Vector drawing in Affinity Designer for iPad: plants!

1. 01: learn Affinity Designer for iPad: Hello and welcome to my class, Affinity Designer for iPad. My name is Els Ruiters. I'm a graphic designer, illustrator, photographer, and a Skillshare teacher from The Netherlands. In this class, I'm going to introduce you to a great vector drawing app called Affinity Designer for iPad. Affinity Designer is not free, but it's not very expensive either. And it has one great advantage. It's a onetime purchase. You don't need fancy subscriptions. Just buy it and you're good to go! Good news for those who work on a desktop computer. There's also a desktop version for both Mac as well as Windows. On a side note, why would you want to make something in vectors? Well, as long as you stick to vectors, it's indefinitely scalable. It goes both up and down over and over and over again. You can export vectors to pixel output easily, but the other way around is not possible. That's why vectors are especially suitable for logos. Affinity Designer has both a vector as well as a pixel-based working area. And you can combine both. But in this class I'm focusing on the vector part only. This class is suitable for beginners and basically for everyone who wants to learn drawing with vectors in a fun and easy way. In the next lesson we're going to take a closer look at the requirements for this class. So let's get going. 2. 02 What you need: First things first to get you started, what I use in this class, Let's take a quick look at the current status of Affinity Designer for iPad. It's July 2022, and the most recent version of Affinity Designer for iPad is 1.10.21. Currently, the price is about €22. If you are serious about a good vector app, then this is definitely worth the purchase. Keep your eyes open for discount promos. That's how I got my Affinity Designer, both for iPad as well as my desktop computer. at a nice discount price. By the way, unfortunately, there is no trial version for the iPad, but there is for the desktop app. Next to that, I'm also using an app called VizRef, VizRef costs about four euro's and it's a very cool Moodboard app. You can add all kinds of photos and other images and export it to any format you like. You can drag and drop directly from the web or from your photos or files, and it works like a charm. Now, let's move on to the next lesson, starting with Affinity Designer. 3. 03 Starting Affinity Designer for iPad: When you started Affinity Designer for the first time, you'll see the home screen with two items. One is a link to tutorials that you can watch to get you started. The second one is a folder with examples to show you just a little bit of what Affinity Designer has to offer. The tutorials are well worth a visit. In the top, under the question mark, you'll find a very extensive handbook. Your work will appear in this home area. You can add folders and store your work per item or per customer. For example, Skillshare. Make a new project to create a folder that can hold all your Skillshare files. Normally, each new document you make will show up in this home area. If you haven't given you a document a proper name yet, or you want to change it, you can tap the hamburger menu and choose Rename. Be careful when you tap close, you will delete your file. Affinity Designer will ask you to confirm this action. You can still cancel this If this happens. This is a bit different from what you're used to. You can export or save an image to a location outside Affinity Designer, for example, on a flash drive or somewhere in the Cloud. After that, you can close your file. Setting up some important preferences. Tap the cog in the upper-right corner to go to the preferences. You can use a dark or light interface just as you like it. There's also an option for left-handed people. Affinity Designer comes in different languages, so you might want to change it to whatever is appropriate for you. There is so much possible, but for now, there are just two things you should definitely change. Tap on Tools and then activate "enable hand tool for accessibility". And "allow canvas rotation in all tools", tap "done". And now you're good to go. Next up. The interface. 4. 04 The interface: Create a new document, tap the Plus tab, Choose new document, and choose a format and a size you like for print, for web, etc. For now, I'm going for iPad. At this stage, I don't need any transparency or art boards, so I'll leave those unchecked. Let's take a look at the interface. What have we got here? At the top next to the document and the edit icon, you'll see a blue vector icon. This is called the designer persona The part of the app that offers vector drawing. This toolbar on the left holds all options that are activated when you're working in this particular designer persona. Changing to another persona will automatically change this toolbar on the left as well. The one next to the designer persona is the pixel persona. The one next to that is the export persona. We will stay in the designer vector persona. I will discuss the tools as we go. Otherwise, it'll be very boring indeed. But one thing is good to know. See this question mark in the right bottom corner? Hold that and you'll see the name of each item. That'll help you further if you don't know where to look. Now let's move on to the next lesson. Getting reference pictures. 5. 05 Moodboard musings: I want to draw some plants in nice pots. So I'll be looking for photos to help me. Unsplash.com, a very famous website, has free photos for everyone to use. So I searched for house plants and plants in pots. Now, it is possible to drag and drop a browser image straight into Affinity Designer. But I like to make a mood board and I do it like so. I saved a dozen nice pictures to the files folder on my iPad already. Let's head over to VizRef. First, tap the Plus to make a new mood board and give it a proper name. You'll see a new board appearing and open it. Under the cogwheel, you can set the background to dark or light. And you can toggle a grid on and off. Now it's time to add images. Since I've already saved images to my files folder, I'll open that file. Select "choose all", and invoke the dock by swiping up from the bottom. Hold your finger on the VizRef icon and move it to the right of the screen. In the files folder. Hold your finger down until you see all images are loaded, and then simply drag the selection onto the VizRef board. Let's go and give it a moment. VizRef will place all images smoothly. A blue outline indicates an image, or more than one. And that's the one that's currently selected. Pinch to reduce the size of art board. Now, use the arrow tool to move a selected image around. And you can use scissors to chop parts off, like this. Delete an image that you don't need by tapping on the three dots in the lower-right corner and then tap the bin-icon. Once you're satisfied with the mood board you've just created, you can export it. I'm using the PDF version to export the entire board. Ready. Of course, it's not necessary to make a mood board, but I like to work with it to help me get ideas and look for certain colors or certain decorations. Next lesson, Affinity, Designer, shapes. 6. 06 Shapes: Let's start drawing. Affinity Designer comes with a bunch of cool preset shapes. Tap and hold the rectangle tool. So all the different default shapes will become visible. I was very surprised by how much is possible with these shapes. They're completely editable in all kinds of ways. Let's start with a rectangle. Put your pencil on the screen tap and drag to make a rectangle. Your rectangle might have a different color than mine. So now we go to the color studio on the right and tap the fill button. Choose any color you like. I'm using the color wheel. The outside ring is the hue, and everything inside the triangle is the saturation. Don't you see the color wheel? then tap on the color wheel fly out menu and you'll see the option appearing. Don't you have a visible line? Tap the Stroke Studio and set a line width either by moving this slider or by entering a value. A shape can have a fill or a stroke, or both, or even none. You can easily swap the color of a fill and a stroke by moving from left to right in the color studio. Like this. If you move your finger up, you can set the color to none. Now, let's select our rectangle. Tap the selection tool, the arrow, and you can move your object around, scale it by selecting and dragging one of the handles. Select a corner and drag while holding one finger on the screen will give you proportional scaling. Drag while holding two fingers on the screen will provide you with a copy. If you have the magnet in the lower-left corner turned on, you'll get nice even spacing, snap-to options, et cetera. This is very handy of course. How about a mistake? Well, that's easy peasy. Just tap with two fingers and you'll have your undo. Also, these little "smaller than", "larger than" symbols in the lower right corner give you undo and redo options for multiple steps. In the lower left-hand corner below the magnet, you'll find the bin. That's the delete button, that little x above the magnet is the de-select option. There's also a history studio, the lowest icon in the right part. To get you back even further. In the next lesson, we'll take a look at selections. 7. 07 About selections: Let's talk about selections. You can select an object by either tapping on it with the selection tool, or by dragging a marquee around it. Mind you: completely drag around an object to select it. If you only drag over a part of an object, it won't be selected. You can select multiple objects this way. It's also possible to tap the "Add to Selection" button at the bottom. This feature does work with only taps on your specified objects. But don't forget that this is toggle button, so it will remain active until you turn it off again. Above the magnet, you can find the de-select tool, this little x. Last but not least, the Layer studio is also very useful for selections. Unlike a pixel drawing app, each vector, line or shape will live in its own layer. Swiping to the right, we'll add more layers to your selection. Now head over to the shapes again and start playing around. Notice that the menu at the bottom changes when you change your shape. You can, for example, add the number of points and the inner radius when you're drawing a star. You can do this before or during or even after you're drawing the star. Take a look at the doughnut shape. You can change the inner radius easily. Now it's up to you. Experiment with the available shapes. Look what happens when you drag and put your finger on the screen. With three fingers on the screen and drag to draw your shape from the center outwards. Try to select multiple shapes and move them around and scale them. Practice a little with shapes, selections, de-selecting and moving. And then we can move on to... the order of things. Next is the order of things. 8. 08 Ordering your objects: Now that you're drawing several shapes, you might want to put one in front or behind the other. To do that, you can go two ways by going to the Layer studio. Select and hold the layer and then move it up or down. I've noticed it works best to do this with my finger instead of the Apple Pencil, but that's probably personal. The second way is by going to the Transform studio and use the order options in the top section. I prefer the layers method because it's easier to see what you're moving to which position. By the way, now that we are in the layers studio, if you want to select an entire range of objects, you can tap the first with your finger, tap the last in your desired range. Everything in-between will be highlighted, meaning that they're selected. This makes grouping easy. To group a selection, just tap this button. Tap on the three dots to make a sub-menu visible. I'm using the lock quite often. It's also possible to change the opacity or the blend mode here. There are usually several ways to perform an action. For example, grouping can be done in the layers studio, but also in the Edit menu, and that goes for a lot of actions. In the next lesson, we'll edit the shape. 9. 09 Shape editing: Now that we've got shapes go covered, it's time to learn to edit them. To do so, you first need to convert your shape to curves. And to do so, tap this button. This "Convert to curves" button appears in your shapes menu when you're working with shapes, but it's also available in the Edit menu. Now it's possible to edit individual nodes and line segments like this rectangle. Convert to curves, select a corner point with the node tool and move it anywhere you like. The shape will no longer behave like a standard shape. When your shape has straight or pointed edges and corners, you can round those with the corner tool. Selecte the corner tool right here, and tap your object. All corner points will be selected. And you'll see the change when you start dragging inwards. You can drag one or more points by first de-selecting everything and then drag a marquee around the point you want to change. In the contextual menu at the bottom, you will see there are more options than just rounded corners, like cutouts and concave, for example. After you've done some fiddling with this, it's time to clear this all. Drag a marquee around everything you made and delete it by tapping the bin. Next: drawing the pots. 10. 10 Drawing a flower pot: Now it's time to place our mood board in our document. Go to the document tool here in the top and Place Image. Navigate to where you saved your PDF and tap it. Now hold your pen or your finger on the screen and drag to place it. Head over to the layer studio and lock the layer by tapping the three dots and the lock icon. I'm using this image as my reference for the pots I'm going to draw. The three pots in the picture clearly belong together, but each one has a different shape. And I like that very much. For number one, I'm using the rectangle shape. I'm starting with a pink thin outline stroke, like this. Edit the color in the color studio and the stroke width in the stroke Studio. I use 0.5 points. Select the rounded corners tool and select the bottom anchor points. Now, round the corners by dragging inwards. If you need to correct the size of the pots, move the anchor points a little like this. Yaay! The outline of the first pot is done. For number two, tap the trapezoid shape. The narrow part will probably be on top, so just drag until you have to shape roughly determined. Then use the rotation handle, - this one on top - to turn it around. If you put your finger on the screen and hold, you'll get perfect angles. Alternatively, in the transform studio, right here on the right, you can flip your selection. Add rounded corners to the bottom two anchor points as you've done with the first drawing. Next, use the node tool to add a curve to the sides. Now add some anchor points to the top line and add some curved lines. Amazingly, even after this edit, this is still a shape ...and the outline of another pod is ready. For number three, you could use the trapezoid shape again, but for educational purposes, I'm using two shapes now: The ellipse and the rectangle Tool. Now convert both shapes, two curves. So the anchor points will be editable. Move the lower anchor points of the rectangle to the left and the right, where they will touch the ellipse. Drag a marquee around both shapes and go to the Edit menu. Then tap, "Add" under "Geometry" and tadaaa! ...your shapes have been combined to one pretty pot outline. In the next lesson, we'll cover adding decorative elements to the pots that we've just made. 11. 11 Decorations and gradients: While looking at my mood board file, I want to incorporate these effects to the pots I just made. Now select the pencil tool and make sure that Sculpt is on. Loosely draw a wavy line on top of the first part. Don't stop but continue a bit further than the pot. And then draw outside to to end where you started. Close the line with the node tool. Let's turn this into a shape we can use. Select both shapes, go to the Edit menu, and select "Divide" under the "Geometry" options. The shape now consists of the bottom part, the top part, and that which is outside the pot. In the color studio, swap the color of the stroke and the fill. And now you can see that we've made three separate shapes. Delete the shape outside the pot. We don't need that anymore. On the left, you'll find the gradient tool. That is this icon. Oh, I love gradients, especially with Affinity Designer. It works so beautifully. With the objects selected. Use the gradient tool and drag over the shape to fill it with a gradient. Affinity Designer takes your most recent color and adds a lighter or darker tone as a starting point. Tap one of the two points and change the color in the color studio. Let's save the colors we've made, in the color studio. Tap the hamburger menu and make a new swatches palette, and give it an appropriate name. The current color is visible in the color dot. Let's add this color so it quickly at our disposal. You can save uniform color and gradient colors. Gradients come in different ways. Linear, radial, elliptical, clinical. Just take a look at what it does. It's also possible to add more colors to a gradient. Just tap anywhere on the line the gradient tool makes. And you'll get a new point to which you can apply a different color. You can apply a gradient to both a fill and stroke. How cool is that? I'm using a bluish gray and a yellow cream color gradient for the pulse. Repeat this process for the top part of the pot as well. Once you're done, select both parts and group them. Number one is ready. Congratulations. Repeat this process for the other two pots as well. Don't forget to close curves outside the shape to ensure it will be divided properly. On to drawing with the pencil tool, a much more freestyle way to work. 12. 12 Drawing with the pencil tool: Now that we've got shapes covered, it's time to take a look at the pencil tool. This is a free form pencil and it's really fun to use. This plant, visible in my mood board, is what I'm going to make. Let me head over to the layer studio and bring the opacity of the layer down a bit. Select the pencil tool and select a thin pink color and a 0.5 stroke width. Now, enable the Sculpt option. Do a test run, draw a leaf, and here you go. It's is very easy to form a leaf like this. There are a few things to consider. The first starting node of a line or a segment is always an open blue square. The last closing node is always an open red square. In-between you'll see anchor points: they're round. Selected anchor points are turning blue. Affinity Designer doesn't have an auto close feature, but when you've got snapping turned on, it's easy to do that. Just select the node tool and move the red over the blue square or the other way around. You'll see it jumping to alignment also the node-contextual menu appears. You can see it's closed because you only have a break option. Now, you might be wondering why I'm using a stroke instead of a fill. I think it's easier to concentrate on the shape at this point in time and get the right color and fill once to shape is done. However, if you prefer to draw with a fill instead of a line, then please do. It's a bit like drawing the outlines in traditional art work and filling in the open areas later. Don't worry, just like with the pots, I'm only using this bright pink color to properly see what I'm doing and distinguish my pink sketch from my actual artwork. So back to the plant. I've restored my pencil width to 0.5 and I'll start tracing the outline of the leaves. It's good practice to start with objects in the back and then work your way to the one in front. Of course, you can reorder and rearrange them easily afterwards, but this is really a timesaver. Once I've got all the leaves, I'll make sure that I'll be closing each curve with the node tool. I'll connected the two squares, as I've just explained. Now, let's fill the leaves. Select all by dragging a marquee. Move over to the color studio and swap the stroke and the fill. Wow, pink leaves! Now let's pick a nice green color from the color wheel. Activate the gradient tool on the left. Drag the gradient over the leaves and the entire set of leaves will have the gradient applied. I'm going to add a bit of yellow to the gradient. Like so. I do however, want each leaf to have its own directional fill. So de-select everything. Then tap one leaf and tweak the gradient just by dragging these bullets up and down. Repeat this process. So each leaf has its own appearance while still having the same gradient fill. Last but not least, I'm adding this particular fill to the Swatches palette. Next we'll be adding veins to the leaves. 13. 13 Adding veins: Adding veins will make the leaves come to life. Select the pencil tool and start drawing lines with a yellowish color. Remember that I told you about starting and end points on a curve? Well, this is a good moment to explain what starting and ending points actually do. Look at this vain that I just made with just a single stroke. I'm going to the Stroke Studio and I'll increase the width. Pull down one of these points in the graph, and look at the line, it's getting a sharper ending. Now, if I tap reverse in the contextual menu, the settings of the stroke are turned around and the narrow part has switched places with the wider part. This is a very handy feature. If I tap anywhere on the line in the graph, I can get extra points that I can move up or down to change the appearance of the stroke. The reverse button changes the overall ending too. If you want to delete these extra nodes in the graph, tap on the line and you'll see an option to delete the node or reset the pressure altogether. Another cool feature is to turn on pressure in the pencil menu. Take a look. If I apply a little pressure, I'll have a thin line. If I press harder, my line width will change. This is ideal now that we're drawing the veins. So continue drawing veins but turn off the sculpt option. When sculpt is turned on, Affinity Designer will continue from your previous lines. In this case, you want each line to be a new one. Once you've got one leaf ready, select all the veins and group them. And now here comes the magic. The size of the pot and the plant are way too different. So just select the group of the plant, select a corner and scale to an appropriate size. Well try doing that in pixel based software. You'll have a blurred image that you can't repair while the vectors stays pristine and crisp. Now, how cool is that? Draw stems with the pencil tool. Be free in your approach. Experiment with the stroke width. To give the stroke a gradient. Go to the Gradient tool and then tap the Stroke option in the menu below. This is how you can add gradients to outlines. Use the layer studio to move layers in the correct order. In the next lesson, we'll be working with clipping masks. 14. 14 Clipping Masks: Clipping masks are containers. They can hold items and hide everything that is outside the clipping mask. Here's an example. Follow along, draw a circle and a star and let them overlap a little. Fill the circle with a different color than the star. Now, I want only part of the star to show in the circle. Go to the layer studio, locate and select the layer with the star. Then move it on top of the circle layer until this horizontal line appears. The star will now be contained inside the circle and the effect is visible right away. It is still possible to edit this star and the circle too. Clipping masks can be stacked so one can live inside the other. Here's what I mean. I'm drawing a line and I'm moving that line on top of the star layer in the layers studio. And bam, the line is clipped by this star, which is clipped by the circle. When I move the circle, the contents of the clipping mask moves along. But when I change the size of the star, I'll double-tap it and I can edit it without affecting the container. In this case, the circle. When I change the size of the circle, the contents sizes along. Now that you've know this, you can turn each leaf into a clipping mask to hold the veins for that particular leaf. And then it's a piece of cake. And if you want to edit your leave, the veins will remain intact. Just double-tap and you can do some changes. If you're up to it, you can move part of the leaves to a position above the pot. Next up, we'll look at expanding strokes. 15. 15 Expanding strokes: Now, I can continue with Affinity Designer for hours because there's so much to learn. Did I say that you can make a straight line by selecting the pen tool, tap and tap somewhere else again? Give it a stroke width and the color and you've got your straight line. There's one thing that I really like to explain. We've seen it with shapes; after converting to curves even more is possible with this same object, although it's no longer a shape. Well, technically speaking, that is, I'm converting the veins. I just made to curves by tapping the Expand Stroke button in the Edit menu. Now, select all the vein objects in this leaf. Go to the Edit menu. Tap the "Winding button" on the right, and then tap Add. Under "Geometry", the path disappears. And if I want to change a shape, I no longer have a single path or align stroke. Instead, each vein has become a curve and I can edit individual anchor points. It might be necessary to ungroup the entire set of veins in one leaf to get this option. All the objects are melted together. And instead of a lot of lines that form the veins, I have one object with the exact same appearance. This step is, by the way, not necessary, but there are far less objects and paths which I always strive for. And by getting rid of line width, more stability in artwork is guaranteed. Let me give you an example. Here are two exact same flowers. When I select 1 and 2 and scale them down, you'll notice that number 2 still has the proportions that the original flower has. But the stroke on the other one is way too thick. The stroke is nearly covering everything inside the petals while the other one is okay. If I enlarge the flower, the outline stroke will be too thin. This happens when Scale with Object is turned off. You can find that in the Stroke Studio. Sometimes this happens accidentally. Sometimes it's on purpose. It can cause some pretty unpredictable and unwanted effects, especially when you are sharing the vector image. Expanding your strokes, you'll get only curves, will solve that. In the next lesson. You get your assignment. 16. 16 Your assigment and examples: If you've followed these lessons along, you will have at least one pot and one plant. Hopefully, you've been able to draw a few more. Your assignment is to add a background setting or a scene to your plant, or plants. For example, a wall or a window, a shelf, a framed picture, a small table. Here's what I made, but I won't explain in detail how I did it. By now, you should be able to do this yourself without too much trouble. Experiment. Don't be afraid to try different things. Use reference photos to make backgrounds and take a look at the different tools on the left that we haven't used. There is still a lot of ground to cover in the various studios on the right, but you've got a great basis now, I'm sure you can come up with some cool artwork. Share your artwork in the Project Gallery. So don't share the Affinity Designer file itself, but exported to a JPEG or a PNG. To do that, go to the document menu, tap Export and choose a type and a location. Save it to your photo library or your files folder, and of course, share it right here on Skillshare. To get you started, here are a few examples of artwork I made with Affinity Designer for iPad. We're nearing the end. 17. 17 Thank you!: This is it. Congratulations, you made it to the end. I hope you enjoyed this class and I hope this was helpful and it has given you more insight in working with Affinity Designer. In this last lesson, I will reply a question some of you might already have. I've made classes about Vectornater in the past. Vectornator is free, so why have I moved on to Affinity Designer for iPad? Well, Vectornator is great if you're curious about vectors and if you want to see if it's something you'd like to do more often. But it's pretty basic. For me, Affinity Designer for iPad is definitely more intuitive. It has a better interface and it just works more natural. Is Affinity Designer THE app to use? Yes, for me. I still have a soft spot for Vectornator as it is pretty solid, and it offers people a great opportunity to try vectors. But for more control, more smoothness, more versatility, and many, many options I'd made the step. You won't regret it. Now - we've reached the end. Thanks for watching. If you have any questions regarding this class. Leave a comment below. And if you have any requests regarding subjects, subjects you'd like to see in the next class. Then let me know. Bye for now. Keep drawing, keep vectorizing.