gray mass. Claire's work on the shades of grey. So the closer I get toe white, the less it's going to show through and a little bit less still. And finally, when I get right up here on this edge of white, very, very subtle effect with the mask lair. And now if I want to undo it all, I just come to white and what is white do it reveals, and now I can undo the entire show. You can, All right, so in theory, that is a mask layer. Now, if we remove it, let's go ahead and delete it. Notice my black rectangle or my blue rectangle. I'm sorry, is back large in charge. Mass glares are a nondestructive way toe work, which means I don't have to destroy the blue rectangle in order to get that really cool, grungy effect that we were doing. I know this doesn't make a lot of sense right now. There is no substitute for working with Mass Claire's. We're gonna work with them from here on out. And the very next project, which we'll get to in a couple lessons, will help you with this concept. All right, folks, let's go ahead and take the next step. Mass killers are a lot of fun, but they do require a learning curve we'll see in the next room. 7. 3 masking techniques you already know : all right, welcome back to affinity designer. So we're working with Mass. Claire's. And some of the time it's complicated to judge, kind of in explain what a mass Claire is to people that may be unfamiliar with the concept . So I wanted to anchor it, and I wanted to show you three ways that you already know that you could do what I would think of as masking. So let's go ahead, and I'm gonna show you a couple different things that you already know. And we can look at the different type of masks that are created. So we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna grab a square and a triangle. Let's go ahead and make the triangle green. And now let's bring this pesky rectangle inside the triangle. Well, where to go? Well, it's still there. It's just nested inside. We've been nesting. Now for several lessons. This makes the triangle what is called a clipping mask so you can absolutely look at what we have been calling nesting as a clipping mask. And how does this work at a higher level? Well, now, if I take my pencil tool that I create this weird being shape I create the no tool and I lock this down. Let's add some stroke to it here. Now. Why is it not showing up? Because it's inside the triangle. We want to move that to the top. Perfect. And now can we move the triangle inside of bean shaped? I bet you we can. And then when we move this over, look that mind blown clipping mask inside of a clipping mask. Whole different way to look at it now for moved to be in shape. It moves is one unit. This is key. This is what is called a clipping mask, and we do it all the time. Now. Another masking technique could be thought of as transparency. Now we do this a lot when we have characters. So let's say I have a body of a character and I want to make it a pink body. So we're in good shape, and now I want to take this arm and I want this arm to be just a skosh darker right than this arm. But I wanted to kind of blend. How can you make a mask using the transparency tool? Let's watch if I go with the transparency tool. And I come to here and I cranked this bad boy up. Could this transparency tool then be a form of a mask? You bet. So you can absolutely create a transparent shape with this particular effect so we can move this up and you'll see how the line when I start moving in, disappears right about here. Now, if I wanted to, I could go back into my transparency tool, and I could tightly control that to make it even disappear a little further. You see how that's masking? So what we think of as being a transparency tool is absolutely a mask. Now, the next version of this, let's grab two squares, we're gonna grab a red Square, and then we're gonna make another square. We're gonna go ahead and make a blue square, okay? And then we're gonna move one on top of the other. So you've seen this show? Let's go ahead and make the blue one. Now, if I have this rectangle and I create a mass glare, we've seen this show before. But now here's the trick. You can apply Grady INTs to Mass. Claire's the same way you can color now watch this now it looks like I'm painting it purple . Right. You're going? Okay. It's a little bit of purple, but let's come up here. I'm actually according ingredient painting in shades of gray. So if I come up here and I changed the shade of gray to black now goes from black to white And look at what happens to my square. I'm not painting in purples and blues and reds on painting in shades of gray because I'm painting on this mask lair. Now, let's take a look at this layer. If I grab the blue and I just move it over to the side. Look at what has happened. This is integrating and fill. This is me working in black and white on the mask. So three techniques that you can use you can use the clipping mask. You can use the transparency tool. Or you can use the Grady int tool when a mask is applied. To get to that effect, we're gonna be using a combination of all three as we go through the next lessons. But I wanted to show you how you know more than you think you do. All right, let's take a one more tough subject and then we're gonna get onto some are all right. See the next one 8. Blend modes - What are they: all right. Welcome to one of the most complicated lessons in all of digital art. Not just affinity designer, but whether it's Photoshopped, whether it's hit film, whether it's cinematography, whether its after effects all digital artworks on something called a blend modes now blend modes defined. Get this down deep in your soul blend modes tell the lair how to interact with the layer below it. So in our example here I've created this and I've included it in your downloads. We have multiple shapes and order makes a difference. So let's go ahead and let's start by moving this ready lips up to the top of the stack. Okay, now blend modes work on a variety of areas, and they work on layers. So let's go ahead and pull our layer panel out, and you find blend modes here. Now there are common groups. As an example. Let's take this square and move it on top of the white. Now you see, it's under, we gotta move it on top. Okay, so we got the gray square selected. What a blend mode does is it tells the layer how to interact with the layer below it. So you've got a white filled rectangle and you've got a gray filled rectangle. What do you think is going to be darker? The gray Phil or the white Phil? I'm gonna guess Gray. But now, see, we got a black background or a black border. Watch what happens when he turned this over? Darkened. Now what did that just do? Affinity designer read the value of the gray, and it read the value of the white. And it said, Gray is darker than white. That's the dark and blend mode. And so we need to keep the gray and the black is darker than the gray, so we need to keep the black. That's exactly what it did. Now there are different versions of each area, so we've included a download in this lesson with a whole lot of technical data. There is no substitute for working with blend modes, so you see that darkened, darker color multiply. They all work the same color burn. That's all kind of. We're gonna work the same. Now you've got lighten, lighter color screen. Now let's take a look here. What did it just do with screen? It compared to the grade of the white. The white is obviously lighter than the gray, and so it allowed the white to show through. Now what did you do to the black? It said. Gray is lighter than black, so show the gray. So again there are very nice groups you can make. Like all the darkened, darker, multiplying color burn, all darkened light, lighter screen and color dodge all lighten. And then you've got weird ones, like add and overlay and soft light. Those don't really translate well to the greys. So let's go ahead and take a look at them in relationship to color. Now, you might think that this is red and green. But in reality, here's what affinity designer sees just to kind of give an example. You don't have to do anything with this. Come up here and I'm gonna go black and white adjustment, and I'm gonna move this up to the top. And when I do that right, crank up a little bit. So here's what affinity designer sees it sees shades of gray. Someone go ahead, delete that out. Now, when you do this part, notice here that I've got the red over top of the blue so I set the blend mode to the red in the blue. Which one of these do you think is darker? The red is it's gonna take the red, and here it's going to exclusively keep the red. You see how darken and darker color change a little bit. One of my favorite ones to do for shading multiply, multiply, takes the value of the red and the value of the blue and combines them together. Notice there's a subtle difference between multiply and color burn. It does darken it, but one goes a little bit more blue now lightened. On the other hand, it will take the blue. And what do you think? Lighter colors going to dio exclusively? Take the blue so you see that it tells it how to interact with layer below it. And then there's some really weird ones where you can do Hugh color. Average glow. If that makes sense in the way that the math is created, it will work. Now there's some commonality here. Let me just go down this path Any time you're trying to shade something, Multiply is a great blend mode for the top layer. Any time you're working in highlights. I tend to use my screen or my lighten option as my highlight option. We saw that a little bit in the smiley face, and then sometimes I want to get crazy so I'll go to Color Dodge. Now we can do the same thing here. Onley. Let's go ahead now and let's bring the green up on top of the red. And now we'll run the blend modes for the green, and you see how now lighten creates a weird orange lighter color. It clearly shows the green is going to be lighter than the red. You've got screen blend, you've got hard light. So there's a whole bunch of math behind it, and in the downloads, I hope that it makes a lot of sense to you. I will tell you there is no substitute for working with blend modes, and as you mature is an artist. You are going to find blend modes to create the effect that you are comfortable with and one of my favorite things to do and you'll see me do in the next lessons. If I have something that I know kind of works like if they're red and the green should interact. I'll go through the whole list to see if I find something that might be really cool, because sometimes with like a fire, you might find things in a color burn or something in an intense light that you didn't really think about in terms of the blend mode. So I'm gonna go ahead and leave this here. You can certainly play with this sheet, but I wanted to introduce blend modes, and the only thing you really need to take away right now is blend modes. Tell the lair how to interact with the layer below it. All right, let's go ahead and take the next step and actually apply some of this stuff. Let's get into a project. 9. Balloon Project Background: all right, and welcome to this challenge here. This is gonna be kind of a draw with me here. So we're actually creating piece of art very similar to what you see in a Children's book using all of the masking techniques that we took a look at and really getting to know the program here so that as we go forward into the pixel persona, you're all ready to go and you've got some familiarity with the tools. So let's go and start out with any size document. It really doesn't matter. I'm using in 1920 by 10. 80 and I'm gonna begin out here in the draw persona, and I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna pull a rectangle. Now, in this document, I've included my balloon palette. You know how to make your own palettes, and I'm gonna go ahead and fill it with any shade of light blue. It's not essential that you use mine. There's the values for mine. You've got the palate for mine. But if you wanted to follow along, you absolutely could Now, because I want this to be kind of the base color. I wanted to be a little neutral. What happens in the sky, right? It gets a little bit darker as it gets toward the horizon area. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna come into our pixel persona. I'm gonna grab my brush, and I'm gonna work with my ever trusty airbrush. Now my go to airbrush right about here. Let's grab something a little bit different. There we go grab this 64 pixel and will bring it up large and in charge. This is the default brush. And when we look at color, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna pick that darker color that we're using. Now, you see, I can't paint on the rectangle. I have to add a pixel air. And now you see, once the pixel layers created, it's beginning to preview the color. Now, to do this, I always tend to work with about 50% opacity. Rarely will I go in with 100%. It's just not the way that I work. And once I've got 50% opacity, I've got the darker color selected. I'll start touching areas of my canvas. So you see how we're creating some dark and light spots even now. And I think that were actually pretty good. And the closer I get to the horizon, the darker I start getting here and I'm using a mouse. Folks, I am not using any of my wall calm tablets. I'm not using my huyen. I'm using a straight up mouse just like you guys. So we're in pretty good shape there now. The trick. What we want to do is we want to create some clouds. Now there's a bunch of ways to create clouds. We could create him with pixel heirs, but what fun would that be? Let's go ahead and come over to the rectangle shape. Select that and the pixel shape, right click and group them together and let's make a mask Lair. All right, we're back to that pesky masking. Now I know that my workspace underneath his white. So therefore, if I paint in black on my mask layer, you see my mask. Claire selected. I should get white. So with the pixel air still selected, let's grab a brush that maybe gives me some sort of texture. Um, now, that's not the one that I might want. Let's see here. What else can I use? All right, I can go there, and I'm gonna drop the hardness, perhaps on this. Okay, so now what I've done here, I've got this brush. I've cranked it up a little bit, and I'm gonna go ahead and drop the hardness down, and I'm gonna drop the opacity down to and let's see what this does. No, I don't like that. Okay, what's trying to the brush? Let's go. Instead of sprays and spatters, let's go to my texture brush. All right, let's find a texture brush that I like. Mm. Kind of like that grunge brush. All right, I kind of like that, and I'm gonna turn down the opacity. So in my texture brushes, I did find a grunge brush that I like. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna crank this bad boy up a little bit. We want to create some clouds, and don't be afraid. Trade your brushes up. Now, you see how we're kind of painting through here? Okay, so we're in pretty good shape there now as we get closer, the rise and what happens to clouds. They dropped down. So let's go ahead and drop down the opacity a little bit. And I'm really going for a stylized painting. Look, I'm not going for photo realism, so I think we're in pretty good shape here, all right? I think I'm pretty happy with that. So you see the effect we used, We used a mask. Lair. Now, if we wanted to go a little bit further, what we could ideally do if you so chose you could add some go shin blur to this layer. Hopes. Let's make sure on the mass. Clara. Sure. You're on the mask layer at the effect. There we go. All right. We had to be on the group. Sorry. And let's add it in here. I think we're in pretty good shape right about here. All right, let's go ahead and stop there. You wanted to add the effect onto the group. Sometimes even I get confused is the layers add up? So we've got the effect on the group. The effect, technically is on the mass. Claire. And then we're moving into the next lecture. All right, We'll see the next one 10. Building the basic Balloon: All right, look back. So in the last lesson, we went through and did this very simple sky background. So now let's go ahead. And I'm gonna show you how to create a balloon using primitive shapes into the draw persona . So in order to do that, let's practice some good layering habits were gonna come over the group, but I'm a name this sky. All right, Perfect. Now what we're gonna do, we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna create any lips, and then we're going to come in and I'm gonna zoom in a little bit. We're gonna then create a rectangle and with the rectangle, we're gonna go ahead and make it rounded in the corner, and we're gonna pull those corners in because we have to create the not in the Balloon and I'm gonna go to copy and I'm gonna go to paste, and that will give me two of these. And now I'm gonna go ahead and reduce these even further, right? Nobody I know has a balloon that ties that large, not in it. And then we're gonna come in even a little bit mawr so that we can grip him. All right, that looks pretty good. Now, at the end of every balloon knot right there is that little bit this left over. So let's go ahead and use a trap is oId and let's go ahead and just do that. And we'll bring that in right about here, and that creates a pretty decent balloon. So grab all the shapes, okay? Got all the shape selected. And now here's we're gonna do. We're gonna create an ad operation. This is gonna take all those shapes, Pau. One solid balloon shape. All right, Perfect. Or? And call this balloon and you see how it turns shape from the curve. Were in good shape. No pun intended. All right, let's see what we got. Now I'm gonna teach you guys how to work in gray scale. So right now, we just had whatever default color this was. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to click on my fill color. And here's the thing. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna choose a scale of great. Now, this is a pro technique. Rendering in gray scale is absolutely a good idea. And the reason I say that is because you can always change the color if you render in gray scale. So let's go ahead now and add this filled to the palate So you guys have the exact color of the gray that I've got and then what we're going to do, we're now gonna come in with a pixel air. So let's go ahead and swap over to our pixel persona. We're gonna zoom in here on this balloon to just get a little bit better angle on it. I'm gonna drag this inside of the balloon. So now I got a pixel layer nested inside the blue. Now, with my brush selected, I'm coming back over to my airbrush is and I'm not using any fancy brushes that I downloaded. These are all the same ones that you've got. Go ahead and go with this brush here, this 64 pixel airbrush. I'm gonna crank this bad boy up. I'm gonna crank down the opacity here. I'm gonna crank down the hardness to Zippo. All right, Now what do I got here? I think that that is much better now I'm going to begin slowly working in the shading. Now I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna be using my mouse. So I'm not cheating. And I'm not even gonna crank this capacity down a little bit further along with the flow, because I wanted to be super subtle. Okay, so if you've got a balloon like this, come in here and we can shade out the outside. Looks pretty good. And now we can come down here, drop it even further, maybe go 10%. All right, that looks pretty good. Now, let's go ahead and highlight the balloon. Not down here. We're gonna use the same brush come down. I'm gonna crank down my size of my brush quite a bit now, I still have my opacity down. Probably gonna want that up a little higher now. And you see how we just took two swipes across and all we're doing here is we're really just identified where the shadows fall. All right, so let's go ahead and do this. Let's zoom out a little bit now, where this balloon is tied here, we're probably gonna want to zip this up a little. So we come up here and we expand now I'm using the bracket keys again. You can change your size right here using my bracket keys, and I'm gonna keep this flow down super low. And I think that that is actually pretty good. Now watch this. This is the key that makes the entire magic work. The pixel there. We're gonna go ahead. We're gonna change it over to multiply. Now, it doesn't look like it did anything right now, but stay with me. So now let's add another pixel air. Because now we've gotta add a highlight. Let's call this one shadow. Let's call this one Highlight. All right. Now, the highlight layer. If we're working in gray scale, I come over to my swatches. Let's go ahead. And before we do much else, we're gonna go ahead and put this guy down in the palette there, and then let's grab. Oh, I don't know. Let's grab a very, very almost white their clothes. And then we'll add that to the palate. Okay. Sorry. I didn't put the gray in there for our highlight. Their shadow. Now you got it. All right, So same brush. Same process. But now we've got thesis slightly off white selected, and I'm gonna crank up the opacity and make sure you're on the highlight layer, folks or else you'll undo what you did before. And now it's a very subtle effect. But you see how I'm starting to add in some highlight. Now, before I go too far in this highlight layer, let's go ahead and change this over to a screen. Okay, so we're in pretty good shape. You see the white beginning to develop. Now, in order to make this even a little bit more opaque, I'm gonna come down here, drop my size. I'm just gonna put a little highlight right there. All right? It is very subtle, so subtle that you may not even be able to see it at home. And I'm gonna come down here and with my brush selected, I'm gonna crank this bad boy down, drop my capacity back to around 40 and you see how I'm going to just put a couple highlights right along that side. Okay. See, I'm drawn on the side here. Okay, let's go ahead and zoom on out here now. I'm gonna continue that side Rim light right up the side there. I think that that's pretty good. All right, let's see. We got all right. So we have a perfectly shaded I would say an acceptably shaded balloon. You're saying, OK, what do I do with it? I got it. Let's go ahead. Cut this one here. And then I'm gonna show you how to do this with transparency and color in the next lesson. All right, we'll see in the next one. 11. Finishing the balloon: All right, gang, welcome back to of any designer. So we're working on this balloon design in the last lesson we got to this point, you've gotta now a constant balloon master there that we're going to use. Now. What I'd like to do is I'd like to switch back over to the drop persona. We're going to come in and we're going to work with the transparency. Now we're going to begin in the middle, and we're gonna drag the transparency out. But now you'll notice balloons aren't transparent into the outside of the transparent in the middle. So in order to do that, let's change the Grady int to an elliptical Grady int because this it elliptical balloon, let's go ahead and make sure we're good here, and then we're gonna reverse it. All right? That will look pretty good. So step one, apply your Grady int, or I should say, your transparency. So we're pretty good there. Now, the next step is we got to add some color. So in order to do this with the balloon, what we're gonna do we're gonna just gonna go ahead over here. When a tap on the last color that I had. Cool. Now you see, because you've got a master color, you can adjust all of these because what you really changing the color of is this top layer . Now, if you wanted to change the blend mode once the color selected, you'll notice how different blend modes have different subtleties. So soft light might be a little different than hard light pin lights a little bit different . You see how I was saying you might have to adjust some of them. You can do whatever you want to do. However, you shaded this particular balloon. But now you're saying Okay, well, I got one. What about two? The reason that we gray scale all you have to do now is duplicate this balloon. Come over, create a separate balloon, right? And now just change the color. Folks, if you come over here and you change up the hue of the balloon, there's a green one. If you come over here and you duplicated again, you come over here. You can change it to a yellow one. You got the idea here, so this is extremely powerful. And if you wanted to change the shape of the balloon, the size of the balloon to pull off the perspective that you want. You absolutely could. Now, what you could do if you so wanted balloons have to have strings, right? So let's go ahead and let's create a string. Come over to the pencil tool, grab a brush. I'm going to use a common 16 point brush. Nothing special. And all I'm going to do here with my stabilizer selected is I'm going to come down here. I'm gonna crank up the size of that, and I'm going to put a very simple black string on it. That's it. So what do you could do if you wanted Teoh, Grab the balloon, grab the curve. Right. Click and group. Now we can do the same thing here. What I'm gonna do, I'm just going to duplicate the curve duplicate, duplicate. And I'm doing this because I didn't do it originally, I'm pulling this one out here and I'm pulling this one out to put up here. And then I'm grouping. When I move, them will place them where they go. Now, you see that? This one here is above the red balloon there. We don't want that. And this one here is right here. So let's go ahead now and kind of sort this thing out here. Oh, let's see. The red needs to go with the red. The yellow needs to go with the yellow. There we go. That makes sense to me. Yep. That's why. All right, You want to make sure that your strings are behind your balloons. If they're in front, that doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense. Alright, so I've got a group a group, The green balloon with the green string. Yep. I group. And then I take the yellow balloon with the yellow curve and I group. Now, if you wanted to, you could absolutely adjust the length of the string. Let's take the green one. Grab the curve. Grab the node tool. I will. Just shifted down. You want to play with the node? You absolutely can play with the note on add node. You can absolutely add a note. All right, let's play a little perspective Game here. We're gonna grab the red one. We're gonna have the red one flying away here now. When things fly away, they tend to get a little bit fuzzy, right? You can go through and with a very subtle effect. And I say, very subtle. Go to the effects tab. Let's see. Do I have my effects tab out? Stiller. Did I close it? That's out here somewhere. It is. We're gonna go ahead and put some Goche and blur on that bad boy. We're just gonna go and shake it off just a little bit down there. All right? Cool. So that's very simple. Now, the last thing that I might do, if I really wanted to go for bonus points, I could theoretically taken image out. I could eliminate the stroke. I come up to the Phil and now I can run a Grady and Phil, and I'm gonna make it a radio, and I'm going to make it so that in the inside it's that color and on the let's make it on the inside, we're gonna make it orange. Then on the outside, we're gonna make it kind of white ish, yellow cool. And we can make that into the sun. If we so wanted Teoh, depending on your style and to do this we come down here, come down to this area. What a place it behind and now I'm coming up to my effects. I'm gonna go shin blur the effect. And now lastly, one of the cool things I can't adjust I can play with the blend modes to see what I get. Maybe it makes sense. Maybe it doesn't with the domino ahead and just keep it as it sits. I think that it's playing a a rough game with the clouds. All right, so that's a little bit on blend modes you've used blend modes. You've used transparency you've used grouping and you learned how to gray scale. Render in a finicky designer to create a professional piece of art. Alright, folks, let's go ahead and kill this one here and then we'll get into the more artistic areas of our community designer. Alright, see the next one 12. Adjustment layers : All right. Welcome back to Infinity Designer. So this lesson is all gonna be about adjustment layers. Now, there's no possible way we can go through every single adjustment layer. But I wanted to give you a flavor for what they are, where to find him. And some of the most frequently used from my perspective. So let's go ahead. Now. Let's go ahead. Open any old file, right? Doesn't really matter. I'm gonna go new. I'm gonna go 1000 by 1000 just because I like things Square. It's a quirk of mine. Okay, so now let's go ahead and grab a red square, and it doesn't have to be read again whatever color you want to make it. And I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna grab a I don't know. Let's make a green triangle again. Red Square, Green triangle. Right? Common things adjustment layers are found right here in the layers panel, so I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna pull out my layers panel and I'm gonna show you. It looks like the half circle. Now, there's a lot of layers that you can use, right. There's even Maurin affinity photo. But these are the ones the designer has, and now I want to show you how this works. Let's go ahead and go to black and white. Now you see what happens here. All of a sudden, black and white became a thing, right? So if you do this notice, the black and white adjustment applies above all of these other layers. If I was to bring it in the center, notice the black and white is above the rectangle. And then, if I was to bring it below, both of those show up again. Now black and white, you'll notice I had a red rectangle and a green triangle. Watch what happens as I adjust the amount of red as I adjust the amount of red. The direct angle shows up, but it's not quite any red. Same thing with black. You'll see here that as I adjust the green and I knew to adjust the green because triangle was green, that it begin to change. Now, how does this work if I was to move the layer? If I bring it into the center, it does not affect the layer above it, but it does affect the layers below it. Now you can also nest these layers. Look at what happens if I nested inside the triangle. So you use adjustment layers just like any other layer. And then if you wanted to delete the lair, you use it that way. So adjustment layers work like another layer, and it really allows you to stylized your stuff. Now let's do this. Let's apply a re color now. Well, what just happened, right? I'm applying a red re color to a red rectangles and nothing happens. But look what happened to triangle now. If I shift this around, you'll see how now it begins to re color everything underneath it. Now, what was to happen if I was to move the re color adjustment down to just this layer? See, it only affects the rectangle because it's below it. So you can saturate or de saturate. This is how you achieve those really cool CP atones and photographs. We use this a lot in photography to get that dated C p a type of look to it, and then I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna delete this now. The ones I use the most frequently levels adjustments are huge. So what is the levels adjustment. A levels adjustment allows you to adjust how dark or how light and images. Now you see that this doesn't have a lot of effect on these images because they're not really shapes don't really translate well. But let's do this. It's come up to go to file place and in your downloads for this image, I've included a image of a flare. So let's go ahead and find this particular issue come down to here, and this is the image that you've got. Let's play with this image now, all right? So if I wanted to perform a levels adjustment now, if I come in here notice I have a lot of data. And if I shrink it toward their and I'm compressing the blacks and I'm compressing the whites, I can get a lot of contrast. Maybe it's contrast I don't want, but you can adjust a lot of images here. Now. You can either work with this in the blend mode. You can change the blend modes, and you see how the blend modes change a little bit. If I was to go with a soft light look at that, that actually looks really cool so you can use the levels adjustment to change the contrast . Let's go ahead and delete that. And now we're back to normal. Some of the other ones that I use all the time hue, saturation and lightness. This is primarily a blue image. So if I wanted to shift the hue, I could make it a green image. I could de saturate it, and I could make it lighter or darker. So I use hs L quite frequently and again. You can adjust the blend modes and then if you wanted to delete it, you absolutely Could you just delete it like any other layer? So the levels hs l the re color, the black and white. You've seen that area. You can adjust the brightness and contrast. You can do a lot of things. One of the last ones I'll give you here is you can do a curves adjustment. Now. Curves are super. I'm going to say difficult. A curve works in a linear fashion. You got lights and darks and you can adjust curves like you see there and bringing in the lights. You can adjust the dark's and you can create different adjustment points. People do some really weird stuff with curves. I personally used them. But I will tell you that there's a lot of abuse that could go on with a curve. That's a whole different story for another time. There are plenty of tutorials out there to show you exactly how to use them by people far more qualified than me. No, the last one that I'm gonna show you here. There's some interesting things with lots. Now, Lutz, I'm not gonna go into him in depth, but they are a look up table now. What happens here is you go in with a lot and you can load a look up table. And if you type in free Lutz, I guarantee you 900 of them will come up and they're in a dot cube format. And what it does, it changes the look of your image. So in a way, a look up table says, if this is blue and I modify it, then everywhere there's this type of blue, modify it to this So lots are called look up tables. There a thing. Sometimes I use them in affinity. Designer When I'm working with pixel, the last one that I'm going to show you that we will use occasionally is the invert. Now, when you do this, it's going to change the entire look of it. Now let's do this. Let's go to controls it. And I'm gonna combine two of these now and I'll show you how this works. Black and white goes on top of this year, so it's put a black and white on there Now there's a lot of blue right now. I add a levels adjustment to crank down on the contrast. You see how now this will begin to change in the contrast level, crank that down even further and then lastly, let's go for bonus points, we're going to invert. And now what was black is white and what's white is black. Now you're saying, When would I ever use this? Think about making the vector brushes that you did right. You had a black background. Well, if you have an image and you want to make a pixel brush out of it, spoiler alert in the next lesson. When we do pixel brush is you're gonna have to work with white backgrounds, so the invert adjustment will absolutely come up when we start doing pixel brushes, all right, that's a little bit on adjustment layers. They add a powerful component when combined with blend modes to your art. All right, let's go ahead and call it a day, folks get into the next one. 13. 1.7 update for the HSL adjustment : All right, gang, welcome to the hue. Saturation in lightness adjustment in the affinity designer and fancy photo 1.7 release. So I wanted to combine affinity, designer and affinity photo because they operate the exact same way in this video. And I think this is a huge upgrade in terms of my workflow. I hope it is to yours too. All right, so we've got this vector image. Now for my photo people, go ahead and skip through intelligent of the pixel side. But for my vector, people notice Here in the layers panel, you're able to choose a new adjustment layer. Now, we've always been able to choose the H S L adjustment. It's a very popular adjustment. And what this does is this allows us to change the hue, saturation and luminosity or lightness, often image. So let's say that we could then put a blue hue or a purple hue to this entire image. Right? So what this adjustment now allows us to do here is we can target a certain color. So this red heart, if I want to target the red, I just hit the red. And now these weird sliders appear now if I just targeted the read Watch this. I can change everything right to a blue. But you see how it's affecting a lot of other things. And why is that? Well, because brown is largely composed of red. So what you want to do, You want to take thes sliders and you want to hug them up. So that on Lee the red is affected. Now, my way to do this because I've been playing with a couple days. If I make it adjustment and then I manipulate thes sliders until my image doesn't turn, you see how my image began to turn. If I just wanted to target my red, I would leave these sliders right here. That's really is tough is against. Now you can turn down the opacity of this adjustment. You see how we added some blue to the red and got purple? If you wanted to make that a little less purple, you could always drop the opacity down, and eventually you'll get back down to the red. And, of course, as always, you can change the blend boats. All right, so that's the 1st 1 Now let's take a look at this in a pixel image. This is for my photo folks. All right, so now we've got a yellow image here with some red, and we've got some green. Those that understand color theory. No yellow and blue made green. So we try to switch on Lee the yellows using NHS l adjustment. We're gonna impact the green. Not anymore, folks. Go ahead putting your h I sell adjustment. We're gonna target the yellow. All right. Once we've targeted the yellow, you can go through here. And now you see where your yellow is. Here. Let's go ahead and do what I just mentioned. I'm gonna take it over, and I'm gonna change this up. Now, you see how we're beginning to affect these areas here. This is undesirable. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna come over to my green, and I'm gonna back that out until the only thing that's affected primarily are my yellows. Now, if I move my reds, you see how I'm impacting my reds? I may not. Mom, my reds impacted, so I might actually scoot those out a little bit. That would work. Now let me show you how to do this another way. All right. So we got this. You come over to your HS l boom just like that. And now we grab the yellows. But now we grab the picker and we pick that particular yellow. You see how that just moved? And now we can impact this just like that, we can move it. And now we can shift our greens just a little bit. So you can be terribly surgical with this picker the way that you want it. So that's how did you use the H S L adjustment in both affinity photo four pixel work and affinity designer When it comes down to your vector designs 14. Effects: All right, let's get into this lesson on effects Now. If we were talking adjustment layers, we were talking color. We're talking all of this artistic stuff with Mass. Claire's The last big thing that I want to show you before we start putting it all together in a project is the idea of effects and effects can take a very bland the design, and it can absolutely make it an incredible design. So let's go ahead and let's pull some basic shapes. Now again, The reason I use basic shapes in this course is because they're fairly simple for everybody . You don't have to spend a lot of time drawn him to get the effect. My goal in these shorter lessons is to get you the information you need to get drawing as soon as humanly possible. So the effects tab is up here in your studio and again, if you don't have it by now, I hope you know where to find it. And there's no potential way we could even go through all of the potential effects that air here, right? I'm gonna show you the most frequently used. And then in the course of the lessons we are gonna use a tremendous amount of them. So the 1st 1 let's go ahead and pull out a red circle is just go shin blur. All effects work the same way. To apply the effect, click on the box and you'll see in the layers panel. Little F X comes up and then slide it. Now there's this weird box here. This is preserve Alfa. Anywhere there's currently not read. It will blur it, but it will preserve the Alfa around it, so it really doesn't have much of effective this point in isolation. It's the best way for me to explain motion blur after a long night of drinking and everything kind of gets a little fuzzy. Okay, so that's Go Schindler. Now the other thing is, when we click down here, all of these have certain adjustments. So let's click on outer shadow that enables the effect on the ready lips. Let's crank up the opacity of that outer shadow, but you see nothing's happening. Let's increase the radius of that outer shadow. Ah, now we got it. And then let's increase the offset. Hey, look at that. That looks really cool. And then let's adjust the angle of the offset. So you see, they have the most frequently done adjustments here. And then when we pull this up over top of the green square, it looks like it's supposed to. In order to soften it, we can adjust it. Now we have a clear relationship between foreground background. Now you can come over here and click on the CAW. Go. All of these have conchs. And if there are additional adjustments that you may not have in this quick pick here, right here, they will show up here now, thankfully, here They're all present here as they are here. But there are some things that you can adjust right. You can adjust the a pass ity, the shadow, all of that kind of stuff. The same is true for Let's do a head and do an inner shadow. So now I select in her shadow I'm still on the red, but, you know, we could start cranking up the radius of the centre shadow. Hey, look at that. That looks a lot like a greedy In Phil. We can do an offset to that shadow. Now we start shading a sphere. This is a very simple, quick and cheeky way to Shada Sphere, and we can change the intensity of this particular shadows. So something that was flat before now becomes round. And then, if you wanted to, you could adjust the color. This is again a very cheating type of way to shady sphere. And then, of course, you can adjust the angle from a light source. So this is a nice way of shading. Orb and adjust the light source. So inner shadow outer shadow. Very, very self explanatory. Now outer glow inner glow. This is kind of cool, So let's go ahead and make this green a little bit darker. Poof! All right, so now in her shadow, let's select the red ball there. Let's go ahead and go with an inner glow. Sorry, glow, not shadow. And now, when we select inner glow were in a crank up the radius and we can crank up the intensity all the way to a ridiculous level. So if you kind of put in an inner shadow and an inner glow together and you worked the offset, you could create a pretty cool sphere, and we can again adjust this shade so that gives a nice little rim light to it. You see kind of what that's doing all right, so you can change it from the center to the edge. There's a whole bunch of stuff you could do. Same thing with the outer glow. We can increase ad in the outer glow, kick up the radius, change the color out, and then reduce the intensity until we get it kind of where we want it. So you got those outline Very similar. It's crank up the radius. Now that's very similar stroke. I technically, don't use this ever. Never have. So now in the three D, though this is kind of cool. This is what I wanted to show you. When you go to the three d, there's a ton of stuff. So when you go to three d, the best advice I can give for you crank up the radius and you see how it does this. You can change all of your lights, how much the light diffuses. You could look at this shiny anus of the object so we can crank that down a little bit. This three d effect is actually really good. You can kick up the ambient light to make it a little stronger. And you can also change the color of the ambient light. So what happens if we add green and red? We get a brown right. We do kind of a blue light, a light blue light. We kind of get somewhere in the purplish range so you can change the ambient light and crank it up. You can crank it down. You can add a light source. So let's go in at a second light source, and you can even change the as myth and the elevation of this light source. So this is a fun little project you can work with so far back on one, I can change the location. I can change the as myth to 50 degrees, and I can elevate it. Now. If you elevate a light source, what's gonna happen? It's going to get a lot less say, uh, isolated, and it's going to change substantially and blur right down on that thing, which it did, and the last thing that I want to show you here. We're gonna come over to profile, and you can select different profiles that will give you different. Three D effects. And if you wanted to change him, just click and drag. This is really cool. If you're doing like a quasi three D prototyping robot, so there's no substitute for playing with three D, and the same is true with this bevel and boss. Let's take a look at the bevel on Boss. The way I use this all the time, I go to inner toe outer to em. Boss, I use this all the time. So when you do this, you can crank up the radius of this and it gives you a really cool effect. Few outer. You go in er and then you can change the profile again, just like you would be able to any other time. There's not a tremendous amount of difference between this and three d, so I kind of used them interchangeably. And the last thing that I want to show you here you can apply a Grady int overlay to this thing and all the great Ian Overlay is gonna dio is it's going to give it a Grady Int Phil again. The color and the Grady and overlay are similar to adjustment layers. I use adjustment layers more so or I'll just shade the shape in with linear ingredient. But there are some times where you want this for, like, transparency or special effects. So that's a little bit onto the effects panel. You apply effects two layers, and then if you wanted to turn the effect off, you just come over here. Let's close out of there and you click on the effect and you can then turn it off From there, you see, now we have no more effects on that layer. All right, that's a little bit on the effects window. Hope you learned a little something. We're gonna use a lot of effects coming up in this next lecture. So let's go ahead and get on to the next project and take one more step forward seeing the next one. 15. Styles : All right, welcome back to affinity. So this is a lesson on styles. If I said before that, the pallets that you use, the naming nomenclature that you have is a key of a professional artist. Styles is one of those magical things that cuts down the workflow substantially. And professional artists get really good at using them. All right, so let's go ahead and take two steps were gonna come down here, we're gonna create a square, and then we're gonna create a circle. So let's make the circle. Let's make it red, Who cares? And then we'll make the square green. All right. Perfect. So now the Styles panel is here, so let's go ahead and undock this now. Styles could be thought of as presets. So these are the default presets that come in affinity, designer and much like any other category we can add. So let's go ahead and add a styles category, and then we rename category. Let's call this try align to, because I think I might have already had trial one already in there. So we have a new styles category, but nothing's in there. Let's see how to apply a style would come over here to default and now we can apply the rainbow. We could apply sunset. Now you see that this is just a simple Grady into this cog. This has the rainbow, but no sort of line. But when we get to Onyx, let's take a look at this. We quick off. We can clearly see a little bevel here. Now the trick here. We know that's an effect. If I select this shape with this particular preset, I can backtrack which effects it has used. So it has three D and a bevel in Boss. I can see the fill that's used and I can see the stroke preferences so pretty much everything when they saved this style I can apply to here, So can I apply it to the red circle? You betcha. Styles save you a lot of time in your workflow. So in order to make this happen, let's go ahead. Let's go ahead and edit. Undo. We're not gonna apply that style. Let's go ahead now and go over to our category coming in, and we're gonna go to trial, too. And now let's use this red circle and let's do some adjustment. Let's make it first and foremost a Grady Int Phil. So we come over here to the Phil. We go from bottom to top. Let's say it really doesn't matter what it is. We're in good shape. And then with the circle selected, were to come in and we're gonna put a stroke down and let's go ahead and create a bright blue stroke. And I know this is awful, but I wanted to be able to be seen from across the room. And then let's go ahead and add an effect. So we bring out our effects. Let's go ahead and add a three dimensional effect. Crank up that radius quite a bit, beginning to look like a button. And let's go ahead and create an outer shadow. So we crank up the opacity, we crank up the radius, and I'm gonna go ahead and crank up the offset to make it look like it's floating. Okay, that looks good. So once we've got this Now, in order to set a style, you come up to your, uh, do your menu here and you add the style from the selection. Now you see that a style has been created and If you look real close, you can see the outer shadow. You can see the three D effect. You can see the Grady Int. So now if I decide to come in and create a new trap, is oId I have a very similar style that I can apply. When I come over here to a new square. I have a new style that I can absolutely apply it to. Sorry I missed the trap is oId on that last one. So this kind of works every time that you have a new shape. So when I come over here now, let's go ahead and make a very simple I don't know, move this way here. What now? We're good and I apply style Boom. That's how this works. So styles are a simple way to say preset. And then when you're done, if you wanted to export or import, you could export or import a styles category the same way you would a brush the same way you would a palette. All right. That's a real quick lesson on styles I would highly recommend in large projects. You keep your styles up to date and it cuts down the amount of time substantially, because if you don't now, you have to click on every single effect. Make sure your colors a good make sure ingredients are in place, and it will absolutely tank your workflow. All right, let's go ahead and get in. The next lesson will take the next step, seeing the next one. 16. Setting up the project and creating the shapes : and welcome back to affinity designer. So let's take everything that we now know about artistic effects, color how to color pick and everything and put it into an actual project. So let's go ahead and go to file new now. It doesn't matter what size I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna work in 1920 by 10. 80. And that's because I have another agenda for this. I'm gonna be using this later. So that's the size I chose to work in. And now the first thing that I want to do is I want to set up in the draw persona to get the neon brush up and running. So to do that, we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna grab a new category of brushes. I'm gonna rename the category, and I'm gonna call this neon project. Now, if you were following along in the course and you made the neon brush, it's the exact same one. If not, I've included the PNG in the download file. And if you really don't feel like making the brush, you can go ahead and import it because I've put the brushes into this lesson on the down votes. So Let's go ahead and go, OK? And then we come in here, we're gonna make a new textured intensity brush, right? And in my desktop, somewhere around here, in the whole group of what we're working at There it is. Neon brush JP. So it's double click. We're gonna go ahead and we're not going to stretch this. We're gonna go ahead and change up the head on this thing here quite a bit. Okay, so we're in pretty good shape there. I think that I'm happy with that. And we're gonna go ahead and change the width a little bit. There we go, and I'm gonna close it. I don't want any variants on it. So we have our 162 pixel in neon brush reading rock. So now let's goto file place and we're gonna grab the affinity designer logo because that's what we're working in. And we're gonna place this front and center large and in charge right about here. So we're all set. Let's take a look at our layer structure. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna lock this thing down right now. And I'm also gonna come over to my swatches and I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna create a palette. So we come over here and we go add application or a document. We're gonna go ahead and have the document, and then we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna rename the palate. Were called this affinity me on. Now I wasn't lying when I said this lesson is all about setting up the project. So affinity neon, We've got our item in place. It's all locked down. And now what I'm going to Dio is I'm going to start by grabbing my pen tool, and I'm going to look for places where it makes sense for me to draw a line. Now, you see that these air all solid. So to me, it makes the most sense for me to be working in a polygon all mode someone a click, click, click. And I'm gonna want to go right about here. And then I'm gonna go. Wanna go right about here? And then I'm going to go want to go right about here because I don't want those touching. Okay, Now I hit most my points, the only one that I really truly missed, that I'm really truly worried about is right here and right here. So other than that, you can get his closest you want. This is just a guideline. So it's for horseshoes and hand grenades. I'm pretty close. But if you wanted to be more exact, you absolutely could be. And you remember, this is now an open path. So step one, trace your image. Now, let's go ahead. And with that selected, I'm gonna come up, and I'm going to increase my stroke up from one point. Okay? So I'm pretty good there. All right, So now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to come over. I'm going to do this again. Now I want to select De Select, right? I want controlled because I don't want to start a new one. And then I'm gonna come down here one to three, four, five, six. I think that's good. Select de Select Grabbed my pen. Go again? No, I see snapping is on. It's causing me some angst. One to you. Three, four, five. All right, I'm gonna go ahead and touch that corner up there because I can't let it go. Select d Select. Now I'm gonna go and turn snapping off. It's really causing me a lot of problems. Now I'm going to right here. I'm gonna go ahead and editorialize and make that kind of a square. Well, quite frankly, because I can. There we dio Okay, Select de Select. Now this one one to three, four five. And I'm leaving these open on purpose. Folks, this isn't by accident. Select de Select. And then one more. Let's go here. One to three, four, five, six. I think that that's gonna be good. So I think that I'm pretty happy with that. Um, you know what? No. I'm gonna control said that. Okay. I'm gonna try a new one year. Select de select. Bring up my pen. I'm gonna start it here. There we go. Because, remember, neon tubes, right? They run in, and it's straight lines, curved lines. So you want to make sure that you're working in that area, So I think that I'm pretty good there now what I'm gonna do, I know that we haven't done a lot with this area. I'm gonna unlock that. I'm gonna crank down the opacity, and I'm gonna see if what? I got matches, and I'm actually quite happy with that. So let's go ahead and end this here. So what have we really done? We've set up a palette. We've set up our image. We've made our brush. Now, in the next lesson, we're gonna apply our brush. We're gonna set a style, and we're gonna work on this image. All right, We'll see in the next one. 17. Creating the neon effect: they are a gang woke back. So in this one, what we're gonna do now we're going to take one line and we're gonna get this thing right. So let's go ahead here. Let's grab this line in particular. And now we're going to apply this brush. Now, you see, that went horribly sideways because the 162 pixels that's not gonna work. So you want to shrink this thing down? Now? When we do this, we come over to the stroke panel. I'm gonna change the tight. Now watch what just happened? This is key with this sort of a brush, you see, right here it kind of clipped off and you can see it right here. Change your cap type, and then it changes the entire game. So what I found after doing this one line is about a 40. Say, let's go with a 45 point stroke is good based on the gap that I've got and the but cap type for the stroke is going to be the flat. So make sure you got that. And now we want to use our color picker in order to change the color of the stroke. because the black stroke doesn't exactly look good. So we come over to layer, we're gonna come over to the affinity image, and I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna crank that capacity backup. All right, so now we want to find in color that works. So let's go to our color. Let's grab the color picker and let's choose something kind of in the middle. I think that this is kind of interesting. Or you could go over here and then when we do this now, let's go ahead. And with the stroke selected, which is this one here, apply that color. Oops at it. Undo. You want to apply to the stroke because we're not filling it. Okay, Make sure is nothing's in there. All right, now that might work. I'm looking at it. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with that. So, what we've done, we've made sure that we color picked from the affinity logo somewhere, and we made it part of the stroke. So we're in pretty good shape with that. No, let's take a look at blend modes now, in order to check out what the blend mode should do, let's go place a dark background on this because, quite frankly, what we want is we wanted to glow right against the background. So here, we're gonna come down, and we're going to just go ahead and put a solid black on that. I'm gonna go ahead. I'm gonna leave the area where it is. There the line and in my layers panel. Now I'm gonna move this to the back, all right? And for right now, I'm gonna turn off my affinity logo. All right, so we got this. That's actually pretty good. What I want to do now with it. Let's play with some blend modes. Actually, let's add effects first. So let's go to the effect now. How do we find effects? Let's go. I might have closed it. Let's go to view studio. Yes, I did. I closed my effects window. All right, So what should we put in there? Should we put an outer glow on it? I think we should. And we should increase the radius. And we should probably drop that opacity a little bit. And what color should we make it? All right. I think that that's pretty good there. So now let's go ahead and just add a little bit in their reduce that radi I and increase the capacity just a little bit. And I think that I'm actually quite happy with that. So I think we're pretty good there. So let's go ahead and call that a day. Let's go ahead and move our effect panel over. Now let's go ahead and zoom out. And now what we're gonna want to do now is we're gonna go ahead and we're going to create a style. Now the style portion here, we're gonna come over here, we're gonna add a styles category and I'm gonna rename the category. I'm gonna call it Neon Oops. Not the lead it rename it. Uh, let's go that route rename Neon Perfect. And now we want the selection, right. And now we're gonna add a style from the selection and there it ISS. So now if we do this so stay with me now. This is how we work. We're gonna turn back on the affinity logo. I'm gonna select this, this this this and this. So all the other curves and with those selected, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to apply this style now. If I did my job, right? I should be able now to come into the layers panel, turn off the logo. And what I now have is a good glowing affinity symbol. Now, you see here I might have to make some subtle adjustments because I made these a little bit too big. So let's go here. Shrink that down a little bit. Come over here, shrink that down a little bit. Come over here, shrink that down a little bit. And this is one of those things where it just gets a little bit weird. And if it gets to the point in which it really starts hindering your design, here's what you can dio. You can come over here, you can select it, we grab our no tool. And because the polygon mode is on, we can just come over here and we can shift him however we want in order to shape them up. So if I wanted to take this and shifted down, I wanted to take this guy and shifted across. I can make some subtle adjustments and it won't impact my design whatsoever. Okay, let's see what we got here. I think that I want to do the same thing here. I mean that a little bit too big. So in order to adjust this just ever so slightly come down that way and I'm gonna come up this way. Okay, Let's go ahead and Docker effects panel so I can see the whole thing here. Okay, Now, I want to just see what I can get away with, so we're gonna grab that. We're gonna grab this, come over here. We're gonna come over to the stroke panel. I'm a crank that up just a little. There we go. All right? I'm actually quite happy with that. Now, let's go ahead and cut. This one here. Just kind of do what we're doing there with that. Now, why is that doing that? Let's see what's up, all right? It was just a leg. Alright, folks, let's go ahead and cut this one here. You see how we applied the style to what we were working with in the next area? We're gonna go ahead and we're gonna duplicate this so that you can see exactly how this works. All right. Good job. Let's go and take the next step 18. Applying the neon glow part 2 : All right, gang, welcome back to affinity. So in the last lesson, we did this particular affinity symbol. We put a black rectangle behind it so that we could take the next step. So if you don't have that yet, make sure you put the black rectangle behind it. It's just a simple black rectangle moved to the bottom. And we grouped all of these things together, right? So now the next step, we're gonna create kind of that inner glow that's gonna be created. In order to do this, you're to come down to the curve. We're going to duplicate each of these curves, so we're only going to do the 1st 1 right now. So I have this curve and I'm gonna call this the top. Okay, so there's the curve. There's the top. Now what we're going to do is we're going to change the parameters. I'm gonna come over to the stroke panel, so let me pull this out so we can see what's going on. And with the top selected, I'm going to reduce the stroke now going to reduce it to about 10. Let's say 10 point is good. Now you're not sure what's going on with it yet. Let's come over to effects and let's turn off the outer glow. And then with the stroke selected, we want a MAWR. I would say, How do I put this lighter? Phil? So you see the stroke. We've now got this lighter filled. To do that, all you have to do is go into the stroke panel or into the color panel, find a color that's a little bit higher on the spectrum, and then you're good to go. And you see how now that is creating a really cool effect in addition to the other. So step one duplicate each of the curves step to reduce the stroke with the 10 point on the duplicated curve. Step three, lighten the fill on the curve. Now, step four, we're coming to effects. Go ahead and bring out our effects. We're gonna put an inner glow on this bad boy. Now, you see that a little bit goes a long way with this. So we're gonna go ahead and crank down the opacity and we're gonna crank up the radius a little. I think that that's actually really cool. So you see, we removed the outer glow, and we did put an inner glow on this other area. So once we have this done, the last thing that I want to dio is with this lair selected that new top layer. I want to change the blend mode now and you see how, as we change through the blend modes, it moves a little bit. I think the overlay blend mode is the closest to what I wanted to be. So we've got this overlay blend mode with an inner glow, and we turned down the width on the stroke. Now what we can do here, we can use styles. So let's come to style. Make sure we have that curve selected. And now we're gonna add this style from the selection and you see, now it's given me a top style. This is huge. So let's bring the stroke panel back in because we don't have to use it anymore. Let's bring the effects panel back in. We don't have to use that anymore. And let's come two layers. And now what we're gonna dio is we're gonna right click duplicate right click duplicate right click duplicate, right click duplicate. You see, we're just duplicating each one of these duplicate right click duplicate. So now I should have the regular one. We'll call this top, should have the regular one. And I call this top. I should have the regular one, but I call this top. I should have the regular one. I call this top Top top. Now it's and top. All right, Now, here's what you gonna do. You gonna select all your tops. See how I only have the top selected. I'm gonna come over to styles and then click on it. How and the exact same style now is applied to every single top layer. That is super duper powerful folks. I think we're in pretty good shape there. So now, if you so wanted to Justus an example, you could come over to your layers and you could group all your top players together. If you wanted Teoh into their own theoretical image. I'm gonna go ahead and do that so that I keep good naming habits, good layering habits. And it doesn't matter what's really on top of what with this. Because none of the lines air really overlapping. So I'm gonna come over here to select all my tops, drag him outside my group, and then I'm going to group them into what? I'm gonna call the top group. Come over here when we go to top group. All right, so now, once you've got this figured out, you really can do a lot with this, right? You can go through and change up the effects. You can change a lot of this stuff. That is, it sits right there is actually pretty cool. I'm gonna go one step further in the next video, and I'm gonna show you how to put together a little background on this to just make it pop a little bit more and have that glow come out. All right, we'll see the next one. 19. Adding background and glow: all right. Gang walked back to her projects. So we're now in the home stretch of this thing. So you should have a top group. And amid group and the rectangle, right. These are the three components. I'm gonna show you how to get a really cool glow on this thing. So we're to come down to the mid group and we're gonna go ahead, and we're gonna duplicate it. So now with the lowest mid group, let's rename it bottom group. All right, I'll give you second to get there. And over the bottom group selected the easiest thing to do. Really grabbed the go shin blur and crank this bad boy up a crazy amount. There we go. All right. Now, if it's a little bit too intense for you, you can always turn down the opacity. Get where you like it. Totally up to you. But that is a simple trick in order to make this happen. Now, when we do this, I'm gonna go ahead now and I'm gonna shrink down my floor. And then I'm going to create a new rectangle to kind of take its place. So one of these I'm going to call floor. Good deal. And I'm going to apply a Grady in, Phil two said floor. So let's go ahead and make the floor right. The Grady in Phil. Perfect. All right, that looks pretty good. Now we have to do the same thing to the background. Let's go ahead and add ingredient Phil to the background. Now notices it gets the floor. It becomes a little bit darker. Now, what I want to do here, I want to go ahead, and I want to make this backdrop a little bit darker. So I'm gonna come back to my Phil. I'm gonna come back to here. And now when this is selected, I'm coming back into here, and I'm gonna increase it ever so slightly. All right. Good deal. All right, let's go ahead and call it a day on this one. I think they were far enough for horseshoes and hand grenades. You've got a pretty cool, stylized neon affinity symbol out of this activity. But you think about all the techniques that you used. We're gonna go through and you've used your own brushes. You've created multiple layers. You've screen blend modes you've gone through and created effects. You've done a tremendous amount of work on this thing, and it is absolutely showing. All right. Folks will see the next one have a good one. 20. Aligning the background and the foreground: All right, folks. Welcome back to offend designer. So the last lesson we added the backdrop, we added that glow. So the last thing I want to show you here is how to three d this thing so that we can make this happen. So now that we got a floor right, we can add in any lips. And now where we place this, the lips will matter, right? You want to go down onto the floor and then we're going to apply a radio Grady int to this area. So in order to do this now, we're gonna change from linear over to radio, just like that. Change this over like that. And now it's gonna be an elliptical, Actually, I'm sorry. Elliptical Grady int. And we moved the center just like so. And we move the elliptical just like so. And now where we have this middle ground, let's go ahead and put a ingredient in there. We're gonna come down here. We're swing on over to this sort of area here. I want to come down and grab something right about here. I would say that we're right about in here, give or take. And then as we get closer to the outside, gonna swing down over here, and we're gonna come down just like so match that gray out a little bit. And now we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna apply a go Schindler, because again, we don't want a hard look. And now take a look at the blend mode. Let's go ahead and change the blend mode up. I think that a nice color dodge would be good. Ah, let's go here. Let's change that up to maybe a screen. I think that that's probably better. Now what I'm gonna want to do here, let's go ahead and adjust my logo. A Scotia off the floor. Hoops. Grab the entire logo. Hey, let's grab this. Why don't we make this a logo, huh? Group logo. Now I can move the entire thing as a unit, and I still think I want to check the capacity down Just ever so slightly. All right, That looks actually pretty good. So I'm happy with that. So let's go ahead and try this on the back rectangle. Now, I don't know that this is gonna work, so let's see what's up. Go ahead and prove the same thing to the back. Notice it kept the lips from the last time. Go ahead and place this right about here. Try that and we're gonna apply the same go shin blur, and we're gonna come down. We're gonna tweak this down a little bit. Now do this. Let's see, we can do in the blend modes. I think the screen blend mode is good there. Let's drop the opacity a little. That's actually really cool. That worked out super Well, all right, so I'm very happy with that. I think we've got a finished piece of art. I'd love to see what you guys come up with. Go ahead and drop what you got in the box anyway. This is it. So let's go ahead and get in. The pixel airs, and we'll get into the next lesson.