Vector Illustration Masterclass - Botanical Art in Affinity Designer & Adobe Fresco for iPad

1. Vector Illustration Masterclass: I built my whole creative career by switching from pixel art to vector art. Vectors give me much more flexibility and allow me to work faster on multiple client projects. I never have any problems with pixelation or preparing client work for print, and having a big library of reusable vector assets makes me much more efficient in my freelance work. And now I'm here to teach you how to harness the power of vector art so that you can work faster, create more flexible designs, and take your creative projects to the next level. Hi, my name is Veronica. I'm super excited to be your teacher on this journey. Welcome to my biggest and my most comprehensive course about Vector Illustration. You might actually know me from my other affinity designer courses. I'm an illustrator, surface pattern designer, and currently I'm working predominantly in children's book publishing. I designed this online course to give you all the tools that you need to take your vector illustration skills to the next level, and to help you in building your creative career. In this course, I will teach you everything you need to know to master vector Illustration tools. Whether you're a beginner or already have some experience, you will learn intermediate and advanced tools in both Adobe Fresco and affinity designer on the iPad. You will master tools like the rectangle tool, the alignment tool. We will have a look at Bleion operations, the knife tool, and so much more. Plus, we will explore a Dob frescos vector symmetry tool and learn how to transfer vector assets seamlessly between Fresco and affinity designer. Together, we will build a complete library of botanical assets in affinity designer, and by the end of this course, you will be also able to create a botanical poster, which then you can either upload to your POD shop or print it out for yourself or as a gift. This course is very hands on. I've prepared exercise sheets where I will guide you step by step through practicing each vector. You won't be just learning the theory. You will be applying everything right away with practical exercises. See you in class. 2. Getting Started: Oh. Hello, everybody. Welcome to my biggest and my most comprehensive course about affinity designer vector Illustration. This time around, together with Adobe Fresco. This was really requested by many students of mine. Please don't feel intimidated that this course is so long. You can take it at your own pace. There is a lot that I wanted to teach about, mainly because affinity designer is such a powerful software. It was really hard for me to edit it down and to cut out any material. On top of that, we're doing a lot of practical exercises. There's really a lot of hands on material, not just an affinity, but also adobe frescos, it's like double material, and there is a lot to learn. To get started, all that you will need is actually your affinity designer software and your drawing pencil. I'm recording this course in August and September of 2024, and my affinity designer version is 2.5 0.5. Using Adobe fresco for this course is actually optional, but highly recommended because you can get it from the App store for free, at least at the moment of recording this course. There is a free version waiting for you to download, so why not try it out? I will be showing you my demonstration, of course, in infinity designer version two on my iPad. However, you can definitely follow along regardless of your version. The steps that I'm demonstrating in this course, they can be applied to both version one, in case you have the very old version and to version two. You can also apply the principles that I'm teaching to the iPad and to the desktop version. But you have to bear in mind that Being a big fan of drawing on the iPad. In this course, I'm teaching as usual, a lot of useful hand gestures for the iPad. I think this will be the one thing which you unfortunately won't be able to replicate on your desktop version. But nevertheless, it's not a big deal breaker. The goal of this course is to make you more skilled in using vector tools and to make you basically a vector art pro. The biggest focus is an affinity designer with some help of Adobe Fresco. Simply because I think affinity has much more to offer, especially if you compare it with the free fresco version. I also wanted this course to be super practical. There is literally a ton of practical exercises really hands on that we will be doing together. Plus, there is a real life deliverable after taking this course. Namely, we will be creating a botanical vector art poster that you can print for your home, you can print it as a gift, or you can even turn it into different formats. For example, you can turn it into postcards. I will be showing you my whole process from creating vector assets all the way to preparing your poster for print. Now, if you're feeling, you would first love to take more of an introductory course into the infinity designer interface. But at a slower pace, you can consider taking my beginners course and this course is for both affinity version one and affinity version two users. But in this very course, I am also going again through the interface explaining things like the basics, how to create a new document and where you can find what in the interface. Or task is to build a new vector assets category with botanical elements, and then to design a vector botanical posters to put it into practice. This botanical poster, you can upload it to your POD shop or you can print it out for yourself or as a gift. This course will be very hands on, lots of practical exercises, hardly any theory. And at the end, you will still have something that you can take to the real world. You can put the design in your shop. We will be talking about printing it, exporting it, about the color profiles for print. So it will be very actionable. A friendly disclaimer, you can draw my exact vector poster really from A to Z. You can copy me exactly, but please use it only as an exercise. Since this is my intellectual property, you are not allowed to sell the exact copy of my botanical poster or to present it as your own. But this course is so fun that I am 100% sure that you will not have to copy me. You will go into creating something of your own right away. All right. Let's get started. Thank you so much for being here and for taking my course and enjoy watching. 3. Affinity Designer vs. Adobe Fresco: In this video, I wanted to talk about the differences between affinity designer for the iPad and AOB Fresco. Also to answer the question, why am I using both? Why don't I just stick to affinity designer? There are also some advantages of using other software simultaneously. You might have taken my other affinity designer courses, but I wanted to quickly run through the interface of both affinity designer, and also the interface of Adob Fresco to show you the individual feel of each of those softwares and how the navigation looks and what is the ease of moving in those programs. Let's quickly start with affinity. I'm assuming that you already have some knowledge of affinity designer. Perhaps you have taken my previous courses, like I said, also have a beginners course for Affinity Designer users. What you got to know is that you have your home page that is also called live Dogs. Right now I'm actually in another folder of mine called Botanical art. But when I click on this arrow here, it will bring me back to my main interface. This is your life Docs area, which is basically like your home page. In that home page, you can have either individual documents or you can create projects which are essentially folders. We were just a second ago inside of my botanical art folder. Whenever you want to create a new document, and of course, we will be doing all that in the course together in the lessons to come. You just select new and new document, and then it pops open a new menu. We can, for example, work in pixels here. But how to create a document in particular for this project for this course, we will do that in. The next lessons to come, but this is where we create new documents. Then under the open menu, you can open a document that you have maybe saved on your storage or in your cloud storage. Under templates, you can open templates because you can also create kind of like pre saved documents with an affinity designer extension. And if you find yourself using a certain document setup over and over again, this is really really handy. When I click on templates, it brings me here on my iPad internal storage to my templates folder, which I created manually for myself, and this is where I have some client templates, some templates for products. This is, for example, a template for a puzzle design for my red bubble shop. And if you take in my pattern design courses, I have quite a few repeat pattern templates, even though I have to admit that I use most of the time the diamond repeat template. So when you click on this template, it will open it. And the template that we have seen here in this templates folder, it will not be overwritten, essentially. So now we created a new document. It's not saved anywhere. If I just want to get rid of it, I click this X symbol and I just close it without saving. Under lessons, there are some tutorials that you can find within the iPad version. I also take advantage of this help section where you basically you can find everything. If you type in, for example, vector brush, you start typing, at least, you get a whole library of topics and you can do that, of course online, but you can also do that within your iPad within your software, basically, you can look for some answers. Then under account, that's also very handy also for this course. Under account when you register, you get some free brushes, free pixel brushes, and free vector brushes and some textures, and anything that you also connect through the infinity Designer store. For example, I bought this El Malo Illustration kit by Frankin Ton. You can also manage it from here. I actually have it on my iPad storage and I save all the goodies that I bought in shops, later on also on my desktop storage. That's why there's this cloud icon because I didn't download it. Through this interface here. Account and under settings. You have a few general settings here that you can change. For example, in your user interface, you can change the background gray level. Usually your Canvas that you start with will be white, but there's also this background area. We'll head into one document to show you an example in a second here is where you can change the gray level of this background area. You can also switch to the left handed mode. You can set the undo limits. This is also too safe. Um, maybe to optimize better said your iPad storage. This is, for example, where you can also upload extra funds because affinity designer doesn't come with a fully blown library of funds. This is where you can add those two. One thing that is a bit of a difference between adobe and affinity is that all this artwork that you're creating in affinity, it's on your local storage. So there is no cloud connection. It will not be synced to any Cloud account, which I don't mind because I have I'm pretty consistent with saving up my backups on my iPad storage. You can also have such a solution as dropbox. Now, we will be using a lot of basic and intermediate and even advanced tools in affinity designer as we proceed with our project. All you got to know that is that the majority of your tools are here on the left side, the move tool, the node tool. This is where you find the pencil tool and the pen tool. In case of doubts, there's this small question mark icon here. That will give you a bit of a preview and a bit of a cheat sheet. Super important affinity designer. Both for vector art as well as for pixel art. Over here, you have this blue affinity designer icon, but when you click on it, you can also change to the Pixel persona and use combined pixel art with vector art. As you switch personas, the interface will change a little bit because you will get access to the tools that are specific to aster art basically. There's also the export persona, which I don't use that much because I lately, at least, I don't create super big files with multiple artboards where I want to export a lot of things at the same time. But if you needed that, there's the export persona. So we're just going to go back to the designer persona. When creating an affinity designer, this is what we will stick to 99.5% of the time. Because we'll be focusing on vector art. Then here on the right side, you have some studio panels. This is where you have your layers, for example, here you access the brush studio when you're using symbols, this is where you can access them. This is what I use a lot when I create repeat patterns. This is where we have our assets library, for example, this is my assets library. This will be the focus of the course. This is where the good stuff begins. Here, also question mark. You have your asset studio. Then I also often use the transform studio, and from the navigator, this is where you can check the gray scale of your art. This is what I also use most of the time whenever I create something new. Over here, you have the context toolbar. This all looks a little bit maybe intimidating, but this is actually one of the reasons number one reason why I like this synergy between Adobe Fresco and affinity designer is that Fresco has some things, just a few. That affinity doesn't have. And I still keep coming back for my final art to Affinity Designer just because it's so powerful. It takes a little bit of time to get used to it. That's why I like teaching affinity designer based on a project. You just tackle a project, for example, a botanical illustration or a botanical poster. And as you create it as you go, you learn all the tools that you got to learn basically. Now, let's move to Adobe Fresco, so Adobe fresco, let me show you the icon. This is the icon for Adobe fresco. You can get the software from your app store, and this is what the interface looks like. If you're familiar with adobe product, then it might look familiar, looks very similar. One difference between affinity versus adobe is that It's all saved in the cloud. Fresco has this seamless integration of adobe cloud, and for some people, it's super super useful. If I was creating anything here on my iPad and then I went back to work further on my computer, then all those files would show up there automatically. Fresco is also a painting and a drawing app for the iPad. It's developed by adobe, obviously. And it's available for the iPad for iPhone and for windows. I had a question in one of my Facebook groups why they cannot find it on their MC books or Max. It's because there is as far as I know, there is no desktop version. I think they target mainly iPads. Now, the good news is that and I don't want to pass on any judgment here, but Fresco is for free, which yeah, I was surprised because basically adobe puts a subscription on everything. And of course, for Fresco you can also get the subscription version, which has a few more options. But you can start with Fresco right away. I mean, even Procreate, I think I haven't checked lately, but I bought I bought Procreate for 999. Fresco is for free, and it has everything. It has vector tools, and it has pixel tools, and it's completely usable for beginners. So I was really positively surprised that it's a nice tool to work with for the iPad, which I personally love. You can also get a standalone subscription for some extra features for WB Fresco. Then it costs 999 but per month. And you can also get it in case you're using a photoshop, you can get it as part of the photoshop and Fresco plan, and then it costs something like 20, 21 years, I think. What is the difference? The paid version has some additional features. I cannot really tell you because I never had the paid version, so don't be surprised if you have the paid version and things look differently. But I heard that it has more brushes and more customization features. It also gives you the ability to export high resolution exports. Here for those artworks that I created, I would have some limits, but it never really stopped me because I worked just in one particular dimension, either 3,000 pixels or 4,000 pixels square, and this dimension is fully it's working. So I can export it. So for me, it's not a problem at all. The paid version also has an increased cloud storage, and I think you also have more things like more blending modes and a better layer management option. But for me personally, the free version is enough and I don't insist that you have to buy the paid version. This is our interface. Whenever we will be creating a new document, we will be doing that together in one of the lessons. You can create your custom sizes and you can just hit this plus icon or over here, it create new and create a new document very very fast. Then we can, for example, open this monsters gardening illustration that I was working on for my portfolio so that I can show you the inside of the interface. It's a little bit more limited, maybe because I have the free version compared with affinity designer and actually, I started so I started this Monsters illustration in Fresco, but then through I brought it to affinity just because I, you know, The interface is a little bit simpler. You have fewer options, but maybe it's even better for beginners because you might not be feel as intimidated compared to the affinity designer. What I like about it is that it also has vector brushes, which you can access here and all the other tools, you can access them here on the left side. It has pixel brushes. It has very praised live brushes, watercolor and oil for the free version that behave pretty much like the real deal, the real watercolor and oil paints. Here you have things like the eraser, the smudch tool, the move tool, what is it called the bucket tool? This is how you fill your shapes with color. We will be doing that too. Then here you have your layers panel by tapping it, you can just close it and open it. Here you get, the second icon, you get some extra layer properties. For example, you can lower the opacity, here lowered the opacity of my sketch. Over here, this is what will be applicable for our course. You get access to the symmetry tool, which we will be using as well to create our vector assets with the symmetry option in Fresco. This is it. Then the plus symbol, this is how you create a new layer, the symbol, you can make a layer visible or invisible. Here is the clipping mask symbol, and that's pretty much everything that I'm using in the Fresco. We will see that in action together. This icon here allows you to publish and to export your artwork. Now the question, the good question is. Why do I use both? Why can't I just stick to using Affinity Designer? First of all, the symmetry tool. This is at least a recent update, I think, either from July or even August, this month, 2024, at the moment of filming this course. I can very quickly use the symmetry tool. While using the vector brushes that I like. That's already a plus. You can go around that in infinity designer but you can draw just one side of your object and then copy it and then flip it and mirror it. Yeah, you can also work with symbols. But I like the speed of work with the symmetry tool here in Fresco, and it's not a problem at all to then just Export everything to affinity and I will show you how to export and work on the compatibility of what you create in Fresco so that it fits and it's workable in affinity designer. Number two is brushes. I focus on using vector brushes here and there's one category under all that is called Jitter. And this is what I really really like. I saved pretty much all of them to my favorites. Vectors tend to be very rigid and very smooth and they look very polished and some people don't like the feeling that they give. For me, using those jitter vector brushes in fresco and then exporting them to infinity is just a perfect synergy, an example of a perfect synergy because I can create something very playful, especially here for children's book illustration. The lines are not so polished and they're a little bit unpredictable. For example, there's this very heavy jitter brush. Let's go here, by the way, you have the color panel, and you can see what I mean that those brushes are very fluid, and they give a little bit more unpredictability. Also those brushes, you can fill shapes in real time. I think such brushes are called blob brushes. When I import everything to affinity, this shape, for example, will not have any stroke element, which means it will not have an outline, but it will only be filled. This has quite some advantages for me. Light Jitter. Here you can adjust the size. We will be working with those brushes together as we're working on our project, so don't worry if it's too much information at the same time. Is it two reasons? Yeah, it turns out it's two reasons. Why I really like combining affinity together with Fresco, the Jitter brushes. And the new symmetry tool. Then I export everything to affinity. Color changes are much easier. I have my pre saved color swatches here. I can use, for example, the same fill color or the same stroke color option to select the same color across the entire artwork if I want to change it or slightly adjust it. I can also use global colors. Also, when I choose one global color and I want to change it, it will adjust across my entire artwork. I can use gradients here and transparencies, just like on the slide from this little B UFO. And in general, textures. Also, I have my favorite textures that I also bought from some creators. For me, personally, affinity is much more powerful. That's why it's a software of my choice for the end effect. These were the main differences between the interface of affinity and the interface of Adobe Fresco. We also briefly talked about the pricing that fresco is for free, affinity is for a one time payment. Then I also told you about why I like using both sometimes, at least, why using both programs. 4. Vector Assets Explained: In this lesson, I wanted to talk about vector acids in general, what are vector assets and why you should be using them. Essentially, vector acts are reusable elements. You can store it in your software. They are not shared across devices, by the way. The assets that I have saved on this iPad, in order for me to have them on my desktop version of affinity designer, I would have to export them and then import them on my desktop version. But the import and export, I will explain it in a few minutes. A while ago, I also released my very first online course with a big focus on vector assets, in particular hand drone vector assets. The difference between this first course and this volume two course, is that the first one was indeed a very soft introduction. It was also targeted for pattern designers to create assets that will be then later on used for repeat patterns. Also a big focus of this previous class was hand drawn vector assets, especially using the pencil tool. In this course, I will be using some other tools. I will be also mixing affinity with Frisco for starters. You will also see that in this course, we will be learning some more intermediate techniques with the shape builder, with the rectangle tool over here, and I will be showing you some extra vector tools that will help you speed up your workflow. The previous course put a little bit more impact on this hand drone feeling. Which you can achieve, especially when you're using the pencil tool. In this course, we will focus much more. You will see it's going to be fun. We will focus much more on the shape builder, on the rectangle tool, and also on the alignment options, which right now you cannot see because I need to select one element. In this context menu, now we have a few more options lightening up. We will be also using quite a lot the alignment tool in this course, which we didn't use so much in the first one. And we will be using Boulan operations to create our vector shapes. At the same time this volume two, so to say, this volume two course is both dedicated to general illustration artists and also to pattern designers. Whatever you create in this course, you can use it to create with me a botanical vector illustration, but you can also take advantage of those assets and build your own repeat pattern. Example, I've done that. I have taken this very abstract looking flower or berry and very quickly, I was able to create a new repeat pattern. With this berry design. To say and also the leaves that I created for the purpose of this course. I was also able to reuse them to create this repeat pattern. This is the essence of vector assets. These are elements that are reusable. You can access your assets on the iPad here in affinity designer. On the right side, you have your asset studio. Those are all the flowers, for example, that I saved. I created them only one time, for example, this barrier over here, and now I will be able to reuse them across all my other projects. With the small exception, if I wanted to switch now to the desktop version of affinity designer, I would have to import them first because there is no cloud connection between the different devices, the way it is probably for adobe. But no problem. So also, those leaves that you see here, I was able just to when you click on an asset, you either have an option to delete it or to insert it, or you just press and hold and you can drag it onto your Canvas. So if I wanted to build this parent, let's say, I'm going to select this other leaf because it has a different color. I can insert it and I can work with it further. You can create different assets. It all really depends on your individual needs. You can create some icons. I think I even have over here, by the way, I clicked on this title here, and this shows me my entire library of assets. I just clicked on the title of the assets category, but you can also see small arrows on each side of this title, and I can just move between my assets. By selecting those arrows. But I wanted to quickly check if I have maybe it's under shapes. I think I had a category that was called a icons. For example, I have some social media icons here. I also have some icons that are branded software icons for affinity designer and for a Procreate. You can also if you're designing websites or using affinity designer for graphic design purposes, you can save up other design elements such as buttons, arrows, whatever you might need. I again, depends on your needs. I use it a lot also for general illustration. I was actually before in my kids illustration folder. I wanted to show you one example I was working on this really big search and find illustration. As I was working on it, let's go back to assets. I created a whole was it space? I created a whole space category, and I saved up a few planets. This one is also the fabrican of my website, by the way, this quirky planet here, and the Here, there's a long list of all the elements that I saved up as I was working on this illustration. Sometimes those were completely completely complete, that sounds strange. But complete objects, for example, here you see a spaceship, which is already finished and another spaceship that is finished. But sometimes I was saving up even small bits that took me some time to create. For example, this little shape here. Sometimes I found that I was needing it a lot to create, for example, elements for spaceships. I'm going to delete it so that it doesn't stay here by accident. To create all those elements, it takes a little bit of time. Maybe a minute, maybe or two. But if you find yourself creating something over and over again, and it's no fun, it's repetitive. It's a really good practice to just add in those elements to really save yourself a lot of time. Then all those elements, I was also able to recycle them, so to say, to build this illustration sheet for different robot designs. Or when I was on vacation, I was inspired to create some assets that had to do with the beach and some sea life. Let's find it to do sea beach, underwater. That was actually created for another illustration. But as I was building this bigger search and find illustration, which contains a lot of details. This took a lot of time. I don't even know exactly how much because affinity does not record your creation time, the way procreate does. But if it did, then wow, it would be many hours, and sometimes you just need to fill out an illustration. Let's say, 90% of your design is completely original. You've never drown it before. This is the pure creativity that you translate onto your Canvas. But sometimes you just want to fill it up faster. Maybe you have multiple client projects and you just need to speed up. I have friends in the publishing industry who get such tight deadlines and They know that I also work or help myself working with vector assets and they're really envious that I'm able to grab all those assets, and when I'm running out of energy, I can just drop them and fill in some gaps, for example, this small fish. It's basically the same fish that I saved somewhere in my library, I could drop it or there was another fish that I recycled. I think those two guys. Yeah, they were also here. They were from another project or some seaslls, So underwater plants that I used. I think I had another illustration with Marmad Where are those guys? Yeah, this one here. I think this is how it started that. I created a few algae and coral reef acts, exactly there here. They really help you to be much more efficient and to spare yourself this repeatable work. Then vector acids are also very adaptable. I can show you one more example if we were to work again on this vector illustration. Let's go back to our botanical category. This flower was actually built from this flower here. This was an asset that I created at the very beginning. It wasn't that detailed and it served as a base for this other flower that you can see here. This was my starting point. Sometimes you will create something basic that you might find useful for the future, you will save it up and you can still modify it. For example, on this flower, we can duplicate This circle, make it a little bit smaller, and position it in the middle. We can also create a copy of this element here. Let's check in the layers if it was copied yet it was copied. We can go to the one at the back. We can change the color to something completely different and then from the move tool, we can also resize it, make it completely different, place it in the middle. Then we have a completely different flower that we can also save into our library. Then to save an asset, you just have to go to the subcategory that you want to save it into. Then each of the subcategories. In this botanical main category, I have a subcategory called flowers. Complete flowers, leaves, some extra details and vases. Now this new flower, I would like to save it again to my flowers subcategory. I go to the three horizontal lines, the Hamburger menu. Click on it. Here you can also rename your subcategory, or you can completely delete it. Here you can also add asset from selection. This entire flower is selected. You see the thin blue line. Add asset takes a little bit of time. Now this new flower is already added in. I just realize this one was not added. I can also add it because it will be just so easy to insert it into another project. Let's save this one too. And this is how you are slowly step by step building your library of assets. I already mentioned a little bit of naming that is important here, we can go under assets to this other main hamburger menu. Here you have a few options that are important to know of. When you want to start a category, a category is a name for a folder that holds all your assets. Then if you want to create a complete new category, you just have to select at category. If I'm on desktop and I want to import a category that I built on my iPad, you go to import category. Here you also have an option to create all those sub folders like flowers, leave, stems. You just click on ad subcategory. If you build something on the iPad and you want to back it up, or you want to export it and then import it on your desktop version. You have the option here to export category. You can also rename it. If I click on rename, right now, I am sorting it alphabetically. That's why I also gave them numbers. You can also delete it. And here, you also have an option to change the background. I really like this dark view, but in case you want something else, you can choose the light one, but you see this is not working well for what I created. And sometimes the checkerboard is also a good option. It all depends on your personal preferences, but I like the dark mode, so I stick to the dark background. You can also sort categories by date added. And when you select that, it switches itself to the other option, which is sort categories by name, and this is the option that I prefer. I like to sort them by name, so that when I click on this library review, I see all my asset categories alphabetically. And the ones that I use the most, they have a number. So the most important one is also the zero branding category where Oh, my new logo, where I could, for example, just drop my logo over here, which I don't want, so I'm going to delete it for now. I also have some textures. You can also save your color palettes as assets. If I wanted to use, for example, this color palette, I just click on this asset and I click insert, and now I have this new color palette. Another good example is that you can, for example, save up all those little elements that build bigger elements. For instance, here, I have a whole selection of mouths and noses and smiles and hands. I have some animal head shapes and also accessories like sunglasses or hats or little bags. This is the one that I used the most. That's why I just named it as number one. Your assets can be vector based, but they can also be raster based. If you have any pixel based assets, you can also save them in the same way in your assets library. Do you remember where to export and import your assets? You go to this main Hamburger mania, import category or export category. That's important to know. And when you're exporting category, for example, if I wanted to back up this category here, I click on Export. On my iPad storage, I have a separate folder called resources, affinity assets, and this is where I save all my assets. They have this file extension point AF assets. That's how you can recognize that it's an affinity assets file. Then in general, it's a good practice to export your categories every now and then and to back them up somewhere on your storage, either on your internal device storage or in your Cloud storage. I think this is all that you need to know about assets, in affinity designer. In this course, the extra material will be about Adobe Fresco. We will be also exploring how to create vector assets in Adobe Fresco and then import them and save them up in affinity. Those vases, for example, they were not created in affinity. They were created in Fresco. Here when I go back to my home page, all those vases they were created in one document. You can see here all the layers. And then later on, I exported everything into affinity, and I saved it up here directly as an extra subcategory of different vases. Now, I hope that I don't have to convince you any more about the huge advantages of using assets in general in your workflow. Sum it up for you, vector assets are reusable elements that you can store, organize, and access across all your projects. They can include some icons or logos, buttons, illustration elements or individual components that build something bigger. They improve your efficiency and speed w working on an illustration because you can simply just drag and drop them onto your document instead of creating them from scratch. In this way, you can spare yourself repeatable work and save time with bigger projects. Now let's move to the next lesson. 5. Symmetry Tool in Fresco: All right. We are starting learning about vector design tools from Adobe Fresco as a warm up exercise. Also, in order to learn quickly how to work in Fresco and then export and import everything into affinity designer properly, which will be our end software. This exercise, we will be creating vector vases. Those are just a few vases that I created as I was preparing for this course. I will show you how I created them in Adobe fresco and then imported them into affinity designer. We first have to start by creating a document. Instead of a square format, we will go for the rectangular format because vases are a little bit longer. This is the file that I was working in previously, but we will create a new document from scratch to create a new document in Adobe fresco. You either Click here on the plus symbol custom size, or you create here in the lower left corner create new. Then you can either choose the sizes that you use previously or you click plus custom size, and this is where you can adjust your dimensions for your document settings. We will stick to pixels, and we will choose a width of 2,500 pixels and a height of 3,000. This just comes from my personal experience that either 3,000 pixel square or this type of rectangular format work the best for my asset sizes. The orientation is vertical. Under print size, we make sure that we change our DPI to 300 instead of 72 because it will be possibly also important for print. We leave background as white. And in case you're using this size more often, you can also click on safety size and you can rename it here. And now we're done and we hit Create document. By now, you already know a little bit of Adobe fresco interface from my introductory lesson. All the tools that we will be using to draw our vector assets are in general here on the left side. The most important one are vector brushes, so we will be creating vector assets. So we can create on our vector brushes, and over here on top of this vector brushes window, there's like a little spot here with a horizontal line. When we click on it and hold onto it, we can position this vector brushes window anywhere we want. We basically just want to dock it. So we press and hold it and we release it and this docks, so to say, our vector brushes in the window permanently. Normally, I also open the color studio button over here. This is not so important for this particular exercise because we will be drawing in black. But in case you need a color palette, you can also just press and hold and also dock it here. Now our color palette and our brushes are docked and they will not disappear as we are drawing. From the vector brushes, you can go to the all category, and for the free version, you have a few categories to choose from. There's basic brushes. If you don't want any texture or jitter around your shapes, then I recommend that you just choose this round simple vector brush without any taper at the end over here in the lower left corner, you can also adjust the size of your brush. The next icon is for smoothing, how smooth your line is going to be. If it's super smooth, then your line will be very flowy, so to say. The same gestures apply just like in affinity and in Procreate. If you tap twice, you do the the undo and redo buttons, you can also find them in the upper right corner over here. This round brush would be good. Make sure that you test out your brushes so that you see which one is to your liking. If the streamline is too, you can always lower it down. I think it's streamlined in affinity and smoothing in fresco. Too much habit working with affinity. You can also reduce this smoothing. This would be the round vector brush that I recommend, but I personally like to create vector assets in fresco with the jitter brushes. Under Jitter, you have the heavy jitter brush. If I just draw a straight line, you see that it has some irregularities. Here, the last icon also lets you set taper, so we can also set it actually to zero. Taper means that the end line and the start line are more pointy. Medium jitter, create a lot of lines right now. By the way, as I start to drawing a new vector layer is created. That applies at least to the first stroke in the document. This was medium jitter, I can also make it a little bit bigger so that you can see better. It's also a little bit more unpredictable and spontaneous, but not as dramatic as this heavy jitter brush. If you really want to stay on the safer side, you can go for the light jitter and this is what I will be using for my vases. I'm just going to check if there's any. No taper is off, so it's all good. This is the brush that I will be using. You can also make it bigger. And my smoothing is at roughly, I think, somewhere half the line like 50%. Another tool that we got to know in abi fresco for our purposes is the fill tool, this little bucket icon over here to the left. Whenever we draw shape, instead of you can also color it in like this in abi fresco, but this will take ages. Instead, you switch to the fill tool. And then you just fill your shape. My brushes were not docked, I will dock them again, and then you just got to remember to go back to your brushes icon. Again, if I was to create this flower, I just draw my outline with my light jitter brush, select the fill tool, and just fill this shape. If I were to export everything to affinity like this, all those individual shapes, as long as they are not joined, they will be recognized as individual shapes, and then you will see later on when you import it into affinity, they will be on separate layers. So that's super handy. Theoretically, all those lines and all those shapes could go over the ho vector acts, but of course, we want something more pretty. When I click on this layer, a few more options show up and here I can also clear the layer. Other options are you can hide the layer, this icon, or you can do it here on the right side. You can delete the layer, or you can also select multiple layers when you have a few so that you can group them. So Let's draw something. Another thing that will be useful for creating our vector acids here is the eraser. You can see that the eraser also has the same types of brushes for normal vector brushes. For example, you can use the round brush, but if you're drawing with the light jitter brush, you can choose the same brush for your eraser so that you can erase elements of your shape in a similar way. And the same gestures apply to finger tap on the screen and you undo. We have our vector brushes. I will be drawing with the light jitter. We will be drawing in black so that we can see the silhouette of our vase better. You know where to find the eraser and you know where to find the field tool. All your layers will be here on the right side. This is where you find your layers panel. And now the most important tool for this lesson is the symmetry tool in Adobe fresco. You can find it here under this third icon. There are a few more options, snapping grids, perspective grid, and there is symmetry. It might be close, so you can open it by clicking on this arrow, and then you toggle on symmetry. By default, you have this beautiful vertical symmetry with the line going from the top to the bottom of your document. Let's stay with this light jitter brush just to show you what I mean. This is very similar to procreate. For example, we were learning about symmetry in procreate in my procreate online course about drawing vector ts, and this was basically the same system. You can have this type of symmetry with the vertical line, horizontal line, the same like in procreate. I think this was called radial in procreate, if we wanted to create a crazy flower shape and then fill it with a color. Then we would use this radial symmetry. This is super easy, as you see. There are different types of symmetry. In here, you can play around with it as much as you want. There's also some rotational variations. The same like in Procreate. At least the principles are the same like Procreate because Fresco has a few more options with those rotational options. We will stick to this first type of symmetry, the vertical one, so we can close this panel. I'm going to t on this layer and it. I will also i sheet with the ases that I created before and we will do the exercise together. How to gain an inspiration regarding what to draw. First of all, you can use either Pinterest or Google images to find interesting shapes for your vases. I created a special dedicated board called vintage florals, where I tried to find some interesting vase shapes that have a bit of a retro or vintage feel, and they have very interesting shapes. You can also work in split screen. By dragging the program to one side. You can minimize also your pinterest board here and you can look at different vases simultaneously, you can do the same with Google images. Another alternative is that you take some time browse through the web or through Pinterest, and you do a few warm up exercises where you're drawing vases in your sketchbook, just to explore different shapes, and again, as a warm up exercise. If you like ceramics like me, you can also look around your house for the vases that are already there standing somewhere in your window sill, and then you can also practice drawing them either in your sketchbook or directly here in Adobe Fresco with the symmetry tool. Now we discuss the theory, the tools that we will be using a bit of a refresher of the interface. We talked about how to gather inspiration about finding interesting shapes for your vases, and in the next video, we will get into our actual practice. 6. Practice: Vector Vases in Fresco: Now we are ready to start drawing. I will show you a few examples of how I've drawn my vases and then exported and imported them into affinity designer. Feel free to draw the same vases like mine. But I would also encourage you to look for your own shapes and to do a little bit of research and to draw your own assets. Instead of pinterest, I would like to take advantage and see my little cheat sheet of the vases that I've already drawn. So I'm going to take this photos app and drag it and drop it instead of pinterest. Vector brushes, I have my light jitter brush. I think the size is very good. Symmetry. As long as you see this line, you know that it's on and it's working. We don't really need the color studio because we will be just using black. Now I will show you how I draw a few of those vases that I created before. Let's start with the one here in the uppermost left corner. We will be using the first layer that was created, but every time we want to work on a new vase, we will have to hit the plus symbol to create a new layer. Let's get started. If you draw and hold in Fresco, you will draw a perfectly straight line. That's also very useful. I'm going to hold it for a second so that it snaps into this perfect line. You see that the slight jitter brush creates for me a bit of an uneven outline, and this is what I want to achieve. This vase over here also has a rounder shape. You can also create a circle shape by drawing and then just holding your apple pencil on the screen and will snap into a rounder shape and then you can also move it a little bit to see how you like it. For my outline for my shape, I like to draw a little bit like inside into this shape because it will be easier to color it in and I will be preventing any gaps between the lines because then later on when I'm using the fil tool, and there is a small gap, I might be overflowing the ink onto the rest of my canvas. I also start inside over here. Draw a straight line, have a look here. Once you're holding it here, you can still edit it. This is good. And then I'm drawing the line at the bottom. This I would like to fix. Maybe it's cosmetic. Maybe it's not really even necessary to fix that, but I cannot see such small things. I'm going to use the eraser to adjust it a little bit. The eraser can also change size over here. Can also rotate your canvas to make your changes. Sometimes for the eraser, the round brush works the best and then you can just make the size a little bit smaller. And then adjust your shape. Then I'm moving to this field tool and I'm filling everything with the black color. This is the advantage of using black. You can zoom in and out and you can see if you're happy with your shape. I'm pretty happy. I doesn't have to be the same in the photo that I created before. I just want to demonstrate how I've done it. Light jitter, if I know I'm using this brush, I can also close the brush window. And now I will make this first vase invisible by hitting this icon. Then plus new layer, and now I can deal with this vase over here. More or less. It's going to be a shape like this perhaps. Then you can always fix that, but you have to be very mindful of any gaps in between the lines that you have to color in. That looks good and now the bottom line. This is my personal preference that it doesn't have to be perfectly straight. And now I fill this shape to see if in general, I like it or if I need to fix anything. In this vase, we have an element, which is the little handle that belongs to this vase. It has to be first of all, on a separate layer, so I'm going to hit the vase underneath. Create a new layer and now I will have a new layer underneath my main vase shape. You see which layer is selected because once it is selected, it has this blue outline around it. Then I go back to my precision panel and I switch off symmetry, and then I click on click on it again to hide it. Now I'm going to draw this handle, but this time without using the symmetry on the other side. I'm going to hold it so that it creates a rounder shape. And then I'm going to switch the visibility of my main vase shape so that I can see better where I have to close it. In case you want to make it smaller, you have to select the layer that you want to and over here you have the. Actually, it's called a move to infinity and here it's a transform panel. You can move it around as you like. You can also rotate it in the same way like in affinity, and once you are done and it's adjusted to your liking, you have to hit done back to my vector brush. Then there are two ways in which you can group your layers. Theses one is just to grab one layer and to drag it on top of the other one. Now you see a little stack in Fresco and when you double click on it, you can access the layers that belong to this group and then you can hit the arrow to go back. We're going to make it invisible again, it plus. Now let's maybe try to make Which one is interesting? This one is nice. Let's create together this one. A new layer that is empty, switching on symmetry again. The line is here, so it's all set up. That looks nice. Now back to the vector tool. Remember that you have to switch between the fill tool and the vector brush tool, creating another layer underneath, and now we will draw those little elements. Let's start from this side, and it's a bit of a trial and error with this one. I fill it with color. You have to do it on both sides. To see better, let's go to the color studio. Hue saturation brightness laters. Let's make this black into gray by pumping up the brightness. Now let's fill it again. Again, this is cosmetic. You could change all the colors again in infinity designer. This is just to see things better. That looks good to me. I just have to remember to switch back to my black color. And then I'm dragging the layers on top of each other so I can create a group. We make it invisible plus. Once you get into this flow, you do things very very fast. This one looks interesting. Let's do this one together too. That looks good. What else? This one plus holding so that I get a straight line. This is a little bit too close together. Tapping twice on the screen to go back. I want it a little bit more narrow. This one is ready. We make it invisible to see better new layer. Let's create maybe one more that is a little bit more complex. It includes symmetry elements and nonsymmetry elements. For example, this one. This will be the last one and then we will be importing everything into infinity. Let's start with this basic straight line. The the base of my vase. That looks good. Let's fill it with black. That looks a little bit different, but I'm okay with that. Now, this little mouth over here, I'm not sure how to call it is part of this basic shape. I will be still drawing on the same layer. But I am switching off the symmetry tool and then I have to hit it again to close it. Making sure I'm on my vector brush. You'll get used to that. Then I'm going to draw this little mouse or a beak. In Polish, we call it e Beck. It's like a little beak. Our jeu Beck is ready, and now we need our handle. You know the drill ready back to my vector brush, a new layer, and then I'm going to draw this shape here. That looks good. Switching off the visibility of my main shape. Now I just have to make sure to be on the right layer for starters and to close it properly. Let's fill it. Bring back the visibility of our main shape. Going to choose the transform tool for this shape over here and position it a little bit lower, so that it looks a little bit more seamless. The reason why I included the handle for or the grip. I'm not sure how it's called the grip of this vase on a separate layer is that it will be easier for me to recolor it. Just like here, I use different shades of pink and it adds a little bit more dimension and depth into the piece. Now we're hitting done. There's another way to group our layers, especially if you have more layers. Instead of just dragging and dropping one layer onto the other, I click on one layer and this extra menu opens, and then I can choose select multiple. This makes more sense if you have really multiple multiple layers that you have to select and then group them fast. But I just wanted to show it to you so that you can learn this extra trick. Now those two layers are selected, you see the blue selection line around our layer symbol. And here we have the folder icon will allow us to group those layers. Now they're grouped. Now we will be exporting everything to affinity. But please feel free to take your time to sketch your vases, draw as many as you want. By the way, when you hit the arrow to go back to your home page, let's bring back our full screen. You will see that the system, W fresco software will be saving your document and also saving it in the Cloud. The dots menu also give you the option to rename it. We can rename it to vases. That is different than this document here. But I can show you the original document that I was working on. I think I've drawn 20 vases. You can judge just one. You can just save time and judge just one that you like. But the purpose also of this course is to teach you a bit more speed and efficiency. I suggest draw a little bit more so that you can create a nice asset category and nice asset subcategories in affinity designer. This will help you to save time in the future for future projects. We have renamed our document. We can go back. Now for the export. We have to make sure, first of all, that there are no clipping masks. But we weren't using clipping masks are over here. You can see this icon with the Canvas symbol and the arrow down. We were not using clipping masks this time around, we might be using them later on. We have to turn on back the visibility of all the layers because otherwise they will not be taken into consideration when we export them. And this little picture icon here is just the white background. If you don't want to get it exported into affinity, then you can also turn off the visibility of this layer over here. As you are working on your document, you can always go here to the title of the document, arrow down, and you can also save it as you go. Then the export icon is in the upper right corner here. So we had export, publish an export. And now we will specify to export our document as format PDF. In my experience, PDF works the best because it will also preserve the layers and the groups that you set up in your document. So PDF export, my recommendation is to save it to files. Files is application on your iPad, can show you the icon. This is the icon for this app. If you've taken my previous courses, you already know that I am in this habit of saving some work in progress and my working documents in the files folder. I have a separate folder called Exports, and this is where I will be saving my PDF document with the vases, save to files. It's already pre selected, but in case it's not, in case I have something else, go back to the folder that you need and then hit safe and done. You can also exit to the homepage so that everything gets saved up automatically. Now this PDF file is saved into this exports folder. Then we go back to affinity and I will be basically replicating the same document here. I like to work on a Canvas 4,000 pixel square to create a new document in affinity, we hit new new document, and I also have this pre saved, but it's very easy, in general, you just have to adjust here your dimensions to the 4,000 pixels and make sure that under document units, you have pixels selected. 300 DPI, no art port, and color mode RGB. Here we can also set up an infinity margins and bleed, but we don't need that, so we just stick to general, and then we hit okay. Step number one is to create our pixel based document in affinity designer. Then by hitting the arrow in the upper left corner, we go back to our live dog interface, and now we have to open our PDF document from Adobe Fresco. Here we have the icon open document. We have our exports folder selected, and we select the document with vases. We keep 300 DPI. This is the previous and we know, it's correct. That's the one that I need. We keep our GB, and the rest pretty much stays the same. We hit k. And this is our document. The reason why we have two documents now is the difference in measurement units. The document that we created, which we can also save, by the way, here, Hamburger menu, save us. You can, for example, name it as assets, ve, and then it's going to have a name, and then you can I will also save it into this exports folder just as an example. Now it's going to have a name. You can also see all the details of this document in the upper right corner. We see that the document that we just created in Affinity designer has 4,000 pixels square and it's in RGB, Was the PDF document that we imported from Adobe Fresco from our exports folder is in points. It retains RGB, but it's in points. The reason for that is that PDFs follow print standards. Pixels as a measurement unit is specific to digital media basically. PDF, they are meant to be printed out. The unit of measurement for PDF files will be point by default. PDF files, by the way, can contain both vector and raster graphics. They can mix and match. Whenever you export something as a PDF or give a PDF file to your client. They will most likely open it in points and not in pixels or in centimeters or in inches, which is a little bit annoying and you just have to be careful about the scale differences between the two. That's why I am opening the Fresco PDF separately, and I am creating my affinity document like here also separately. Then I go into my original PDF document. See, this is what I like. Everything is retained. There is gesture that you most likely know from my previous classes, you select the group or the layer that you find on top, and then a two finger tap on the last layer or the last group and everything is selected at the same time. This is what I like and this is what I'm missing in Fresco. That's why I keep coming back to affinity designer because there's more tools to choose from and the gestures, I find more advanced and they help me to speed up my work. Now all the vases are selected. We go to the three dots menu. And we hit copy. We copy all the vases. We hit the left arrow to go back to the interface. We click on the document that we just created, again, three dots, paste. Now our vases are here. I can tap somewhere outside of my document so that nothing is selected. When I go back to the live Docs, you see indeed that I created everything one to one and in the preview can tell that the dimensions are completely different. Right now, I can get rid of it, I can just close without saving. I'm not going to be working in this PDF document anymore. I will be working in my affinity file. Now we have to tidy things up a little bit. The first thing that you can do if you would like to be super tidy like me, is you can rename your assets. The easiest way to do that is to swipe to the left with your Apple pencil or your finger and a small menu will pop up and here you can rename layer two vase. I'm going to copy it. This is the work that you just do at the beginning, and you do it one time, and you don't have to do it ever again. I was doing some vector based work for a client last months and they were very specific about having all the layers named as much as possible. If I was using this pre safe vector assets for such a client project, I would do the work initially when I create those assets at the beginning, but then I would not have this work in the future to have to rename those layers. That's why basically I am in the habit of renaming, especially the top group layer accordingly. Now we have to check can do that from the move tool. If everything looks okay. Now that everything is spread out more evenly wherever I click. That's what I also like about definity. It will find this shape and it will just select it super fast. Then I'm opening my shapes because sometimes this is this fase here, sometimes we were working on the shape by fixing the outline and some new shapes were created. We will have to merge those shapes. We can do it on the group level from the Move tool. We will be talking about blean operations in a separate lesson. But for now, to merge the entire shape, all you got to know is that you got to select this group, go to the Move tool. Blean operations are here, and then you have to select add. And now it's only one shape that is merged. I'm keeping the separation because maybe I will want to change the colors. We can also change the color to this blue, and then this handle also blue, but on the HS L sliders from the color studio, I can make it maybe a little bit darker. Now I move to my next phase, I can close it. Here everything looks good, so I'm just going to give it to this blue color. Can also choose a completely different color. This shape is also supposed to be one color, but because I was fixing the outline so much, some extra vector strokes were created, and even though everything is grouped nicely as one shape, they were created on separate layers. We just need to tidy it up and select this upper group from the Move to bul operations ad, and it's merged and also our name is retained. Let's give it another color. This one is also supposed to be one shaped. There are some unnecessary strokes that were made. We select the entire group, and we merge it with the add function and give it another color just because it's more fun this way. I will switch of the visibility of this shape so that I can first work on the base. This is meant to be just one shape from the group level, bul in operations ad and let's give it a color, and now I will switch off the visibility of my main base and bring back those little handles. I open the group, I click any layer that I find here, and then I'm just going to drag this one shape to select everything. You see that I was fixing it. That's why some extra strokes or extra vector objects actually were created. Using the add function, I am merging them. You have to move it. I mean, you have to do it from the move tool and sometimes it switches itself into the node tool. The other handle in the same way. Add. Now we only have those two shapes and we can recolor them from the group level. Also make it darker so that it's a little bit more two dimensional. Now we have this vase left. Let's see. Yeah, we have to merge the main shape of the vase. Recolor it into something happy, and also recolor this handle. Get out of the swatches panel, HSL sliders, hue saturation luminant, luminans down, which will make it a little bit darker. Now our vases are ready. They have this nice uneven shape because we were using the jitter brushes in fresco. It's less polished. It's a matter of personal preference, again. Feel free to draw your vases also with the smooth vector brush. I the differences maybe not too dramatic, but I can see it anyway that it's a little bit uneven and I like it a lot. All right. In this lesson, we created our vector vases in fresco, just to prove that, those are vectors. Let's select this vase and go to the Node tool. You see that it has nodes and it's basically a vector path. So all good. We also exported our PDF file from W fresco to our exports folder, and then we imported it to affinity designer, we created an extra affinity document. We shifted all our vases into this new document, and we polished them off a little bit. Now those vases are ready to be added as our vector assets, and this is what we will be doing in the next video. 7. Assets Studio in Affinity: Great. In the previous lesson, we created our first vector assets and now we had to the asset studio, which you can find here on the right side right in the middle, and we will be creating our first assets category and our subcategories. In order to do that, we have to go to the main assets menu over here. And then we select add category. For simplicity, I will just name it as botanical assets. This will just be a dummy category that I will create for the purpose of the scores because I already have my own assets category for botanical elements. Case you change your mind, you can always rename your category here and you can make a copy of it or you can delete it altogether. Once you created it, when you click on the title and you scroll, you see all the other asset categories that you created before. And you can imagine them as little folders, which will be nesting your vector assets or just assets in general because you can also create raster assets and populate your library in this way. My advice is to sort it by theme because sometimes, for example, the kitchen treats, cooking, category, they tend to grow pretty big. For this course, we will be focusing on botanical assets anyway, so we can stick to one category. Then this main folder has to be populated with subfolders. We cannot add in those vases right away into our category. We need to go again to this menu and add a subcategory, which will be like a subfolder or a mini folder. At least for the iPad version, you cannot reshuffle those asset categories freely. That's why I will create a few subcategories in advance basing it on which elements I will be using the most. Now we have this new subcategory called assets. We can click on the sub menu here, Hamburger menu. You can add assets from the submenu. You can rename the subcategory, which we will do, and you can also delete it altogether. I'm going to hit rename, and the elements that I use the most are flowers. I'm going to create one subcategory in advance so that I have all my flowers right on top. Back to the main menu, add another subcategory. Then the sub menu again, rename the subcategory, and I will rename it as complete florals or something like that, which will be floral compositions that already include some berries or leaves or stems. Next, another subcategory that I want are leaves, rename, leaves. Different leaf shapes will also be working on those together, and What else? Sometimes I have categories for berries or for stems, but I'm going to skip that and I will create one last subcategory for our vases. You can also name it as you want in your own language, however you want vases, is going to be mine. Now we have a category and a set of subcategories that are ready to be filled with our wonderful assets. There are two ways in which you can add your assets, and I'm going to show you both. When we go to the layers panel over here, can add assets individually, and the system will recognize that it's an asset from the group level. If I wanted just to add this one as an asset, it's enough that it's selected from the move tool. You see this selection area. Then I go to the respective sub category, Hamburger menu, add asset from selection, and then it takes a few seconds, and there it is. You can also select the rest by either swiping to the right or you select the top layer to fingertap on the last one. See that everything is selected. And the group level, the top level will be recognized as an individual asset. Add asset from selection. Then all of those are added in. This saves you a lot of time. Let's create a copy of this vase and having this vase selected, I will go to this group icon. There's also an option to ungroup. And I'm going to ungroup those elements. Having those two elements selected, you see there's a bluish selection. I go to the studio, add asset from selection. Sometimes, I am saving up as elements twice. The first time I saved up this purple vase one time as a whole. It had its basic shape and it had this little grip. Sometimes I want certain elements separately. For example, I want maybe to be able to use just this base separately without having to delete this grip. Another time, I just clicked on this circular like grip area. I'm going to click insert. Sometimes you just want individual elements, which will be components, so to say for other elements. From the dropleor tool, I'm selecting the same color of the vase, in this way, I created a completely new vase. And then I could group it again. And from the group level, I can add it as an extra asset. This way, I have this little grip separately. I have two vases with a slightly different shape, which have this circular grip, and the two bases, the yellowish green one and the purple one are also saved separately. I'm going back to this original document with my vector vases. I've mentioned before that I created 20 of those. Again, two finger tap on the last one. Everything is selected and I wanted to demonstrate again how easy it is to create a lot of assets and to add them into your library at the same time, add asset from selection. We'll take a few seconds. Boom. This is really satisfying. This is what I meant. Don't create just one or two, go for it. Have a coffee, have a tea, create a few more because it really looks good to the eye when you have a little bit more in your library. Now we also know how to create a new category and how to create those subcategories and how to add your assets. Remember also a reminder that from this main menu you can also export and import your asset categories or little folders with assets. This is what I do on a regular basis to back it up so that nothing gets lost in case something happens to my device. Now, we had a pretty good introduction into the asset studio. 8. Rectangle Tool & Alignment Tool: Before we start creating the rest of our assets, the florals, and the leaves, and a few floral compositions, I wanted to introduce you in the lessons to come with the most important basic shape creation tools in affinity designer. I'm just going to recycle this assets with vases document. In this video, I will be showing you the basics of using the rectangle tool and the alignment tool. Grouping, you already know how to group. You have to select everything that you got a group. It doesn't matter if you do it from top to bottom or from bottom to top. Here you have the grouping icon. And you can switch off the visibility of your shapes over here by toggling on and off this little circle. Then I'm tapping somewhere else outside of my document. For building our minimalist geometric looking vector assets, we will be using the rectangle tool a lot. In case you cannot locate it, you can always press this little question mark and we'll show you this little cheat sheet. A rectangle tool is named in a pretty strange way. I don't know if it's the same in adobe, instead of a shape tool. It's called a rectangle tool because this is the very first shape that you see in the menu. There's another tool which we will be also learning about, which is called the shape builder tool in affinity designer, and the icon for it is right underneath the rectangle tool. But for now, whenever you choose any of those tools that you can find on the left side, there will be a new context menu showing up here on this upper layer, so to say. Let's create a rectangle. If you want a perfect shape, for example, a perfect rectangle, you have to hold one finger on your screen. And then you will get a perfect square. The same the ellipse. You can create leap ss, but you can also create perfect circles, just holding one finger, and that's how easy it gets triangles. Also if you want perfect triangles, you have to hold one finger. And maybe let's take this triangle as an example. When you stay within this shape and when you stay within this rectangle menu. There are still a few options to modify your shape. For example, let me maybe zoom in. You see that there is a small red dot which shows us there are a few more options that we can do here with this shape. For example, I use this type of 90 degrees triangle shape to create my shadows. Now, let's have a look at the round was it rounded rectangle? Yeah, I think so. This is the rounded rectangle. If we skip to the node tool, it will not show us much because this is categorized as shapes, and it's not curves. We can still transform something into curves and we'll change it cycon, and it has ten slightly different properties later on. We'll also talk about it. From the move tool, we only see the selection. To go back to those extra options that make this shape editable, we have to go back to the rectangle tool, and this is where you see this little circle shows up again. Look for a little circles for any of the shapes from the library, they will give you a hint, a hat, this shape is further editable till it is a shape. You can recognize that it's categorized as a shape because next to the layers for those shapes, there's an icon with the geometric forms. There's a square. It's really tiny. There's a circle, I think a diamond and a triangle. If we were, for example, to draw something with the pencil tool, This would be a curve. It's even pre labeled automatically as a curve, and it has a slightly different symbol, which looks like a path with mathematical nodes. It's like a symbol that is typical for vector shapes. Going back to the rectangle tool, we regain our access to the small cute little dot that will give us a few more options to edit. There's also this guiding line that shows us how far we can go in this edition. For example, then if I want to modify the shape further, I have to go back to the move tool. For example, how is it called again rounded rectangle? I use it often to build stems for my flowers. Til it is a shape, it's still editable. Sometimes I prefer to convert this shape into curves. The reason for that is that often when I'm rescaling, for example, stars. There is a bit of an issue with keeping the proportions. That's why, for example, if I were to create a star, if I want a perfect star, again, one finger on the screen. Then I moved to the move tool and I wanted to change something. Sometimes there might be scaling issues. What I do is having the star selected, I go to the three dots menu. And I convert it to curves. This is safer this way. Now when we go to the Node tool, it actually flip to the node tool automatically, it's not a shape anymore. When I click back on the star, there is no option to edit the properties of the star anymore. But at the same time when I go to the Node tool, at least I can create a wonky star, I can play with the nodes, which I would not have access to if I just kept this original star. If I move to the node tool, there are no nodes because it's not a curve like this star, it's a shape, and it has different properties and the options to edit it are a little bit different. Here, we say, fine, I'm converting it to curves. I don't need those other properties for shapes. I actually want more flexibility to work with the nodes or with the corner tool, which we'll be also discussing in the next lessons. But if I still want to retain the editability of the shape from the rectangle tool, then I'm not converting it into curves. For example, this shape, I really recommend that you grab another coffee and you play around with those shapes. This is for example, how we will be creating some basic flowers because it has some really cool options. You can also create a star that is a little bit more rounded. You can create, is it a pentagon? It's crazy and sometimes when you play around with this shape, sometimes don't even remember how I created it because there's so many options, and when you see something that you like, then converted to curves so that it stays set in stone. You know what I mean? You cannot make a mistake by going again to the rectangle tool and moving those tiny circles again and messing up with your shape. If you like it, my advice, convert it to curves, and then I don't know. Maybe you have a category for some wonky shapes. Save it right away because I'm guaranteeing you once you start playing with those shapes, you can arrive at very spectacular and unexpected outcomes. Okay. I hope that now it's clear. Let's maybe create this double star. I hope that now it's clear what is the difference between curves and shapes. This double star that I just created has this shape symbol and the remaining two stars, they were converted to curves. That means I have more access to the nodes, which I don't have here. But from the rectangle menu, again, I have access to those cute little dots that will give me basically some extra editability. Part of your homework when or after watching this lesson is to go through the entire library and to try out some shapes. I did mention that this context menu also shows up when we select this menu. Let me show you what I mean by selecting the star. I do sometimes use it when I want to change the number of elements of a given shape, for example, on the star. You can adjust here the points. I can for example, say I want 15 points, and then they are further editable. Or I can change it to what will happen when I make three? Triangle. Stip question four. L et's change it too far. This is a cute little star. This is what you often see in minimalist illustrations. If you like something, again, you remember the drill, convert to curves so that you do not mess up with the shape that you just created purely by accident. And then go to whatever category you want to populate and add this extra shape basically as a new asset. So Let me remove those, and I just wanted to tell you which shapes we will be using probably the most. I like the rounded rectangle for creating stems for the plants. Of course, we will be using the perfect circles to create the middles of our flowers, for example, quite a lot. This is easy. We will be building some extra tulips, I think using the triangle. Star we will also be using to create, for example, pointe middles to our flowers. We will be practicing everything together. Pi is very interesting. It looks like a pie chart to get one finger on the screen. I use the pie the most to get see it snapped into a perfect semicircle. If you're using semicircles a lot, they could be like half a leaf. Create one, convert to curves so that you do not change it by accident and you will have a perfect semicircle. Speaking of semicircles, there's also a crescent. You can create a moon or from the crescent. The crescent shape helps us to create perfect leaves. Then again, so that you did not mess up with it, three dots and convert to curves, move to. Now we have a basic leaf shape, two fingers on the screen, Holt, you create a quick copy, another leaf, and maybe a very long leaf. But all those three shapes that I just created, they are curves. But they were built on the basis of a geometric shape, the crescent shape. Cloud. This is something that we'll be using a lot because it's just shouting, I'm a flower, so In our demo, we will be creating it a lot. Also in the context menu, those are called bubbles, by the way, you can change. Let's make 25 the number of those bubbles, and they're still editable till you convert to curves. Again, once you convert them to curves, you have more access to play around with the nodes. What else will we be using the tier? This also looks like a pretty leaf or pretty petal of a flower. You can move it to any direction and there's those reddish guidelines. The tier is very interesting. The heart, we will be using it to build some heart shaped petals for our flowers. And I think this is pretty much it. Maybe also the cog to create a perfect shape, one finger on the screen. The cog is interesting because you can just get rid of this doughnut in the middle. Then you can build also flowers like this. That's really interesting. You can make them more pointy. Let's go to the Mt. If you like a shape and you're afraid you will mess up with it, just go to the three dots, convert to curves. Then we go to the shape, which is another color. And we have a small flower. Maybe choose something more bright. From the move to on creating a few more copies of this shape. The last thing that I want to show you in this lesson is one alignment option that will be very what's the word very important? Let's maybe group this and this one, let's group those two flowers. To make sure that the middle of this flower is really in the middle. Let's say we want to position it right in the middle. But we fail, and we cannot quite position it in the middle, make sure that you select all those two shapes, the middle of the flower, and the flower itself, over here, this icon, we have the alignment tool, and we can click align center and align middle, and we will always be sure that everything is nicely centered. Same here, this flower. I just have to make sure that those two layers are selected. Since I have my snap like magnetic snapping on, I will still have the guiding lines that will show me, this is the middle. You don't need the alignment tool, but see, it takes time. I don't want to waste my time. So I select everything, and sometimes you just go into this flow and you're like, boom, boom, boom. Done. Everything checked. For me, personally, it's much faster. In this video, we had a look at the library of our geometric shapes. I really warmly invite you to play around with them. Practice, converting them to curves. You already know how to build your librares of assets. If you would like to create a few shapes like this, which are not geometric shapes, but they are already converted to curves and add them to your library, then feel free to do that. We also learned about the alignment tool, which by the way, is available from the Move tool. If you're on any other tool, it will not be there given on the Node tool, you have to go to the Move tool, and as long as something is selected, those options will be visible. We got a very nice introduction into the rectangle tool and into the alignment tool. 9. Boolean Operations in Affinity: In this video, I wanted to give you a quick introduction to bullying operations. I consider this basic vector design technique that everyone should know of. But maybe it's also a little bit more intermediate. In case you haven't heard of bleion operations before. I think that once you get to know bulion operations, you will be using them quite a lot. They're accessible from the move tool. You have to have two elements selected. You can also see if your elements are selected from the layers panel, you see this bluish selection. Then here under this square and the plus circle button, you see all the bulion operations, add, subtract, intersect, x r, and divide. They're really cool because they will help you to create very complex vector designs, and the way they work You have to have, first of all, at least two elements selected, and they will give you unexpected shapes or let's say unique shapes, either by merging some of the overlapping shapes or modifying those shapes. Now I will carry out a few experiments over here on my Canvas so that you know how those operations are working. For instance, if I wanted to use this circle, take this semicircle. If I hold one finger on the screen and take this rotation, I don't know handle, it will go by 15 degrees increment, so I can bring it back to zero degrees. Then let's say I wanted to create a geometric barry like this. I can also select those two shapes from the layers panel, go to the alignment tool and select align center just to be really super sure that those are exactly centered. Then let's imagine, of course, I could group this shape. But sometimes you want to be a little bit more efficient with your layers and you want to commit to a certain shape. Then the best way to do that is just to merge the shape that you are happy with, so to say. You can do it from the individual layers level, or if you have some end shapes group, you can also do it from the group level. Right now, I have this very random geometric barry shape. If I wanted to merge it into one shape, I go to bulion operations, and then I can select add. Now also when we go to the node tool, we see it's a single object and now we can also play around a little bit with the nodes to manipulate this shape or to modify this shape further. Now we have only one shape instead of putting two elements into a group, and we also save a little bit on the layers. Let me give you another example. I like sometimes to create my flowers, Simply from circles. I'm just making sure that the circle has only this pink color. Sometimes when you're creating directly from the rectangle tool, I forgot to mention that. Let's check the star. Exactly. It will have the color that you choose, but it will also have this black stroke. So you just flip up to get rid of it. Back to the move tool, back to my circle. Now two fingers on my screen, and I will be creating some duplicates. I will be moving without any symmetry in mind to create, let's say, a round shape. Of flower that is not too geometric. Now let's say, let's select all those layers. Maybe group them. If I'm happy with this shape and I want to merge it. It's a little bit more irregular. It will be different from the type of a flower shape that you can, for example, create from this cloud option from the rectangle tool. If I wanted this irregular shape to be one shape. Now I can from the group level, go to my bulion operations and select ad. This is the ad function. I use it quite a lot. Now, let's say I want to use this rounded rectangle as a state for my flower. I can also maybe change or adjust the color a little bit so that you can see better where I am at. This is my flower. Let's say I want to take this shape here as my leaf. I'm going to make it a little bit longer. Now I will take this extra shape. I'm going to change its color to black so that you can see things better. Let's say, it has to be on top of the other leaf. Let's say I would like to make a few cutouts. I can do that by using the subtract bulion operation. Subtract will minus the shape. Just as the name suggests subtract, you take something out. This function you will see in a minute is really good for cutouts and I'm going to create a leaf design that will not be super, but that's not the point. I just wanted to demonstrate how this bulion operations work. Let's say I want those cutouts. On this leaf. First of all, I wanted to be one shape. Without creating any extra group, I can just go ahead and merge them with the add function. Now, this has to be obviously above. It will not work if it's underneath. This cut out shape will be above. I select this black cutout shape and the shape of the leaf. Now I'm going to use the subtract function. It's only one single shape of the original leaf, but it has those cutouts. This is really handy. This is also something that I use quite a lot, for example, in my pattern design. One of the patterns that I'm working on right now, I've shown you this example before. Let me just switch off the sketch. All those cutouts here, they were made by first creating this purple leaf and then creating random shapes in another color that I could see things better, selecting both layers and then using the subtract function. Let's take a few other shapes. Maybe I can take this flower over here and create a new ellipse and make those two shapes overlap. Let's see what the other Bulion operations are doing. If I select intersect, it will only leave the overlapping area. Let me see. Let's see what an area I would be interested in having I actually have a nice idea. Let me change the color so I can see things better. Maybe let me also change the opacity just for a second. I would like to have a rounded tulip shape. I'm just going to make it more oval, place it in the middle. The shape that you see behind, this is what will be cut out. Now I'm happy, I'm going to bring back the opacity. This has to be of course, I mean, this yellow shape has to be on top of the pink flower. Now that I selected everything, the blue line shows me exactly the pathways of both shapes. Now from the bulion operations menu intersect. This little icon will also give you a hint of what this bleion operation is doing for you. You will see that parts on the outside of the square and the circle are a little bit more grayed out, and then the shape right in the middle is in white, and this gives you a hint that this is the shape that will be left out. Intersect. Beautiful. Sometimes you can experiment without even planning any shape and you will come up with really cool designs. I'm going to name the stop. I like this shape a lot. So my mockups category popped up here. Let's go back to my original botanical category and I will add acid from selection, so I'm going to add this shape as an extra flower shape. This was intersect. Let's create another bubbly flower. We don't have much space left. I'm going to go back to the move tool, maybe even use the star and see what's going to happen when I use the rest of the functions by overlapping this star with this bubbly little flower. You have to have the two shapes selected, of course, and then you go to Boulan operations. Now the next one in the line is the x or bleion operation. X r stands for exclusive or. It will retain the shapes that do not overlap. What does not overlap is part of this yellow area of the bubbly flower and part of this star. Let's choose this function. And the areas that we're not overlapping. This is a bit of a crazy shape, but sometimes you might have a good idea of how to use this function. I think. I use it less frequently than the other operations, but I can only encourage you to experiment a little bit with your botanical shapes because you might find some really unique shapes to your library. Now, the last one. I'm going to take the bubbly flower, maybe an extra star, In another color, maybe also the sleeve over here. I'm going to select all of those shapes. Go to my bulion operations and then choose the last bulion operation, which is divide. Divide will give you individual shapes. A lot of individual shapes depending how many shapes you overlap together, and those shapes will be based on the intersecting paths. The paths that cross. As an outcome, it will give you a few smaller independent pieces. Sometimes it might be interesting to use. I think I used that a lot for my mockups with clothes. I can show you that in a minute. Let's first apply this divide function. And Let's group it because now they are all over the place. Like I said, the more shapes you overlap, the more individual elements you have, so we have. This is just one shape. You can also change the color to something else so that you can see better so that the colors are not the same. Let's maybe take this one, but make it contrasting. Let's make this one more purple. Let's make this one more blue. Now, you see that through this divide function, we were able to divide all those shapes into very unexpected and random shapes. Application examples, you saw a bit of a sneak pick of my other mockups category. I gave away a few of those mockups through my other platforms. I have to have a patron and some of those mock up resources are also available on my Saptck. When I was creating them, I also used the divide function quite a lot. But later on, I merged everything together. I was covering, for example, the whole area of this T shirt. And then I use the divide function to really divide everything with the lines. The black lines made the division for me so that I could get the label separately. Let me group all the other elements so that I can make them invisible. This is the T shirt. Thanks to the divide function, I was able to get the label separately, the inside of my t shirt separately, the color is also separate. The sleeves are separate and the body of the T shirt is separate. Again to summarize the steps for you, I was creating the t shirt mock up. I started with my black linework. Then I traced it and I filled the inside of this linework with color, which was more of a solid block. Then by selecting this block of a color together with the linework, I used from the move to the divide bulion operation so that I could get all those little individual elements from the mockup separately. This would be a good example of an application for the divide bulion operation that maybe I couldn't illustrate well enough for you in here because I didn't give you a super actionable example. By dividing all those shapes, I created a bunch of random shapes that I will probably not make much use of. But sometimes it happens that you do need this divide function and then My goal for you is to know that it exists, and you can create such effects. That's pretty much it. This was an introduction to bullying operations that will help you to create more complex vector shapes. We will be practicing everything together when we move to our exercise sheets. 10. Corner Tool in Affinity: In the previous lessons, we gained an intro into the rectangle tool and into bully and operations. Those are really really essential tools. Now I wanted also to introduce you to the corner tool, which you can find in this upper left corner under contour, the corner tool. At first, I was pretty oblivious of its existence. I wasn't using it a lot. But once I discovered it, I started to use it very, very frequently, and I think it can come in really handy. I'm going to remove the mockup that I was showing in the previous video, and I will also delete all those messy random shapes. So To demonstrate what I mean, I'm going to create a star. One finger on the screen, will make the star perfect, refreshing how the alignment tool works. We can align it center and middle and now it's positioned right in the middle of our document. To be able to use this corner tool, we would like to manipulate the corners of this shape. If you create a shape from the rectangle tool, you have to convert it first to curves. Now, this star shape is not a star shape from the rectangle tool anymore, but it converted into a curve and it has the curve symbol. Now having this shape selected, we can go to the Corner tool. By tapping one or actually by pressing one finger on the screen, and then tapping on all the outside corners of the star, I will be able to select them. You see if a note is selected if it turns blue inside. The ones in the middle are not selected. Now I have this selection here to round my corners. It says corner rounded. You can see that already a little bit of roundness has come here to one of the corners. If you cannot grab it, then you have to zoom in a little bit. And then you can zoom out and things will get a little bit easier to manipulate. In this way, you can, for example, create such a flower shape or acute Kawaii star that is a little bit more rounded. Another option is to make the shape concave. Maybe this shape doesn't look too great, but this could already be a nice flower shape. I'm going to move to the move tool. Again, go to the three dots menu and convert it to curves. Because now there is no corner tool selection. This is again an individual shape and we created some extra nodes. If I wanted to name it as a flower and also save it to my library, then I can also do that right away. This is what I mean that sometimes you create very unexpected shapes and before you forget how we created them because they were a happy experiment, it's better to save them to your library right away. Let's move this one to the corner. Let's draw another star, give it another color. Perhaps this time we can also change the points to eight points because we're still in the shape category. It's still a geometric shape, so we can take advantage of the rectangle tool menu. Maybe we can make it a little bit wider like. Now we go to the three dots menu and we convert it to curves. We don't have the options from the rectangle tool anymore, but at least we can work on it further by either going to the node tool and being able to work on the nodes or exactly by going to the corner tool and being able to do something with all those corners. Other options that you have are straight corners. This is really interesting. Or you can create cutout corners. This is really sweet as well. Again, it's a little bit of experimenting. I think this could look nice and You can then convert it to curves, and then those corner tool handles are not available anymore. The shape that we created it converted into a path with nodes. Then if we like it, we can again maybe rename it to a flower. That might be even like a snowflake. If you're creating a library of snowflakes, and if you like the shape, and I think it's interesting, we can add it right away into your library. Let's see again how this works, for example, on a simpler shape like a triangle. Again, we have to convert it to curves. Then we can go to the corner tool. We can select all the corners. They're selected because you see that this little square turned into blue, and we can make it rounded. You see those guiding lines in red. We can make it concave. Then when you hold and zoom out, those guiding lines disappear and you can see the shape better. Straight. Another triangle. But you can go even further, then it gets a little bit weird. Again, cut out. I would like to actually convert now this shape from the three dots many to curves because when I go to the move too, I think it can be an interesting shape for the middle of my flowers. If I wanted to save it up, I can do that as well. Let's test maybe one more with the crescent. First, we can create our moon. Then we can go to the three dots menu, convert to curves. Now let's imagine that we would like to make things a little bit softer and we would like to have those corners here are a little bit more around. We have to practice selecting just the corners that interest us, one finger on the screen. Select. The two corners are selected. Another option because they're right on the left side is just to do the selection like so. Now both of them are selected as well. Then the first option is to round them. Yeah, that gets weird. We just want a very gentle rounding. Then we convert it to curves so that it really settles, it changed into nodes and a nice path. You can also see from the move to if we want to change it a little bit further. If you would like to save up this shape as an extra moon interior library, then you should also do that right away so that you do not forget how you created this shape. We will be practicing a few extra shapes using the corner tool when we are doing the exercise sheets together. But I hope that you can take it for a spin, practice with a few shapes from the rectangle tool library. Just remember to convert your shapes into curves and have some fun play around and if there are some shapes that you like, make sure to save a tier library. 11. Knife Tool in Affinity: All right. We arrived at those shapes in the previous video where we were discussing and practicing, using the Corner tool. You also remember bullying operations which are accessible from the move tool over here. I wanted to show you another tool which is fairly new to the affinity designer suite, namely the knife tool. I think it came with an update from the end of the year 2023 and it wasn't available before. That's why in my previous affinity designer courses, I wasn't using it a lot because the tool was relatively new. But now that we will be working a lot a lot, a lot with complex vector shapes. We will certainly be needing it and I wanted to show this tool to you. The knife tool is right under the vector brush tool. In order to cut something out, we know that one way to do that is to use the Boolean operation subtract. I created the circle and let's say, I would like to align it with the flower. Let's say it's a flower flower shape. I go to the alignment tool over here, Align center align middle, so that it's right in the middle. If I wanted to cut out the circle from this flower shape, then having the two of course selected at the same time. I go to boolean operations and I choose subtract. This works very beautifully, especially when you're using the rectangle tool because the result is somehow very polished and very geometric. It all depends on your style. For the project of this course, my design, my botanical illustration will be somehow more polished, vectory, maybe even geometric. But sometimes you want more of a hand drone feeling anyone to cut something out spontaneously. Then the knife tool will be great for you because it can basically behave just like the pencil tool, but instead of drawing new shapes like the pencil tool, has the same options also here. The pencil tool can have stabilization. I always make a test blob. You can close your curves with the auto close and you can make sure that it has a fill. After the test blob, when I know that all the settings are the settings that I want, I know there's no stabilizer. It will close itself automatically and it will have just fill. I'm ready to draw. Then you saw that this auto close gives you this red circle at the beginning that will want to close itself. In this way, when we go to the moved we see this shape is fully closed. It has this light blue line all the way around it and we know it's an individual close shape. A is good. In the same way, the knife tool works, but instead of creating a shape, it will cut out a shape. You also have an auto clothe over here and you can use stabilization. But just like in the previous example with the pencil tool, I'm going to use no stabilizer, stabilization by the way, is the same rope stabilizer, window stabilizer. But no stabilization and auto clothe will be on. Now I tapped outside of the Canvas so that nothing is selected and I wanted just to show you something that when I'm on the move tool here and nothing from the layers is selected and I want to cut something out, it will not be working. Ideally, you go to the layers panel, you select see over here the flower that interests you or the element that interests you, and now you can cut things out. But first, you have to select the element that interests you. If I select this flower and I'm trying to cut something out here, this will not work because this is selected, I will only work on here. This is cut out. We'll see that in the layers in a minute. This is cut out. Auto close is working because you see this red marking. Now I have exactly beautiful. Now I have cut out those, I can also delete it, and I created random cutouts. But first, you got to select on the layers panel, the thing that you want to cut out, and then you can start cutting out. That looks great. And why do we use the knife tool in this case? Because it will give you more of a hand drone feeling. I think this is the biggest difference between using the knife tool versus using bulion operations. Now I can just delete all the cutouts that I created. It's not very pretty, but I hope you know what I mean. Let's maybe do something else so that you see a better example. Let's draw from the pencil tool leaf. Also very hand drum looking beautiful leaf. Can change it to some green color. Now we will move to the knife tool and we will start cutting out the middle part of this leaf. I think I said flower. Auto closes on. You can also change the color of this cut out, so you can also leave it. You can just make it invisible, but keep it because you might want to use it. You can delete it all together and just stay with the shape that interests you. Another nice trick, especially for pattern design is to take this cutout element in a different color onto the top layer and to offset it a bit. Sometimes it also works great if it stays at the bottom. Then you can grip it and you have let's say such an artistic leaf shape that you can also save into your library. I hope that you can see that it's a leaf back to the knife tool. You can also switch off this auto clothe and sometimes you can just cut through your shapes. Again, I didn't select it. You select, for example, here this little moon and you just draw a line like so. Without any auto close because you don't want to create a closed shape, you just want to cut it with a straight line. Now I'm going to change the colors that you see that indeed, we have two different shapes over here. One last option that I'm using sometimes is to use the straight line option. Sometimes you don't want the line that you're cutting through a shape to be wobbly. And then you can use, of course, I didn't select this shape. I had the yellow ones selected, make sure that you select what you want to cut. In case you have doubts, you can always go to this question mark. You will see also the little cheat sheet for this context menu that you see at the top. This straight line buttons is exactly straight line. It gives you a straight line. Indeed, over here, when I draw and just hold it, you will see the straight line and you can put this line wherever you want. Now this is also a separate element. To fix the fact that the other line wasn't perfectly straight. You can also go to those elements and this middle node means that your movement was a little bit more wobbly, so you can just remove the node, go to this shape, select only this middle node, remove it, and now the line, you can fix it, so to say. But if you want a perfectly straight line from the very beginning, then you have to remember about this option here. When you switch it off, then you have access again to create shapes which have the auto close. So ****. Could cut this out. Also remember about stabilization. If you would like to have a smoother hand, you can always switch on your stabilization. It will make your line a little bit smooth and less wobbly. You can adjust your stabilization over here with the curser. I usually leave it at pretty low because it can get out of control. And now we have the stabilization and your line is a little bit more flowy, let's say. Of course, my shape wasn't selected. Yeah you have to get used to it. Let's do it again, and I'm going to remove it right away. Now we practiced the knife tool. I think it will also come in handy when you are creating your end botanical assets for our project. 12. Shape Builder Tool in Affinity: In this video, I wanted to give you a very quick introduction to the shape builder tool, which you can find right under the rectangle tool. It's a little bit similar to simply using from the move tool the Boulan operations because it will also have the add function to merge certain shapes, and it will also have the subtract function to cut out certain shapes. Also have an extra tutorial somewhere on my YouTube channel where I'm showing how I am creating my geometric vector clouds. To show you how this tool works, I wanted to create another cloud here so that you see this tool in action. From the rectangle tool, I chose the ellipses to create circles, and now I'm also changing the sizes of those circles, and I'm making copies of them. I'm also creating one ellipsis that stretches like this. Very good. Now I would also like to have rectangular shape that will cut through the bottom part of the cloud. That looks very random. Let's select all of the layers and go to the shape builder tool. We are able to subtract certain elements by having this minus selected. I had it pre selected because I use it constantly whenever I creating shapes. You will recognize that it's pre selected when you click on it, the background behind this minus or behind this plus goes darker. Now the minus is selected, it means that we can minus certain shapes. I would like to get rid of all those shapes at the bottom. Here you also have an option, how you want to get rid of those shapes. I had the line one in place because it will move in a line, which I don't mind for this shape it is working. But you can also start with the standard one which is free hand. Now we want to merge all those shapes together. That's why I switched from the minus to the plus. Now this free hand is much more handy because I am not moving in a line, but I can move in this free hand way. Now I merge everything together. I have my cloud shape, which I can also rename it to cloud and just go I think to my sky category and I can add it as an extra cloud. I also have an environment category and I have a few more clouds over here. I just wanted to show you what I created before. Those clouds were created in the same way using the shape builder tool. This is all that you need to know for now about the Shapehder tool. We might be practicing it together when we're doing our exercise sheets together. 13. Power Duplicate in Affinity: All right. In this video, I wanted to show you a pretty cool trick from affinity designer that is called Power Duplicate. For our exercise, I created two shapes. All of them from the rectangle tool. This is the tier shape. This is a leaf shape that we practiced before from the crescent shape, and this is a bit of an elongated diamond shape. All of those were converted to curves. We see this curves symbol on the layers panel. We're going to start from the move tool with this shape over here, to make it a little bit more interesting, I'm going to draw and ellipse, a perfect circle back to the move tool, and I'm going to position it in the middle. Snapping, magnetic snapping already showed me this guiding line, saying that it's exactly in the middle, so I don't have to use the alignment tool. Now I'm going to select both layers and F the move tool, I will go to my bulion operations and choose subtract. Now I have this unique shape that otherwise, I would not be able to get from the rectangle tool. Now we go to the move tool and from the three dots menu, I will create a duplicate, a copy. Then this little handle in my case, at least it's at the bottom. Sometimes it's on top. I'm going to start rotating this shape, and I will hold one finger on the screen. When you hold it on the screen, it will allow you to move left or right by exactly 15 degrees. I'm going to choose, I think it's 45 degrees and then try to position it more or less towards the middle here. Keeping the selection, this is very important, keeping this selection, not deselecting, not hitting the x symbol to deselect. I go back to the three dots menu, and I select again duplicate and it will remember my previous setup, so to say. I created a copy, it created a copy two, and I rotated this copy by, I think it was 45 degrees. I did exactly the same, but this time in relation to this previous shape. Again, the selection is on, you see the bluish line around my shape. I am not selecting. This is important. When you select, the power duplicate will not work anymore. Again, three that's menu, being very careful not to drop your apple pencil somewhere else onto your document, duplicate, and it's repeating this step. Again, keeping the selection duplicate. Create another duplicate as fast as you can so that you do not make a mistake of deselecting, and now I created this shape. Now I can deselect. If I did again, a duplicate. First of all, I have to get the previous shape so that I can show you what I mean and I hit duplicate. It did create a duplicate, but it didn't duplicate the steps that I performed previously, namely rotating my shape by 45 degrees. Once you select, the power duplicate will not be working. This is the new shape that I created. I'm going to mark all the layers and group them. This is the first power duplicate unique shape that could be a flower that we created using this handy trick. Now let's take this shape. You already know the steps. Three, dots menu duplicate. This time my handle is on top. Let's maybe choose 30 degrees and move it slightly to the side. You're keeping the selection, duplicate, duplicate, and you keep using the power duplicate without selecting so that the power duplicate can do its work. I'll try to Zoom out without deselecting so that you can see better. Suck suck. Suck. If you diselect by accident, unfortunately, you have to start all over again. We have another unique shape that could be a flower and we will group it. This little trick with the par duplicate enables you to create vector designs, vector flowers in our case that are a little bit more unique, that go beyond the rectangle tool. Se back to the move tool. I'm going to put it here. Now let's do the last one. What are we going to do? Maybe? Again, experiment. Let's first create a duplicate. Just that you see it creates a duplicate, but right now it's not doing anything because we have to make our move. We're going to move it by maybe 15 degrees, put it a little bit to the side, and now check. It's very satisfying, isn't it? Keeping the selection. Once we select, this is not going to work. Three dots menu duplicates. Try not to make the mistake that you hit, for example, your document or your Canvas because then the power duplicate will be disabled and it's not going to remember the previous steps. Trying to speak and focus on my power duplicate at the same time. We have clip to Canvas. Let's clip it so that you can see better. Si. Oh, this is really nice. We can also rename it to keep our library tidy into let's imagine that this is a flower shape or a flower shape component that could help us to build the rest of our flower. For example, this could be the middle of our flower. Actually, that's not a bad idea. Let's go to the move tool. We have this unique shape, the Penguin. We can go to the rectangle tool and then choose the standard rod flower shape from the cloud shape. L et's maybe change it to a nice lighter yellow color. Then we can put this in the middle. I cannot seem find the middle. I'm going to select both layers, go to the alignment tool, align center, align middle. I think I want to change the color of this cloud to being again a perfectionist here. Since this is not converted to curves yet, we still have this geometric shapes symbol. Whenever we go back to the rectangle tool, we can still make some adjustments. I can, for example, adjust the bubbles or let's maybe the number 12 to 24 to get a little bit more bubbles. Now let's commit to this shape and convert it to curves. Let's create a copy. Change it maybe to white, go to the move tool, retaining its shape by keeping one finger on the screen, I'm going to make it smaller. Then I'm going to select all the three layers, go to the alignment tool, align center, align middle. How does that look? That looks interesting? Now we have another flower shape. If you want to, by the way, this flower shape, you can also having this entire group level selected from the group level and from the move tool, you can go to our bul in operations at and you can merge this shape. Now, for example, let's duplicate it, change it to to maybe this purple color. Actually wanted to have it underneath the other way around, and we can rotate it maybe again by exactly 15 degrees. That is great. Now I actually wanted this green to be this previous purple color. But we were in this watches panel. You can go back to the color studio and maybe I'm going to lower the luminance, which is the brightness. That looks nice. This is a lot of fun. I will be showing you a few very random examples here of how I like to build my flower shapes, but You will probably have a lot of happy accidents as you create yours. The same we can merge this flower shape from the move tool, bul in operations at. Then we can make a duplicate and perhaps choose another orange color, one finger on the screen to move exactly by 30. Now, this doesn't work. Oh, like so. Then from the rectangle tool, maybe we will just get a normal middle of a flower without anything fancy. Maybe something darker. Try to position this in the middle, select both layers, alignment tool, align center, and align middle, and we can also group it. And rename it to flower. This one, you can also merge by using the ad bulion operation. Duplicate, maybe use the same green color but make it either lighter, O that looks good or darker. Also creates a very interesting effect. I think I want it lighter, Sne. We can group it, rename layer, flower. You do the work one time. By that, I mean you rename it as you like, and you have some of the work that you are saving in case you really need to be diligent for your client work if the client really wants every single at least group level to be named. Once you recycle your assets and they are named from the very start properly, you can keep using them over and over again and you're saving time because you don't have to type, for example, flower, like in this case all the time. What are we saving? I want to save those main flowers. I'm selecting each and remember every group level will be recognized as an individual asset. So I want to save them in my flowers category, add asset from selection. Two. But on top of that, let me open those groups. I want to save this original shape, this one, and this one. I am selecting those three layers, and I will be also adding them as my assets, which will be basically components to either use in their simplicity as they are or to recycle them to create and to build more complex flower shapes from individual components, add asset from selection. I'll take a few seconds and see those original shapes that I created without the fancy combinations. I also saved them as extra shapes because they might be interesting to build something new. For example, I can insert this other flower that I created before. We will be creating all those flowers together when we move to our exercise sheet. Now, I could, for instance, recycle this shape over here that we just created together, place it more or less in the middle. And I already have something new. Can put it inside of this flower group. Also here, I can use this shape, put it behind this yellow shape, make it, of course, smaller. Select all the layers that are involved in building this shape, alignment tool, align center, aligned middle. This doesn't look the best because this shape is a little bit asymmetrical. I will just select this middle and try to position it more or less to my liking. Then this shape that we just created, I think for a better contrast, I can move to the navigator studio. Over here, there's like those three overlapping circles icon. I can change everything to gray scale, and you see this color does not pop. From this gray scale menu, I'm having only this one layer here with this green flower shape selected, I go to the color studio, and now I can adjust for example, the brightness of this shape so that the contrast is also to my satisfaction. That looks great. This was an example of how it is worth to save up the flowers that are ready made and are already quite complex. But it's also really worth saving the individual components because we can mix and match them and build unexpected shapes and unexpected combinations. Great. I hope that you liked doing those preliminary exercises with me. In the next video, we will be moving to our exercise sheet, and we will be creating similar flower combinations that will become the assets for our botanical library, where we will be practicing all the tools that we were learning about, the rectangle tool, the corner tool, the alignment tool, the power duplicate, everything that you had an introduction to before. We will be putting it into practice. 14. Practice: Vector Flowers 1: We are finally moving to our practice sheets. You can either keep working in the previous document, let it be your working document. It doesn't have to be any fancy name because the end goal is to have assets, which you will save up into your asset studio. Later on, this document is not that important. You can just close it, delete it, remove it because it's not about keeping a good documentation of your asset work, it's about getting those assets into the library. It doesn't matter if you're staying in the document or if you create a new document. Just remember new document, you press new new document. And I recommend that we keep working in the same format, 4,000 pixel square, RGB color profile and no artboards. I have a separate document here called Assets Florals. You can also create this extra document if you want to. And now we will be recreating those flowers, making use of the knowledge and hopefully some new tips that you learned in the previous lessons. I'm going to keep this group of flowers as my cheat sheet, just because I told you that whenever I'm creating acids, especially from the rectangle tool. Sometimes I don't even remember how I do them because they're just a happy accident. Please allow me to have this cheat sheet here so that we can do this exercise together properly. Plus, I will be able also to reuse the colors that I was using here before. You can use any colors. Actually, you can even work in gray scale. So this type of kind of setup. Sometimes when I work on a bigger illustration, I start working just in gray scale. So from the color studio, I make sure that I start with 1 gray, and then I just lower, for example, the brightness or pump up the brightness, and I work with different shades of gray before I decide on my color palette. So we can also do that with the gray scale. And then I prepared for you the outlines for those flowers, which will be available in the class resources. So make sure to download it and save it somewhere into your iPad storage. In order to place this little exercise sheet, I'm just going to hide the visibility of mine. You go to the Hamburger menu, and then you choose place. Then you either have it saved in your files in the files app on your iPad or you selected from your photos. I have a special little folder for my vector botanical art class, and my exercise sheet for the Flowers is over here. You select it. There's a little blue tick once you have it selected and then you click on ad. Then you just tap onto your screen and you place it in the middle. Either by having the magnetic snapping on, or again, you can use the alignment tool to position it exactly in the center. Next, depends how you want to work. You can just work on top of it or you can switch over here, you can select the blend mode, you can switch it to multiply. Then also from this photo layer, you can also rename it by the way to exercise or something like lines, line work, rename it to exercise. I have it on multiply, and from the three that's menu, you can also lower the opacity. And then you can work either on top of this exercise sheets on the extra layers or below it. If you don't want this to be moving all the time, swipe to the left and just lock your layer. Okay, now we are ready to do our exercises. First, we will be creating this flower here. You can also do this exercise by switching off the volume. Before I tell you what I actually did, you can try to do it by yourself or you can pause this video, try to do this shape by yourself, and then keep watching my video and see and just double check if I created this shape in the same way. That will be a very good exercise. So I'm going to take the cloud shape. For now, I'm just going to choose any color. Then one, two, three, four, five, I want five bubbles. I change it here in this context menu. Then I move it more or less to my outline. Like I said, you can either work on top or you can drag it underneath. I would like you to practice creating those shapes so that they're more or less the same. They don't have to be perfect. You can also adjust this shape like so. Again, if you're afraid that you will mess up with this shape, just go to the three me, convert it to curves right away. Now, the middle is pretty straightforward. It's just going to be Our ellipse shape, and I'm just going to select any color. Now I can select those two layers, go to the move tool, align center align middle, and I can still adjust it to how I have it here. You can put one finger on the screen, make the circle a little bit smaller, and at least make it sure that it's right in the middle of this vertical line, and you have to have for that magnetic snapping on. Now we can grip it. You can also switch off your exercise sheet, and we have our flower. Next, That looks familiar. Another flower shape, five bubbles. That looks about right. And another circle for the middle of our flower. And we group it. Next one. Another cloud shape, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12. But we have 12 bubbles here. Let's make it a little bit smaller to retain again the shape. You have to hold one finger on your iPad screen. That looks about right. And now we create the middle, selecting both layers, alignment tool, align center align middle. That looks good, and we group it right away. Also for all those previous shapes, for example, this one, this one, you can go to the three dots menu and convert it to curves just to be sure that you're not going to mess up with them. It's hard to mess up with a circle, it's usually okay. But the more complex shapes, it's better to convert it to your curves. Another bubble five petals. I'm going to move it here to see my outline better back to the cloud shape. Three dots convert the curve. This one is easy. As you pause this video, if you want to pause and first do the exercises by yourself, feel free to make those flowers also more fancy as you go. You don't have to stick to the exercise sheets. You can also make something more unique and add in some extra decorative elements as you go. Group. I'm going to lower it a little bit, but still keep it on the middle line perfectly in the center. That is perfectly centered, all good. Now, this shape is a little bit more irregular. The best way to do it will be to use one circle. Go to the move to, and then to try to build the shapes from its duplicate two fingers on my screen. And I move around, sometimes making the circles bigger or smaller to create those round shapes. Maybe it's not that visible here, but this shape is a little bit irregular. Now, do you remember how to merge? There are two ways in which we can merge this shape, the easiest one, the quickest one is from the move tool to choose the add function. Another way is to go to the shape builder, select plus, free hand and just keep adding those shapes together. But it will be the easiest to go to the move tool and just to use the add function? Those shapes are also somehow irregular. We will do that with the pencil tool. Before we use the pencil tool, we have to make a test block. I'm going also to change the color. Back to the pencil tool. I'm not using any stabilization. I have to make sure that my auto close is on and that my fill is on. Then this test blob, I'm going to delete it. Make sure that I'm on my flower, and now I will be drawing those circles. And you start to see this red circle that will give you a hand where it needs to be closed. And I draw those irregular val round shapes. With the pencil tool. Then I group them. The rule of thumb is that you want to group all the elements that of course, are the top layer. The entire group has to be a group and inside of it, you want to group all those elements that have different colors. The best advice that I can give you for your layers management is to focus on your co management as you manage your layers. In this way, you don't have to select every single layer to change the color, but you can do it from the entire group level. That's going to be the easiest way. This one will be interesting. This one, this scenario, we didn't really have it before. First of all, we need a circle and ellipse. Going to choose a purple color. Make sure that it's not in the previous color. Now those lines, you can create them either with the pen tool or with the pencil tool. I will do it again with the pencil tool just like here, but we need to make a small adjustment. I'm making a test block. Then I go to the color studio, and I flip the fill up to get rid of it, and I go back to select only stroke. I will select, let's say the yellow color to make sure that it has a nice contrast. I'm going to delete it back to the pencil tool and I'm going to see if the contrast is nice, position this line next to the lines that I created. Under the color studio, I go to the stroke panel. And I will adjust the width so that it more or less corresponds to the width that I used before. Again, this is my test line, so I'm going to delete it. Now with a little bit of stabilization, I am again on the pencil tool. There is no fill. I can only draw a line. There's also no auto close. We have to get rid of it too, and I have a little bit of a rope stabilizer at about 20 then I delete it. And I start to draw, that's very important. I start to draw outside of my shape. And I make one line, and I also finish outside of this shape. Now, I'll try to do this one. I finish outside of my shape. This one, I finish again outside of my shape. When I switch off this exercise layer, I am stuck with this shape over here. You can still go to the node tool and you can adjust your individual nodes. Right now, all the layers are selected so that you can see all the nodes at the same time. Now this is where the magic happens. That's something that we haven't really done before. We go to the three dots menu, and this time, we have to choose the next option under convert to curves, which is expand stroke. Just as a reminder, stroke is exactly the circle with the empty medal. It is basically the outline or the line. The other circle that was filled is also called fill respectively, and it means this filled inside of a shape. Right now we're working just with the stroke. That's why the path that you see here, this vector path is just a line. Now, from the three that's man again, we want to expand it. And now it's not a line anymore. Also when we go to the color studio, the stroke is gone, and now we only have Phil. Great. So I will merge it. It's going to be easier this way. From the move tool, Boulan operations ad, and now, I will choose the perfect way to adjust this shape further, which will be the shape builder tool. I will choose the minus option free hand. I'm going to remove in this way all those little bits that I've drawn outside of my shape. That's why I said it's best when we had our exercise sheet to draw outside because now the cutting of the lines that are outside was easier. D. Ah, that's so neat. Yeah, this is actually the scenario where I like to use the shape builder the most. It's usually when I have to cut something outside of my main shape. Group to the move tool and now this barrier is ready. Let's move to our next shape. What do you think, what is this? Let's move back to have only Phil. Change the bubbles to four bubbles. Position it on the shape from our practice sheet. Now the creation of this geometric star shape is a little bit tricky. Let me show you how I've done that. I create an ellipse. Let's maybe choose a color that is a little bit more contrasting, a little bit darker or lighter. Now I will create a perfect circle, one finger on the screen that corresponds more or less here to this shape. Then two fingers on my screen, I will create a duplicate. And I'm going to see it snapped. I'm going to position it exactly to the left in the same line. Now I can select both two fingers on the screen or from the three dots mean, you can always click Duplicate. But I do two fingers on the screen. I make an exact copy. Again, magnetic snapping helps me to position them stacked right underneath. I'm going to go to bulion operations and select ad. And then underneath this extra shape. I will switch of the exercise layer so that you can see better underneath. I'm just going to what shall we do? We can also just do a rectangle. I'm going to create an extra rectangle. Let's make it maybe yellow so that we can see things better. Move to and position it so that it really covers the entire area of the star that we want to create. This we can switch off. We just want to have the star over here. We select both layers. We can go to the shape builder tool, and again, minus and we will be cutting out all the things that we don't need. Perfect. Here it wasn't the greatest, but I can still fix that. Now it's still one shape and then I can go to the node tool. And I can just get rid of those unnecessary nodes. I don't think I stacked it properly, but I'm going to leave it in this video so that you see that sometimes things also don't work out for me, but there's always a way with vectors that are so flexible that you can always go just to the node tool and fix it. And now we have it. It's also a perfect shape for a star. In case you have a sky, for example, category, over here, you can add it as an extra star. It can be an element for flowers as a middle of the flower, but it can also be just a star, and then you can save it to cross category. Now we're bringing back the original flower shape. I'm going to select both align center align middle just to make sure that they're really stacked and group it. Now, this will be super interesting. To create this shape, can you guess what I'm going to do? I select the rounded rectangle. It will be easier to see if I drag it underneath my exercise sheet. Let's change it to a more reddish color. Now from the move tool, I will just position it more or less at the width of the tip that I want to create, I haven't converted it into curves yet, so I can still go back to the rectangle tool. And here I can still adjust the shape and make it a little bit more rounder. We're already building the base of our tulip. Now those cutouts will be created by using the triangle shape. I'm selecting a triangle. I'm going to choose a color that is lighter. And then I'm going to rotate it and I will improvise right now. You can go back to your triangle shape and you can also move it a little bit. What do I mean by move it? You can move the tip, one of the corners of your triangle. That looks good. Now I'm going to create an exact copy of this triangle by hitting duplicate. From this tool here, I can flip it horizontally. Making sure I'm on the move tool, I can drag it more or less on the same line, and to make sure that everything is really geometric, I can first of all merge it by using the ad function, and then I can select both layers, go to the alignment tool, and just select a line center. Again, this doesn't have to be perfectly the way I built it in the exercise sheet. Actually, you might even build it in a better way. Switching of the exercise sheet, I moved again to the shape tool. I'm on the minus symbol. I use it quite a lot, as you can already tell. I'm removing the selection that I don't need, and I have my tp. This is so neat. I love those vector two shapes. Now we created the first part of our exercise. Feel free also to decorate all those flowers to your liking, and then you can also save it simultaneously to your assets library. In the next video, we will go to Part two, where we will be making a few more advanced shapes. 15. Practice: Vector Flowers 2: I really hope that you like this exercise as much as I do. In this video, we will be creating more intermediate and advanced shapes, and we will be also practicing using blend modes and affinity to create even nicer effects using the blending modes. Okay. Now we're going to start with this flower here. Just like in the previous video, I would encourage that you every time we are going to create one flower, it would be great if you could pause this video, try to make it by yourself, and then keep watching to see if I've done it in the same way. First, we start with the shape of our petals, and this shape is also the perfect shape for our leaves, and it comes from the crescent shape. I'm going to draw my crescent shape. It will snap if it's perfectly symmetrical. Then right away, I'm going to convert it to curves. Now from the move to, I'm going to drag it underneath the exercise sheet. I'll try to position it exactly where I want it. Now, we could use a power duplicate here, but I want to be very precise when building this flower, and I think that there is no need to use a power duplicate. Instead, we will see that one petal is right opposite the other one, so we will use another technique. Namely, we will create first a copy of this one petal. And then we will drag it right underneath. I'm going to switch off the exercise sheet, Zoom in and make sure that it's really aligned. Just to double check, you can also select both layers, go to the alignment tool and make sure it's aligned center, but we zoomed in enough to see that it really is aligned. Now, both of those layers are selected. Three dots menu, Duplicate, one finger on the screen, and we will rotate it just making sure that this is the angle that I want. It's going to be 45 degrees. Now we can create a duplicate again and make use of the power duplicate because the previous step will be all remembered. We have a hybrid technique where we first make sure that the original those two petals are really exactly across each other. Then we carry out the duplicate with the rotation by 45 degrees. Then without the selecting it, we keep hitting duplicate duplicate duplicate so that the previous step is repeated. That was very neat. Now we have this shape. We can even merge it that would have advantages, but what we will be doing also with the flowers in the last line. We will be taking advantage of blend modes, and let's me actually create a duplicate. You can make two variants, one variant of this shape, you can merge it with the add function just to have this shape forever and ever to use. Those are the same shapes. Then you can keep the second shape and then you can open it. Select each of those petals. You see that when they overlap, they create a very interesting star like shape. This is where you could take advantage of using blend modes. We have to have all the petals selected, and then over here, you can access all the blend modes, either by just clicking on the first normal mode, and then scrolling and selecting, see it changes, selecting some other options, or you just use the arrows. Normally, one of the first blending modes that is out there is the multiply blend mode. Just wanted to show you the advantages of having both variants. Again, to repeat. This one is just a single shape without any blending modes. That means we could get rid of this group level, and we could just merge it with the Bolan operation ad. Whereas in this one, we're keeping the entire group of petals, but we selected all those petals and we change the blending mode to multiply to create an interesting star like effect. Then both of those, we can rename them as flowers and we can save them to our asset studio. I'm going to remove this one. Keep the one that we're working on. Just for the sake of just for the sake of this exercise, there are no blending modes applied here. Now, we can create the middle of the flower and create another copy, change it maybe to white, select both of them, move to align center, align middle. Get rid of this exercise sheet, group it, and now it's all done, the colors are slightly different but. Now, let's do together this flower here by starting from the middle. There's another shape that we haven't used that much previously, which is the square star. Here we can already see that we are already arriving at this shape here. To keep it perfectly symmetrical also, one finger on the screen, and I'm going to position it underneath my exercise sheet, go to the move to back to the rectangle tool and here, you can adjust the thickness of the arms of the square star, so to say. That looks pretty good. Now we have our middle, but when we go back to the rectangle tool, then we still see it gives us the option to change its shape. In order not to mess it up, I will convert it to curves right away. We have the middle of our flower. I am not sure if you will be able to guess how I created this shape. Even I needed to remind myself again. Namely, we need to use the cog shape. We're creating this perfect cog shape. Going to position it more or less next to the shape from the exercise sheet back to the rectangle tool. The first thing that we got to do is you see here the small red circle in the middle, we have to close this cog. This is the first step. Here. There's a bunch of other circles that you can take advantage of. And that's why I found it a little bit confusing. I forgot how I arrived at this shape. But first, we take the shape that is on this inside outline of the ****, and just like here, we drag it a little bit more to the middle. Next, the topmost circle. We have to make those petals a little bit more pointy, so we drag it to the middle. There's another change that we needed to carry out, namely, we have to switch to one, two, three, four, five. It's called teeth. Five Ts. Now it looks better. Now we have to keep experimenting with this shape. I took again the circle that was more or less at the bottom. This is nice. This is super nice. This looks like a daisy. Maybe you'll be able to create some extra flowers as you do this exercise together with me. This makes it a little bit more. Let's maybe place it underneath, the exercise sheet back to the move to. I'm going to just keep it as it is so that I don't mess it up again and it still says ****. It's a geometric shape. Three dots menu, convert to curves. Now we have this flower. I think it's super beautiful. Looks like some cute little flower from the Alps. Just my impression. Now, what about this one here? Let's start with the petals on the outside, and you guessed it, we need the crescent again to create more or less the shape of our petals. Just going to change the color to something contrasting. Once I have this shape, I convert it to curves and go to the move tool. Now I can also adjust it so that it's more or less similar to the one from the exercise sheet. Very similarly like with this flower here, I want this petal to be exactly opposite. I'm going to create a copy. Switch off the exercise sheet and make sure that see that they're really aligned, and now I will do a power duplicate as you can guess, but I have to have those two selected at the same time. Both are selected, three dots menu, duplicate. One finger on the screen, I move it by 30 degrees. I do not de select, I keep the selection, three dots menu, duplicate. Again, duplicate, another copy and another copy. L et's at least group it now. We're not using any blending modes here. Now I'm going to create the middle of this flower and to do that, I will be using the rounded rectangle. I'm going to make it a little bit rounder and change the color so that we can see better. A, run away. Make it a little bit smaller and thinner, just like here, doesn't have to be perfect. Just to practice. Go to create a duplicate, 45 degrees, and you guessed it another duplicate. It makes a power duplicate and another one, and I'm going to merge it right away. There's no use for me to group it because I know I want to merge it in any case. This is merged back to the rectangle ellipse. For an ordinary circle. Select everything, move to align center, align middle. Does it look okay? Yeah, it looks okay. Then I'm groping Nice. I hope that you're already feeling much more confident. Okay. Now we're doing this flower here from the rectangle tool. I am selecting the heart shape. I think you guessed it. I'm positioning it position it. Where it should be more or less, and I can still go back to the rectangle tool so that I can manipulate the properties of this heart and when I know that I'm done with manipulating its properties, I convert it to curves. Next, I make a copy. See here we have two copies and I will flip it vertically, switch of the exercise layer, and again, I'll try to position them stacking them right in the middle. Select both of them. Three dots menu. We create a copy by hitting duplicate. This is 60 degrees. Another duplicate, another 60 degrees. There was again a power duplicate. We group everything together. Now we need the star, which is actually super easy. Because under the rectangle tool, there is this double star shape, one finger on my screen so that it's perfectly shapely. I don't know how to say that. Then you can still manipulate adjust the properties of this double star by adjusting here those red circles. Once you're happy with your shape, just converted to curves, and from the move to I can still align it center align middle. And grip it. Does it look good? Yeah. Now I wanted to create those random lines. It's a line that I created with a pencil tool, but it has a little bit of a taper. We need to go to the pencil tool and we need to create a test line. I'm going to start drawing. I can keep the same color like the middle of the flower, but I have to flip the fill and choose only stroke. Going to delete it, and I will just draw my first line so that I can see everything better on my exercise sheet. Now, having this stroke line selected, I go to the stroke studio. The first thing I do is here on the pressure panel, I add this middle point. And then the first one I drag it down to create this starting taper, and I drag the third point down to create this ending taper. I go to the node tool and I still drag the starting node and the ending node of this line in place because now I can see things better. Again, still from the stroke tool, I can adjust the width. Now the pencil tool will remember those adjustments and now it will keep it. I'm drawing the rest of my lines. To do? You can follow the outlines from the exercise sheet or you can just freestyle and create something that you like. This is just a suggestion so that we can practice all those tools, but don't feel obliged to stick to it. You can also freestyle a little bit and create something on your own as well, or just do it step by step, the way I do it so that you practice the vector design tools. Now, do you remember what we have to do now? I will always recommend that you expand the stroke. And that you change the stroke to fill. To do that, you go to the three dots menu, expand stroke, and now we only have fill. This will prevent any problems when you're scaling your vector objects up and down. If you have strokes and the scale with object is not selected, then you will have scaling issues. That's why I will always recommend just to convert it to curves because it will save you up some mistakes in the future. I'm going to drag those extra decorative elements inside of this folder. Far more to go. How to create this one? This one, already the last flowers will have some elements of using blending modes. For this petal shape, we will need a tear or a tear drop shape. Let's go to our exercise sheet. Choose a tear shape. It remembers that we previously were using stroke, so we have to flip it up to get rid of it. Now I'm going to rotate it perfectly with 180 degrees, and I'll try to resize it so that it fits the exercise sheet and then three dots menu, convert to curves. Now I think you know also the drill from the previous flowers. I'm just going to switch off the exercise sheet so I can see better and then create a duplicate, flip it vertically and position it underneath, really zoom in to stuck them together, select both of them. Make a duplicate. I think I rotated it by also was it 60 degrees? Duplicate and the power duplicate will recreate this shape. Now we cannot see that it's exactly the same formation. What we're going to do is we're going to group it. Inside of the group, we will open it and we will still select our petals and change the blending mode, for example, to multiply. This is how you get this effect over here. Now, remember we were also talking about bleion operations about divide. This is where I think it will be nice for me to show you another example how to use this you cannot see it. Let me select everything, how to use this divide bulion operation. For that, I'm going to create copy. Sometimes it's good to have a flower formation or any vector acid that doesn't use blending mode because blending modes, they will interact with any other element of your illustration and sometimes you want that to create artistic effects, and sometimes you don't want that. In order to keep those extra decorative elements, but without the blending modes, we will take advantage of the divide function or the divide bulion operation. I'm selecting all the petals back, and I'm moving back to the normal blending mode. We go back to our normal blending mode, we select all the petals. Instead of merging them, we go to our Bolan operations and we choose divide. Now, as everything is selected, one finger on the screen, and we can deselect all the petals that are on the outside one by one. Before we make any mistake with the selection, let's group this middle. Change its color so that you can see better that it was really isolated. What did this divide function do? It basically made a division where it saw the paths are overlapping. That's another really great example to see this divide Bolon operation in action. Now we can group the rest of the petals and we also have the curative element. Now we can keep using this flower, but it will not interact with the rest of our illustration, the way this one interacts because it doesn't have any blending modes. I'm going to keep this one, but I'm going to make it invisible. What is missing for this flower is just its middle. We create a perfect circle. And we see that it's snapped right in the middle. And we group everything. Now, this one should be easy by now. We go to the heart shape. I hope that you guessed it right, and we convert it to curves. Then we create a copy and from the move we flip it vertically. We switch of the exercise sheet to see things better. I'm bringing back the exercise sheet, to see things better, I create a copy, and it will be 45 degrees and another copy to make use of the power duplicate and another copy. Now I select all the petals, open the group, select them again, and switch the blending mode to multiply so that we have this overlapping effect. Super easy and again, if you want to recreate it just like with the previous flower, you already know how to do that. Let's move to this one. Do you remember how to create this petal shape? Yeah, the crescent. Again to do it in the cleanest way, I'm going to create a copy of this petal, put it underneath, select both and from the move tool, I only want to align them in the center line. Next, I make a copy, and I move it by 45 degrees and without deselecting power duplicate Zuck. I'm selecting everything and grouping, opening the group, selecting all the petals, and we're again creating this blending mot effect. What else do we have here? Put the tube so that you can see things better. This has created an extra shape behind. So to take advantage of the shape that was created behind all the petals. We just have to position it on the outside. Because we're using the blending modes, all I want is to retain just this original shape. I will take advantage of the petal shapes by creating a duplicate. I will switch of this one. And then this duplicate, I will merge it doesn't really have to be in multiply. Now this petal shape will be right on top, and this extra circle will be at the bottom, underneath. I'm selecting both and I'm using the subtract function. Now I am only left with the middle shape, and I bring back the petals that have the blending mold overlap effect. I'm showing lots of tricks here. I hope that you like this exercise as much as I do. Align middle, and align center two to two, we group it, we bring back the exercise sheet. Last flower. This one is fun. So again, crescent. Now, the way I created this one, obviously, I needed to offset one of the petals, but it was pretty random. Duplicate. The angle that I used wasn't a perfect angle, I was just something very random. But remember not to dissect. This is important. Now power duplicate. Data, we group everything. Now I can switch it off and I'm going to create the middle maybe with some yellow. I can also align it exactly in the middle. Let's make it a little bit big. Okay. Now the rest will be just those little seeds. Keeping two fingers on my screen, I'm creating a duplicate every time I move away my Apple pencil from the screen, a copy is being made, and I'm keeping those two fingers on the screen of my iPad to create super fast copies, but surely you know it from my previous courses. Two to two super convenient. That's why I love working on the iPad. We group everything and now I can switch off the exercise layer and I can just scale it to my liking, and we group everything, and now we are done. We were able to practice pretty much all the tools that we had an introduction to in the previous videos with some extras. For example, we were also practicing using the stroke, on this little flower here and this one here and then expanding the stroke so that there is no stroke and we are only working with the fill. Feel free to follow this exercise in exactly the same way that I did. But once you start to feel more confident. I really really encourage you to make your own creations. If there's something that you like, you already know how to add all those creations to your asset studio. This is going to be so satisfying. You select the entire group level. You go to the asset studio, flowers, Hamburger menu, and asset from selection, to, and all the flowers are here. You can still go to the individual flowers and see if there's anything that you would like to save up separately, for example, Maybe you want to save up this element, the components of your flowers because next time you, it will be easier to mix and match. This middle of this sunflower, this could be recycled. Maybe you want to save up just the middle of this flower. Remember we created this star like shape. That could be interesting. This is a shape that you will not get that easily from the rectangle tool options. It's a unique shape. That could be recycled. That's why I'm going to add it into my assets as well. This I can group. This, I have to go to the move the middle of the flower. This is something here as well we used a lot and it's just repetitive. You keep wasting your time. If you go to create your circle tool over and over again. Those precious seconds, you can just group the middle of the flower. And you can also add those individual components into your gallery. Those two guys. This is a very nice shape for a middle of the flower, and then you can save it up as an extra asset because it will surely speed up your work for some other element in the future or this one. It took some time from the shape builder to create exactly the star like shape. I want to have it as an extra asset as well. Now in the next videos, we will be building even more assets together. Stay with me. 16. Practice: Petals in Fresco: In this video, we will be briefly going back to Fresco. I would like to encourage you to experiment with different shapes for your petals. Since in Fresco, you can create both vector objects with symmetry elements. This is why we will be switching from affinity back to Fresco. So let me open my Fresco interface. I will show you a document that I already created before. It's going to be essentially the same document as for our vases. It was 3,000 pixel square, so you can go ahead and create a completely new document here. In case you want to again create it from scratch, just hit create new and remember to input 3,000 pixel square and 300 DPI. When I hit create new, it remembers my previous size, 3,000 pixels square, you can go to custom size. And when you adjust your pixels, just make sure to open the print size and change this to 300 DPI. But I'm going to close it and open the document that I was working in before. In this document, I was working on some extra petal shapes. The visibility of all the layers is activated. That's why it looks a little bit weird, but if I were to switch off some of those petals, this is what it would look like. This is the first petal that I started with as a reminder. I was using my favorite vector brushes and to switch on or to switch off your symmetry tool. You have to go to the third icon from the upper right corner symmetry, and this is where you can activate or deactivate your symmetry. For all of those petals, I was using the very first symmetry type, the vertical one. I will also use my little cheat sheet here. Those are the petals that I created in Fresco, and you can create your own, by no means, you don't have to create exactly the same petals. But later in affinity designer, I'm going to take those petals. I will include all those references in the course resources section. We will be using all those petals to create extra floral assets with blending modes effects. So I will switch off the visibility of this one petal. Whenever you want to create a new item, you have to create a new layer that is empty. Then again, we will be working with a black color so that we can see things better. So first in line would be a petal. Doesn't have to be again exactly the same. It probably won't be exactly the same, but this is very good. Just for the first petal in fresco, create a petal that looks a bit like a hard shape, but it is more irregular. Normally, in affinity, as you know, from the previous videos, for the hier shape petal, we would just use the hard shape from the rectangle tool. But the goal of this exercise is to create a few more unique vector objects that we can use as components for our vector flowers that are a little bit more spontaneous, so to say. So I try to recreate this petal here and I'm going to include a few random lines, making sure that my shape is really closed both at the top and at the bottom. I think you remember the drill from the previous lesson, then we use the fill tool to fill our shape. It's not exactly the same, but it doesn't really matter. It's just to do this exercise together. This one, we switch of the visibility, we create a new layer, we go back to our vector brush, and we draw our next petal. Something like this, switch of the visibility, new layer back to our vector brush. This one is a little bit more elongated. To do. We can just try to draw it, the initial shape, and then you can still fix it making sure that everything is nice and closed. That looks good. Of course, it's not the same, but it's totally fine, filling the shape, and then because everything is in black color, you will be able to evaluate the shape much better. Switching of the visibility, another layer. Now, this one is a little bit more jittery and rounded on the edges back to our vector bush. This might do, but I will fix maybe the base of this petal. Now it looks a little bit better. I'm not going to fix that so that it matches exactly the shape because you will be also creating shapes that differ a little bit and it's okay. Now we have this shape. Then you fill it with color and you still eye it and you zoom in and you zoom out and you see if there's anything that you would like to fix on this shape. For example, I can make the base of this leaf a little bit rounder. This is a super interesting shape. This is a shape that you would not be able to create with the rectangle tool in affinity. One part, and then a bit of a tip. Pretty much for all the remaining petals, I will follow the same steps. I switch of the visibility of the previous layer, then I create a new layer, I switch back to the vector brush tool, and using this very first symmetry type, the vertical one, I create my petals. Now I will only switch on the visibility of the petals that I would like to export, just for you to demonstrate one more time how I export everything to affinity designer. Export menu publish an export, export a, PF. It remembers our previous setup, and then I save it to files into my exports folder on my iPad, safe. Then I can get rid of this little cheat sheet now. I'm going to exit in fresco to my home page. You see that it's refreshing the document and it makes sure that everything is in the cloud. Now we can go to designer back to our home page. First, we have to open our document from our folder. We keep the settings as they are, we hit ok. Sometimes there's a bit of a bug, then you have to go back and click again, Live Docs. Now it's all open. Remember that PDFs, they have different dimensions. They will not translate to pixels, they will translate to points. The first thing that we got to do is sometimes when we were fixing a shape, those extra layers were created, we go to the group level, bul in operations at and we just merge the shapes, so we don't have those extra layers. If you see there's a symbol that there's a group, get rid of the grouping by merging all the little layers within that group. Now we can select all our petals, three dots menu, copy. We go back. Now I can switch off the visibility of those previous petals, three dots menu and paste. I'm going to group them. S. Spread them evenly on your canvas. You can also change their colors. It's because for my asset studio, I use dark background. I I like pastel, I choose a few pastel colors to also change the colors of those petals so that later on my library also looks nice to the eye. What you're going to do, you will wait. I have to go to the color studio. You will just assign some of your favorite colors to those petals doesn't really matter. They can be part of your branding colors. Anything that will be pleasing to your eye in your asset studio, so that we also have a good visibility on this dark background. You can also rename them. I'm not going to waste my time now renaming it. Just wanted to show you that once you have everything unfortunately you have to do it one by one, you swipe to the left and you rename your layers, and when everything is done, you select everything. We go to this botanical assets category that we created together, and over here, you can either save it under flowers, but you can also go add another subcategory. Two to two. You can rename it to two to two petals, for example, Then Hamburger menu add acid from selection. In this way, we created another subcategory with a few more unique petals. Now in the next video from those petals, we will be building together a few more floral assets, which also take advantage of the rectangle tool, but they will be built from all those special petals that we created in Fresco. This one is beautiful. Also, what I'm going to show you is how I utilize blending modes to create those floral shapes. Join me in the next video. 17. Practice: Blend Mode Effects: In this bonus video, there will be more of your own practice behind the scenes, so to say. Your task will be to take the petals that you created since they are grouped. It's very easy for me just to drag them outside of the Canvas. I would like to encourage you to create extra floral assets, which you can add to your library. You can try to recreate the floral assets that I have over here. I will include a bit of a cheat sheet of how they were done and I will explain them in a minute. Alternatively, you can simply experiment by yourself. But I wanted to take a copy of one petal and I wanted to show you how in general, you would proceed. You take one of those petals that you created in Adobe fresco and to see the unique effects and shapes that you're creating, you have to change its blending mode and I would recommend that you start with multiply. You can change it to other blending modes, but multiply will be the safest blending mode. You can also experiment with different blending modes later on, but I would suggest that you first start with multiply because this is where you will see the shapes, the unique shapes that you're creating the fastest. Number one, you take the unique petal, you change the blending mode to multiply. Next, three dots menu, Duplicate. Remember the previous operation. That's why this petal went somewhere away. Let's say you rotated by 45 degrees, you keep the selection. It's important not to di select. You can Zoom and zoom out, but the selection has to stay the same. Then you keep hitting your power duplicate so that it can do the shape for you till your flower is complete. And then make sure to group it and save it to your asset studio. Again, to summarize the steps, you're taking each of those petals and you're playing around with its duplicates and different rotation angles. Also, before you do that, on the individual petal level, each of them will have to have your chosen blending mode, and I suggest starting with multiply. I'm going to remove this. Now, how did I arrive at those floral assets? Your task will be to try to recreate all those floral elements by yourself. Because now you are equipped in all the tools to do that and all the knowledge to do that. Even if you will not arrive at exactly the same flowers, that's not the point because it's not the purpose of this course to copy everything one to one. What I'm doing in my affinity designer interface. It's also to arrive at happy experiments and your own unique floral assets. Of course, if you arrive at exactly the same flower, it's also fine. Feel free to use it in your botanical compositions, but there is no need to copy everything one to one. Now I will just briefly explain how I created those florals and I really warmly encourage you to either carry out your own experiments or to try to recreate exactly the same floral assets. This one is quite easy. I took the very first petal shape that I created in Fresco, switched it to multiply, and then I did the power duplicate, I think at about 120 degrees. Then the middle of this flower, I took it from the library. This little flower that we created in our first practical exercise, creating floral assets. It could be an individual standalone flower, but I thought it will fit very well to be the middle of this flower. Now, with this flower, the petals, I think this is pretty straightforward. I created two copies, one to the left, one to the right, and they were all set to multiply. With the middle of this flower, I think you know how to do the dots. It's from the rectangle tool you take the ellipse. But maybe I'm going to show you how I did this middle of the flower, namely I went to can you guess, by the way? Where is it? I went to the Pi. Yeah. Perfect circle, one finger on the screen, then I make a perfect semicircle, three dots menu, convert to curves, move tool, 180 degrees. Then I went to the Node tool. I removed this middle node by selecting it and hitting delete. Then from the node tool still, with my apple pencil, more or less in the middle, I dragged this line down. Oh. Then you can go back to the move tool and you can still adjust it to your liking. Super easy, but you have to get used to it a little bit to all those tricks and then it's all super super easy. This is done this third petal. I also took a white circle that I placed in the middle of this petal. Then I used the power duplicate and the blending mode that I was using for this flower was screen. That's pretty much it. I also created this beautiful middle shape. Looks like a little cute star. This is also pretty similar, the middle is super easy. If you were also saving up your individual components in your asset studio, maybe you already have it there, see. The middle of this flower, can also just click on it and insert it and This petal over here, I created copies. Of course, I set it to multiply. The first copy, I didn't rotate it, even though you could do that, you can rotate it by 90 degrees. I made a copy, I positioned it at the bottom first, and then I flipped it vertically, making sure that it's perfectly centered. Then I took the pair of those petals. I went to the three dots menu, I hit a duplicate and having those two petals selected, I rotated them by 90 degrees. That's it. It looks like a poppy flower, I think. Now, this looks as if we created this shape using from the rectangle tool, the crescent shape. Remember, we used to create this leaf like shape using the crescent shape. Then we were going to the three dots menu and we were converting it to curves. But if you look a little bit closer, this shape is a little bit more irregular because this is actually the original petal that we were using. I'm going to remove this shape. It's again not created using the rectangle tool, but our original petal shape that we created in fresco. Then the blending mode that worked very well, especially on this blue color was linear burn. You can play around with this shape further. I really like the star like formations that this simple shape created in the middle. I didn't include any middle for this flower, but feel free to experiment and add in any extra elements. Make sure to grip it and then save it to your library. I will go back to show me my original botanical library. I haven't saved them yet, but after this lesson, I will it's going to be over here. Now, this one, I used color burn, I used a white middle. This symbol stands for just a white circle in the middle. Then this petal was power duplicated, if I may say so a few times. You can see how many times by counting the tips of this petal. There was this first one original, then two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11 12. Again, if you wanted to be precise, just create a copy of this petal. Put it underneath, flip it vertically, select those two petals, and then carry out the powered duplicate. Now, this one, I might actually have to open the layers to show you. But it was again a happy experiment. I would really have to focus hard so that I can remember how I've done that because a lot of those creations, I mean, are very spontaneous. First of all, we have this shape element, which I took from the rectangle tool, the double star shape over here. Then this very first shape doesn't have any blending modes. It's just this petal duplicated a few times and rotated by 90 degrees. If you look inside, this is a normal blending mode. I wanted to have a base with no blending mode at the bottom. Then the rest of this shape so that we have those beautiful color plays is using the screen blending mode. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, petals altogether created this shape, and each of them you will see here are in the screen blending mode. To have again everything perfectly aligned. First, create a copy that will be positioned right underneath. This copy again, has to be flipped vertically, and then you keep rotating it one time and second time, and you get really beautiful results using blending modes and powered duplicates together. For this one, I actually combined two of my petals from this petal group that I created in Fresco. The red one, which is underneath, let's go to the layers panel, doesn't have any blending mode. It's just the base. All of those petals were also rotated using the power duplicate. Then with the color dodge blending mode, I this extra petal. I scaled it down so that it fits in the middle of this flower, and I rotated it only one time. I first created this pair over here. Then from the three Ds menu, I created a duplicate, and then I rotated it by 90 degrees to arrive at the second pair. In this way, everything is really really centered. Then this one is exactly the same petal shape from the previous flower. No base. This time, all of those petals were set to screen, and the middle of this flower is just a simple white circle. Let me show you also the layers here. This is just the middle of the flower, and all those individual petals are set to screen and they're also rotated. That's it. I'm going to include the sheet, this sheet sheet with all the explanations, including what petals I was using and what the blending mode I was using, I will include it in the class resources. In the meantime, I need to save them into my assets library because I haven't done that. Once you're done with your happy experiments, you can select everything altogether. Go to your main botanical assets library. I'm going to go to the main one that I'm using. Add asset from selection to add in those extra flowers. Can show you that again. Let me go to the category that I created for the purpose of this course, botanical assets. Flowers, add assets from selection. You can also add the same assets across other categories. I need be if this will make your work more efficient. Of course, you can have assets saved up even multiple times across different categories as long as it's helpful to you and your work, and it helps you to access those assets as fast as possible within your project. In this lesson, we were practicing or discussing how to create extra floral assets. We refreshed how to use power duplicates, and we talked briefly about utilizing different blending modes, not just multiply, not just screen, but also blending modes such as linear burn or color Dodge to create interesting effects. Then your task after watching this video will be to carry out your own experiments. Maybe you created exactly the same petal shapes when you were doing the previous exercise in Adobe Fresco. Maybe you created something completely different. All I encourage you to do is to experiment, and then at the end of the day to add in all those happy experiments into your assets library. Oh. 18. Practice: Vector Leaves: Okay, guys. I think that by now, you will probably feel very confident using all the vector design tools in affinity designer, as well as using fresco and importing your vector objects to affinity designer. But this will be the last exercise that we will do together before we move to a bigger botanical illustration project. What we are missing in our library are the leaves. I already added in a few here. But those leaves that you can see here, we can do this exercise together. There's an exercise sheet that I prepared for you, which will be available in the class resources, which you can place onto your document in a second, you can treat this exercise in the same way, like the previous exercises that whenever I create a vector asset, you can also stop this video, try to first do it by yourself and then check if you are doing it in the right way or if there's a better or faster way to do it. So when you want to position an external image, onto your document, you have to go to the Hamburger menu and then go to place, and I have my exercise sheet simply saved to my photos album on my iPad. You can also have it, for example, stored in your Cloud storage or in the files folder on the iPad. I'm going to place mine again from photos. And here it is. It's just a simple last exercise that we can do together to repeat what we learned. We will be creating those leaves together and three botanical compositions that we can add to our assets library. You can also rename this layer to something like sketch or lines. Then over here, having this layer still selected, we switch it to multiply. Then from the three dots menu, we lower its capacity to roughly half. Then I already prepared those assets before. They already in my library, but I'm going to just move them to the left side so that I can also have a cheat sheet. We start with our first leaf and this is just a suggestion of an exercise. You can do this exercise with me, but you can also stop or you can create completely new creations or even extra creations on the basis of what you see here because we will not be doing as many leaves shapes as we were with the flowers because the goal was basically to get familiar with all the tools that you can use, the rectangle tool, the corner tool, which we weren't using that much. The alignment tool, all the Boulan operations and the shape builder, and now we will just re establish our knowledge and make sure that we remember everything correctly. Let's start with the first leaf shape. We go to the rectangle tool, and then we choose our tear drop shape. Just going to draw this shape and maybe from my color palette, select this green color and then flip the stroke up so that we are only left with fill. Then from the move tool, you can resize it and position it more or less in place. It doesn't have to be perfect. If you want to create something slightly different than what you see on the exercise sheet, then you are more than happy to do that. I'm going to commit to this shape, three dots menu and convert to curves. Now, half of the sleeve has either a darker or a lighter color. You can do that in both ways. They have their advantages and disadvantages, but it's more or less the same. The easiest one would be just to clip it. Then you have to switch off the sketch and position it in the middle so this will be option number one. To be honest, this is the one that I do most frequently because it's the easiest. You just have to remember that if you want to recolor this green color, you have to open this group. Another option would be to drag everything out to select both layers and to go to the shape builder tool when you have the minus selected free hand just to cut out this shape, and then you have to group it. This would be option number one, everything is grouped, but at least all those two objects, they are on separate layers. For this leave, two fingers on the screen, I'm just going to create a copy. Let me show you one, let's say, small disadvantage, if you want to manipulate Both of the layers. I mean the bright green color and the darker green color by cutting out this one element, you will have to do it twice because you have two layers here instead of a clipping mask. I'm choosing a round a rectangle and I'm really rounding it up. If you want to see this cutout better, you can change the color of the cutout element to the color of the background, which in my case is white, only to be able to see things better. Because then when you zoom in zoom out, You can evaluate if this is what you want. Do you want it a little bit more narrow, a little bit more small. You can follow my exercise sheet, but you don't have to. Then just making sure that this is the leave. We have two layers here. Even if we cut it out from this darker color, we still have to cut it out from the brighter green color. I'm going to select this cutout element and make a copy. Now I have only the first copy selected and maybe this green color from the move to bleion operations subtract. Then again, the cut out element, the second green color, boolean operations subtract, and now everything is cut out properly. As you go, I also encourage you just to properly rename your groups. If you know, it's all going to be leaf leaf leaf and just copy paste. When you add everything to your library in this way, it will be already labeled and it might save you some work in the future when you're doing client work. Here, one of the most popular leaf shapes. How to do that. Say super easy, but where is it? Crescent. You create a crescent shape, I think there was this. White color that I choose for the cat out, and then I changed everything to green, and then I adjust the shape, still from the rectangle tool so that everything is symmetrical, it has to snap. You will see those guiding lines, and then three dots menu, convert to curves, move tool and I'm positioning it in place. Now this leaf again, half of it is a little bit darker, half of it is a little bit lighter so that this whole vector design is not super duper flat, but it has a little bit of weight. No weight, but depth depth is what I meant. G to choose this darker color and this time, instead of using the shape builder, I will just use a clipping mask, position and position it in the middle. Then swipe to the left, rename and paste because it remembers the text that I copied previously. From the move to to fingers on my screen. Hold on screen, make a copy. Now we will need this middle line, which will be the easiest to create with a pen tool. We just create a line, doesn't matter if it's perfectly straight. Since we weren't using the pen tool before, it doesn't recognize any fill color nor any stroke color, we move to stroke. Let's just choose even this black color so that we can see everything better. Going to the move tool, position it roughly, then back to the node tool. Now I'm going to position my nodes basically where I want them. And then they will snap into place. It doesn't matter if the original line was straight or not. Then I go to the stroke tool and we need this extra pressure point. I just tap with my apple pencil in the middle and we're dragging the first point and the last point all the way down. We create this taper at the beginning and at the end, then you just adjust to your liking and you can still stay with the node tool. And adjust it up or down so that you're happy with it. Then three dots menu expand stroke that this line doesn't have any stroke, and empty circle, but it only has fill. I can also change it to this green color and then make it a little bit darker. We make sure it's the right leaf and we group it. This one is cute, has a heart shape. We choose the heart shape from the rectangle tool. It will also remember that we were We were having a stroke. That sounds funny. We had a stroke. We were using the stroke. We have to flip it up. We go to the fill, maybe change the color to something a little bit brighter. Again, feel free to follow my exercise sheet, but can also go back to this original shape and adjust it here to your liking, and then you commit. We go to the three dots, to two, convert to curve. Before I create part of this line in a different color, let's maybe do this cut out here by choosing a triangle shape. Can I make it darker so that I can see things better, rotate it, place it more or less where I want it. And then select both shapes and the easiest fastest way is to go to bulion operations and choose subtract. Now we want half of the sleeve to be a little bit darker. It's a very subtle adjustment, but it can add, like I said, more depth. We will choose the original color of the leaf and make it a little bit and this time we will clip it, this will be the easiest way. I'm switching off the exercise sheet so I can see things better. Rename leaf to two and rename again leaf so that we don't have any extra work renaming our groups or our layers when we're working on our projects. Let's do this one. I'm going to maybe rotate my canvas a little bit, and this time, I'm going to choose my Pi shape. One thing on the screen, we'll make it like a perfect circle, and then we make a perfect semicircle. Three dots, convert to curves. Can also get rid of this middle node, selected and deleted. Then from the move to we can rotate it to your liking. Then we go to the node to. We adjust the other node. Here you see those blue handles, you can adjust them two, and you just manipulate one of the handles to adjust the shape again to your liking. Now we need the stem. The best stems are made using the rounded rectangle. We just round it to the max. It will snap and you cannot go any further. Then I make it a little bit darker. From the move to, I can make it also a little bit thinner, rotate it roughly to the shape from my exercise sheet, maybe make it a little bit thinner. That looks cool. Then you can already make a copy two fingers on your screen. If you're working on the iPad. This time I want the shape to go outside of the base leaf. Now from the move to two fingers on the screen, going to create copies. Now I am switching off the exercise sheet and since it's around the rectangle, sometimes the roundness will show at the end. The first thing that I'm adjusting is to ight the srounded shape and I'm double checking that all my shapes really go outside of the base shape. Then all those elements that I created, I go to bulion operations and I merge them, and then I select the lines. With the leave. I go to the shape builder tool. I have minus selected free hand, and then I cut out all the elements that stick out. Some of them came back. Let's do it again. One, two, bye bye. This leaf is done, and now this is super easy. We have our tier shape. Then we go back to the rectangle tool, we make it er. You can basically adjust it to your liking, then we commit to the shape, three dots menu, convert to curves. Then I still go back to the node and I take this node and position it down. Maybe change the color to something brighter, and we will create our stem. We create our rounded rectangle for the stem. We position the main stem in the middle, maybe make it a little bit shorter. This time we can take advantage of the alignment tool. We select everything. We go to the alignment tool Align center. Now we can make a copy of the rounded rectangle. Rotate it a little bit and place it where we like it. Going to already make it a little bit longer because I will be cutting some things out. Two fingers on my screen. I'm creating copies as I go. They can be random. They don't have to be nicely spread. I just wanted to double check if I have any stroke on them, but I don't. Maybe this one can stick out a little bit more. And now I'm going to merge them. From the move tool, add. Then I select the lines and the base color of my leaf. You gust it. I go to the shape builder, the minus is pre selected because I was using it before, and I get rid of those unnecessary elements back to the move tool. Now those lines, I can duplicate them, make a copy, and I can flip them horizontally. And snapping will help me to position them in place. I think now it looks good. Let me zoom in. Yeah. That's about that. I am grouping those stems because they share a color. One last thing that I got to do is to create this extra dimension. Half of the leaf has a slightly darker color. I'm going to with the eye dropper, choose this original color, make it a little bit, clip it to my leaf shape and then from the move position everything in the middle. Now it's all done. I just have to make sure that everything is grouped. We are done with our leaf, so I can select everything. Then I just saved a few before, but I'm going to do that again. You go to leaves to your subcategory of leaves and you then add asset from selection, and then those leaves will be added into your asset studio. Now you see that slowly, but Shirley, your library of assets is really getting populated. Now, those were components that we were working on til now. We had individual flowers. We had our vases, our petals, and now we created a few more leaves. In the next video, the very last exercise is to practice creating a few full combinations so that you can see later on that it also has advantages to save the smallest components, bigger components, but also full compositions that will save you time when you're working on your projects. 19. Practice: Botanical Compositions: Welcome to our last exercise before we move to our full botanical illustration. Now we will be going back to our exercise sheet and what we have left is creating those ready made floral compositions. The key to this exercise is to remember and to be able to recycle what you already created. In reality, those three floral compositions are recycled from all the components that we created. You see, for example, this leaf on the sunflower And this one, too, this is what we created previously. This hard shaped leaf was also recycled and those leaves as well. Now just wanted to demonstrate how quickly it can get, how quickly you can arrive at those ready made combinations that can be safe to your library. So I browse through my library and I can already see the sunflower that I would like to use on this composition, so I'm going to insert it I will tidy everything up later on. This flower is this flower that we also created together in one of the exercise sheets. I'm going to drag them underneath the sketch layer. The berries, I remember they're here. We can also position them in place. Those were the florals that we can recycle. The work was done only once. Now we can just gather the fruits of our work. Now the leaves, we will need this leaf here. Then this one, we will need two of those heart shaped leaves. I'm going to drag them underneath our practice sheet. That's this one. We're going to make copies in a minute and those leaves let's see it's this one here. As you drag and drop the assets that you want to recycle for your project, they will also have the colors that you have pre saved into your library. It can also have a lot of advantages because You already probably have all those colors in your library that you like using. Maybe they're part of your brand identity or maybe they're just your favorite colors that are re occurring in your portfolio and your social media. Every time you keep reusing them in your projects, your entire body of art looks more consistent because you tend to use similar greens and similar purples or similar yellows and so on. That's why I do recommend if possible to save up your asset already in a whole bunch of colors that are maybe even taken out of your directly out of your illustration because then you can just drag and drop. Of course, you can adjust them. Now, for this exercise, I will keep them as they are here, they don't have to look exactly the same in my exercise sheet. It will just help you in your color choices if you already have a starting point in your library, is what I'm trying to say. All right. Now we start with the first flower. We can group them. It's going to be this flower here with this leave, so we can group it. This berry goes with this heart shaped leaf, and this little sunflower head goes with those two leaves. I will switch up the visibility of those two guys and we will start with this flower here. First of all, I'm going to go to the move to and position this flower more or less in place. To add ale bit more dimension to this flower. I created a copy of this shape. I'm going to do that now. Having this layer selected duplicate, and you can simply make it a little bit lighter. Go to the move tool. One finger on the screen of your iPad so that it retains the dimensions and you position it in the middle. So that you get a bit more depth in this shape. This is what I've done. Do I like this color? Maybe no, I would actually like to keep it this way, but then the middle of this flower, if I go to the navigator, and I switch everything to gray scale, then the middle of this flower should be, for example, a little bit darker so that the contrast is good. Maybe also this pink should be a little bit darker. And this original pink should be darker too, and the middle should be darker and now I have to see what I just created. Maybe the other way round. This looks a little bit more dull. I want the middle to be bright. That's how I usually do it with my illustrations. I have some starting point that I like, and then I try to work on the contrast from the inside to the outside. This contrast looks good, and then here we can also make this a little bit lighter. What about the leaves? I think I'm going to keep it this way. Let's bring it back. Somehow this yellow doesn't stand out enough, so I'm going to choose just some other pink. It doesn't have to be exactly the same here, or maybe simply white. White is always a good choice. I can go to my library where I have this subcategory that I have pre created called Complete florals, I'm just going to add acid from selection. And then I can recycle it in some other illustrations of mine. Moving on. First, I'm going to position my berries and adjust them a little bit. Sometimes when elements are recycled and they are too similar, it helps to flip them. For example, this one is just flipped vertically, and I also do this trick when I'm creating my patterns. I tend to recycle quite a lot. At least I flip my elements here and there, so that it doesn't all look the same. Stick the sleeve, position it over here more or less. To fingers on the screen. We make a copy. What is left is the stem and it's not this rigid regular rounded rectangle stem. I created it by using the pencil tool. First, I always make a test line. I flip the fill because when it comes to lines, we need stroke, can make it a little bit darker. Then we have to go back to the color studio, click on any of those pressure points and reset pressure. Normally, I keep the cap rounded. It really depends on your style. I sometimes also choose a cap that is a little bit more cut, but we can keep it around it Cp cap. Dle it. You can also use a little bit of stabilization. I'm going to position everything underneath this flower here, and I will start drawing. Switching of the exercise sheet, I see if I like everything, you can also select those two lines. Go to the stroke studio and play around with their width, and when you like it, three dots menu, expand stroke so that there's no stroke anymore. There's only fill group it, and now we can group everything together. How long did it take? If I wasn't talking so much, then probably less than 1 minute. Last one. You may remember that this flower was created with some blending modes. I really like this effect. As a reminder all those petals that you see here on the sunflower. They're in the multiply blending mode and I really like this effect, so I'm going to leave it. First, I have to adjust this leaf over here, make it a little bit bigger. And then this sleeve over there. We'll be more or less here. Another thing that I like to adjust is this stem to make it a little bit shorter because it will give me more flexibility to join the leaves with the rest of the plant. I'm also moving to the other stem and making it a bit a bit closer to the base of the sleeve. Then underneath from the pencil tool, the pencil tool should now remember our last settings. I can also select. Again, a test line or a test block, we can pre select the darker green from that leaf and apply this color and maybe already make it a little bit more narrow, deleted, and now we can start drawing. We try to join those leaves with the rest of the plant. I can go to the node too. I just noticed that for this flower, I guided this stem all the way behind the middle of this flower because it doesn't have any blending mode, so it will not shine through. That looks good. Now switching off, we have to fix a few things. The best way to do that is to select all the lines that you just created, and then you get access to the nodes and you can just shift them ever so slightly so that they really fit into place and then they don't look awkward. Having all those lines selected, you can also still adjust their width, but I think this looks good. Three D menu, expand stroke. Group everything. And we put it into the same group, flip to the left, rename layer, floral. Now we have those two extra floral combinations, which we can add to our assets library, add asset for selection, and This is it. Let's go back to the move tool. That was our last exercise. Together, we have created those three floral compositions, which we then saved into our library. But you see compared with all those flower elements, leave elements, vases, it's not too big. My advice is give it time. As you work on your illustrations, you might keep adding bits of new assets into your library. Or take some time when taking this course and create a few more combinations at least one, two, three, three, six, more so that you can add them into this category if you want, if you're having fun, also creating them. Try to recycle all the flowers. Try to recycle the leaves or create new leaves shapes, add them into your library, and then pre save them into your asset studio. 20. Task: Botanical Poster: Okay. Now we move back to our home page. What we have so far is a whole bunch of different flower assets, leaves, different vases. We also learned how to create assets in Adobe fresco and import them into affinity designer. We played a little bit with blending modes. But the big question for this entire course is, so what? So what that we created so many assets. I've mentioned before that one of the biggest advantages of using vector assets or assets in general, they can be ster to is that they will help you save a lot of time and you can use them for actual products. I wanted to show you one example of how I can utilize my botanical illustration. So for this particular project, we will be talking about using your work so that then you can use it for print. Those are examples of botanical posters and even one really sweet botanical postcards that I actually created in procreate. I printed out those beautiful posters in through my red bubble shop. And then I used it basically for my branding as a backdrop when I was creating my online courses so that my studio looks nicer. And those postcards, I also used them quite a lot as thank you notes. I don't know if you can see it through this video. The colors are very saturated. We will also talk briefly about color profiles in the next video. They actually look prettier than they probably look in this video. And the goal of our project is going to be creating such a botanical poster. I already created one dummy poster, and I will be teaching you exactly step by step how I created this poster. You can take exactly the same composition. And if you were following all the practice sheets with me, you have all those assets. I mean, the flowers and the leaves and the vases already saved up in your asset studio, so feel free, for the sake of practicing this botanical poster, illustration, feel free to follow exactly my composition. One friendly disclaimer to not sell this design. This is my unique composition that I created, and I would kindly like to ask you not to sell it over your PODs or to present it to potential clients that they are available for sale because they're not because it's actually my design. But for practice purposes and also sharing in social media and tagging me, naming me as the source of inspiration for this botanical composition, then you can absolutely do that. Then I also wanted to show you my own red bubble shop. For example, this very design, I already uploaded it to my red bubble so that I can also see better If things look good, I have sorted out all the other. There's a bunch of categories, so I sorted out any other categories like backpacks or mugs or shower curtains. I only focused on prints, posters, and I really like this notebook design. I left it ticked as well. Even if you're not printing out your designs the way I did with those guys here, you can still take advantage of this whole red bubble interface. It's all I mean, I checked it you're allowed. Even though you're taking the photos from Red Bubble, you are the author of those designs, so you can have easy mockup photos, which you can use for your portfolio website. When you go to the respective design, you see all the products that your design was applied onto. For example, for the spiral notebook design, you can just go to those three dots menu. You can click on those three dots and download all the images or view the product page. Then you can see what the end product would look like. I'm only showing you my red bubble shop because I have a good experience with them. I didn't sell myself lots of designs. I think My all time profit from red bubble is something like $3. So I personally don't recommend it as a reliable source of income. But I did print out a bunch of things that I created myself, and then I used it for my website portfolio or to give it as gifts to people. And also to see whether my designs make sense on real products, and I just treated myself. I think I even have a discount as a creator when I opened my red bubble shop. I don't recommend any particular one. There's other PUDs. I actually removed my shop on Society six because they changed the rules of having a shop there. I think they added some extra costs for the creators. I don't recommend them at all. I think Redbubble is quite cool if you want to test out your products. Then another goal of our botanical poster project, is to show you why we spend so much time creating those assets. The biggest goal is to show you that using assets is super fast. It will save you a lot of time both for client work or for personal projects, and all the elements that you created, they are still very editable and they can really come in handy in your creative work. Now that we discussed our final project for this course, let's move to the next video where we will be setting up our document for the botanical poster, and we will plan out our botanical composition. 21. Poster: Planning & Composition: All right, so we start working on our botanical poster. I already created a new document. It's going to be 50 by 70 centimeters in RGB color format. When you create your document, just remember to go to the Hamburger menu and to click safe as to save it somewhere onto your storage. So I'm just going to name it as botanical botanical poster number one, safe, and I will use the same extra exports folder that I created. Previously. To create our document just as a reminder, we hit new new document. I also have a whole products group over here. If you want to create a completely new category like a pre set, you have to choose the second icon with the plus, and here you create a new category. Then the design that you create, if you want to add it and populate this extra category, you select the first icon with the plus here, and here you can scroll to select the category that this should lend into. For our preset, we need to choose document units, centimeters. I am much more used to centimeters than inches, but feel free to use any other dimensions that you might need. Maybe you have a different POD shop in mind. Maybe you already know that you want to create postcards, for example. And you need specific dimensions, then you don't have to do 50 by 70, or you can just follow along and do exactly the setup that I have here. I stick with our GB. You might not see that, but all those posters that I printed out, let me show you one more here, the poster Here, the bigger one, the paper is very thick and nice, by the way. The colors were perfect, and everything was in RGB. In case of doubt, you can also go to Red Bubble. They have a special article about designing in CMYK versus RGB. I will also link this article somewhere in the class resources or course description. Or you just go to Google and you type in red bubble, CMYK, RGB, and this article will pop as one of the first search results. They tell you the obvious things that you are a little bit more limited with CMYK, but the printing outcome will be more reliable, which is true. But on the other hand, RGB, which is for screens, you can then use it very nicely to your website portfolio. So if you are not planning to print it out, I would stick with RGB. Plus, I already printed out designs that were in RGB through red bubble, for example, and I was completely happy the colors were saturated. And I had no issues at all. That's why I would recommend that we stick to GB. Then also out of my habit under margins and bleed, I set a bleed of half a centimeter here. We're going to go with 5070 if you're with me, create this new document and hit, and this is how we would create this completely new document. But because I created mine before, I'm going to hit X and close without saving and go to the documents that I previously created. So this is the illustration that I created before as I was preparing to record this course. And I like this composition so much that my project for you will be basically showing you step by step, and I will recreate this botanical poster, which might end up a little bit different because this is how it is with assets and with spontaneous work. It might be similar or it might be slightly different, but it will be my a point of reference, so to say. For our composition, I suggest that we design a poster with a tabletop. There will be some wallpaper or plain wall behind our composition. We will also choose one of the vases for our botanical composition. The best part in the next video, I'll will show you how I'm just dropping. Different assets that we created together doing all those exercise sheets together, and I will be building my botanical composition. On top of that, well, I want the goal of this course to be learning vector tools, how to create assets and how to use them. I have a whole bunch of resources about botanical composition in general, I don't want to repeat myself too much. I have a few other courses that target procreate users, where the principles of composition can apply to any software. They can apply to working simply in your physical sketchbook. Right now, I can also summarize those things for you. I have maybe switch off my iPad. I also have a free YouTube videos about botanical composition. I will link those as well so that you can have a look. I have written ages ago, blog post, which is still very, very popular, especially on my Pin trust, titled Botanical Composition and digital Illustration. In this article, I am again summarizing my tips for creating well balanced botanical compositions. Well, this one will also have a vase, but the other principles are the same. Namely, I allowed myself to do a few messy sketches in the sketchbook. But those are all very, very simple ideas. I recommend that you have some a bigger flower like a star of your composition, and you have middle flowers. Next, you also have smaller flowers, so you have a variety of different sizes. This might actually sound familiar because I was talking about those principles in my first assets course for affinity designer. When we were drawing hand drawn vector assets in affinity designer. Also in the Ds course, when we were doing the altro repeat Ds pattern together. The, the same principles have different sizes when it comes to your assets. Maybe have one star, have a few different shapes. Not just round flowers, but include flowers that are a little bit more pointy. Maybe look more like triangles or rectangles and squares. And then always include some fillers and use arrows to indicate the flow of your composition in particular for the leaves or for the stamps. I have another example here. Those are very easy thumbnails. But this is all it takes. You start with this and you end up with that. But a little bit of planning goes a long way. I create it, for example, as I was preparing for our project, one, two, three, four, different thumbnails. I set the table line, which is not exactly in the middle. It's a little bit more below. In the middle, I have different vases. This one is a little bit longer. This one is shorter, this one is more around. I was just experimenting with different shapes. Big flowers, middle flowers, fillers, and arrows for some leaves. This composition, for example, has one star flower, which is not exactly in the middle. It's a offset to the left. Then the leaves don't go up. I indicated with the arrows that I want some cascading leaves that will go more in this downward direction. And this composition would be a little bit longer with two starve flowers, one round and one more pointy, maybe like a tulip, and most of the leaves will go towards the upper right corner, and there will be a few more fillers that will go more towards the left downward corner. For my sketches, it doesn't matter if you do those sketches in Procreate or in your sketchbook, I use at least two different colors. You can use more. I make sure I use different shapes, and I use a lot of arrows to indicate the flow of my composition. This is the rough summary. I can also show you very quickly how you can do that in affinity. That would be your next task to work on your sketch in affinity because I also want you to make yourself more familiar with affinity tools. I like to sketch in the Pixel persona, so I go to this affinity designer icon, and I select Pixel. And then here we have the paint brush. And we choose the color not on the fill side, but on the stroke side. For example, I'm going to choose this pink. If you've taken my previous classes, you know that I like the acrylics category, which is completely for free. I will not be encouraging you to buy any extra brushes because obviously you really don't need it. I always always like to use the met acrylic 02 brush. You can adjust the size over here. And this is how it goes. You start by positioning the table line for your illustration. Then I like to switch color. By the way, we made the first line, and we created a new pixel layer, which by default is called pixel. It also has this little icon for pixel art, which is this little checkerboard. I stick to one layer unless I want some elements separately and I want to move them around. But one layer is completely fine. Then you can draw more or less a placeholder for your vase and you can already indicate the shape if you want it around. Or a little bit more rectangular. Then I usually draw some arrows. I want this composition to look more or less like this and I tried not to keep it too symmetrical. Then I swap the color again, maybe something more orange, and I know that I want one star flower over here, and a slightly smaller one there. And another middle one here. I'm going to change the color to this hot pink. I knew that I want some berries here. Se that I do not position everything exactly in the middle of my composition. I wanted a few berries here. Let's go to a bit of a bluish color. I knew that I want some fillers there. Finally, I choose a darker color and I still think about the arrows. I still think about the flow. This is where I could, for example, do this on a separate layer. You go to the layers panel, you hit plus pixel layer, and now you're on this new pixel layer. Now I can draw again my arrows separately. I just want to see if there's a good flow, it's going to go here, here, my cascading flowers there. Yeah. It does look well balanced to be and it's all Again, I guess a happy experiment. I'm happy with how it is, there's going to be a shadow. I know that my vase will be positioned in the middle. It doesn't always have, for example, in this postcard, it's a little bit more to the left because I also have this extra element with the fruit with the pairs. But I want some of this to be centered like the vase, but then the rest of the composition will not be perfectly centered. Because the arrows are on a separate layer, I can then switch off the visibility, but I like how it is, so I'm just going to grop it and keep it, go back to the designer persona, swipe to the left, rename this group as sketch. Change the blending mode to multiply and lower the opacity. So this will be our preparation. My original illustration is just there for me as a reference point. You can also take a screenshot from your social media or from your website. For example, from your Instagram account, and then through this place menu here, you can place a screenshot from your portfolio. Then as you are choosing the color palette for your botanical composition. You can use this eye dropper here and you can sample the colors from your website or from your social media so that you end up with a color palette for the spontaneous project that will be consistent with your branding basically. That's another trick that I wanted to give you. Do we have everything? We created our new document. It's in RGB. There's a little bit of bleed. And we worked on our sketch. Prepare this sketch stage very thoroughly because then your work will be easier. Again, have a look at my YouTube, have a look at my blog, and refresh the knowledge from my previous online courses, and do the rough sketch for your botanical composition first as your task. In the next video, we will be setting up the entire background for our composition, and we will be finally using our assets and dropping them onto our document. 22. Poster: Designing With Assets: We have to start building our illustration from the background. First, from the rectangle tool, we choose a simple rectangle and we start drawing a rectangle. By default, it might have a stroke, so we flip it up and I'm just going to sample this very, very light green color, positioning it at the back. Because I have magnetic snapping on, I will be able to snap it perfectly into place, taking into account this bit of a bleed that I set up. Say the guiding lines they have shown me that Everything is nicely positioned and it snaps into place. Can always zoom in to make sure. This is my background. You can also rename it as background, you don't have to, I'm going to lock it so that it's not moving too much. Then we create another rectangle. I'm going to already change the color to this yellow, and we will we will be positioning it to create our table. We drag it down. What I like to do is I like to then select this table cloth area with the background. We go to the shape builder minus, and we will be removing this unnecessary bit here. And we will lock it as well. You can also rename this to table, wall, whatever is quick so that you're able to differentiate. Since this is my background, I'm also going to group it so that it stays out basically. Now the fun part is choosing the vase. We're going to our asset studio. This is my favorite part. Obviously, I'm going to choose this vase for this composition, but you can insert it, go to the move tool. Maybe change the color to something contrasting, even black for starters. You can also put it on top of your composition. I mean the sketch that you created, and you can see if you like it. This would be my vase, but what if I want this vase, for example? Of course, you can change the colors. This would also be nice. Maybe I'll experiment with it and I'll choose another vase. This is the time to make your choices. But I think I'm going to go back to this original vase that I wanted to see. If you want to clip out anything that is outside of the Canvas, you just choose clip to Canvas and then you can see things better. For example, I can position this vase, make it a little bit bigger, switch off the sketch and also see depending on the shape of the vase if it doesn't go at a weird line, so to say with the table. I think this will look good. At the same time, we can choose an ellipse and create a shadow underneath this vase. I'm going to make it a little bit lighter and I will change the blending mode to multiply, and I will reduce the opacity to roughly half and p I will position it underneath. Select my vase and my shadow, go to the alignment tool and align center so that I'm 100% sure that everything is in one line, and I can also grip it. D. Step number one, the background. We have our rough sketch here. You can also improvise if you don't need the sketch, or you can even put the sketch to the side of your Canvas and just experiment. Then we have our vase and we can start working on the flowers. Normally, We were discussing a bit those compositional aspects. Normally, I start with the stars of the illustration, so I start with the main flowers. Now there's nothing that I can tell you, basically, you can just choose whatever you want, or you can go to the complete flowers section. This is exactly what I did for this sunflower guy here. So I have clicked on it, inserted my flower. Obviously, it has to be behind the vase so that it looks as if it was in the vase. I placed it here and I didn't overthink it. The whole composition was done for me. I already have the main flower, I have the stems, and I have the leaves. Why not make things easier for yourself. Then I also like those berries that we created when we were doing our exercise. I also added in those berries. But I flipped them horizontally. I also have to remember to position them behind the vase. But I think I wanted them in front of the sunflowers. Let's switch off the sketch. This is how I added them in. That looks good. Now, you can also recycle, so to say, part of your assets. They are not set in stone. For example, this little leaf here is in front of the vase, as well as this barry here. I'm going to find those two elements. Going to open my layers. You can also click on this leaf. Drag it out, and then click on this barry here. And also drag it out. This is this flexibility that I was telling you about that your assets are not set in stone. You can still manipulate them. I'm going to group them so that it's easier to manage them. Then I have the sleeve, I can still rotate it nicely or move it so that things look better. Just because you created an asset, does it mean that it has to stay this way. You can change its size, you can change the position of the leaf. For example, the leaf, I could rotate it a little bit more. On top of that, I altered those assets even further. Namely, I cut some circles out of those leaves because I thought it would look really interesting. Now, the way you're going to proceed, you will just click somewhere else onto your Canvas so that you have a clean slate, and then you tap on the element that you would like to alter. Then we go to the rectangle tool. We draw a circle, can also just make it white and we have to bring it up. I wanted to cut it out exactly in this position so that part of the stem is visible behind because it at some nice depth. Keeping one finger on the screen so that the circle is a perfect circle. I will position I will be positioning the circle where I want it, and then let's see. It's not the clipping mask. So we have to go to the base of the sleeve. We select the circle we want to cut out and the leaf. Then the fastest way is to go to the move, bleion operations, subtract. Yeah, I added a few more cutouts on the rest of the leaves, and I also created a copy of I wanted basically an additional leaf. So I'm going to create a copy directly from this leaf to fingers on the screen. And it can stay the same, and I think I liked the fact that this cut out was at the bottom, but you can position it where you want it, so it has to be underneath this barry. We will be talking about the contrast for illustration in a second too. But if you already see that something should stand out more, you can click on the color affected, go to the color studio, and maybe make it a little bit der so that there's a better contrast in general. This could also be a little bit der, this green. I will also choose the color by tapping this vase the color of this vase to this lighter purple. This color is applied so I can see things better. Now to check the contrast, I go to the navigator studio. This little icon here will give us a gray scale. I can stay in this gray scale and then tap this color. This navigator preview will still show you the colors that are involved, but all the rest on your screen will be in gray scale. You can also zoom out. Keep this color. You know that it's green because you can also confirm it here in the color studio, and then you can make it a little bit darker so that you're happy with the contrast and also this half of the leaf could be a little bit darker too. So that the contrast is better. Yes, I like it. You have to switch it off by clicking on the cycon again, and I'm really free styling here. You're dropping your assets from your asset library, but it's not set in stone, then you can change the colors. You can add an extra elements. You can cut out and manipulate other elements. For example, this berry, I don't want bow like all of them to be pinkish. I will select this one berry and from the HSL sliders menu, I will move it more towards being a little bit more peachy. Then I'm going to select this one here, and I'll make this one more purply. So I added some extra dimension here to this original berry is pink. This one has more purple and this one has more peach. That really looks nice. No, it's a joke. That's not enough. We have to add more. Now, another star color I wanted to be behind the berries. Yeah, it's all a happy experiment. You go to the library and you see what you like. I think I chose this flower here. Just make sure to go to the move tool. Yeah, it's the same. See the contrast wasn't good. You can sample the colors from from where, from your portfolio or from your social media. I will also switch of maybe the blending mode to two. I'm going to select all those petals and bring it back to normal blending mode. Then we did this exercise previously from the move tool. You can also go to let's select all those petals. You can go to bulion operations and choose divide. Then keeping the selection one finger on the screen. We remove those outer petals from the selection. We only selected the middle here, so I'm going to group it quickly right away so that I don't lose it and I will drag it out, change the color to this hot pink. L et's see is it the same, then I will make it a little bit brighter here in the middle. Now this flower will be behind my berries. I'm going to drag it in between the sunflower and the berry flowers. To say, they look like berries to me, and I will position everything. So it's not going to be exactly the same. Now this extra flower, you can go back to your sketch and bring it all the way up. But or you can improvise your sketch can be just your starting point, so to say, you can roughly follow the arrows and you can improvise as you go. I wanted to add those two flowers that look a little bit like stars. Those flowers are more round. Those are a little bit round and pointy, and those two guys are a little bit more pointy if it makes sense. I'm trying to stick to this principle here that I was briefly talking about to have a variety of shapes that not everything is super round unless it's supposed to be very round on purpose. Then it's fine. Let's look for the flowers that I want to use. I think it's this one. I think another variation of this flower that I build on. If not, I will do this with you guys. Yeah. When I was building this illustration, I improvised and I did a few alterations spontaneously. The asset that I pre created, it was just my starting point. Next, I opened this flower and I made a copy. Three that's menu duplicate. Then I chose the duplicate that is underneath. I changed its color. You didn't catch the color, t's change it again. Then I positioned it somehow randomly behind this red shape. I went to the alignment section, align center, align middle, and I also made a duplicate of this middle part and changed it to white, and I adjusted its size and also placed it in the middle. That's how I built this flower. Next, I created a copy, and to build this other flower, I started with this pink shape. I created a copy. I chose the copy that is underneath, changed it to white, made it a little bit bigger, and then I tried to rotate it so that it looks nice. Selected everything, align center, a line middle, that looks good. Next, I changed this to white and I made immediately a copy. Right now I have two of those white elements. I changed the color to somehow darker pink, and I rotated everything. I got rid of this white circle. This, you can also make it bigger. I said, probably this illustration will not be exactly the same. The petals that are around, I made them slightly bigger. You can select all the layers, alignment, align center, align middle. Now those two flowers. We can position them into our composition. Of course, they're not exactly the same because it will be difficult for me to replicate it in 100% the same way. But I wanted to show you that I had a lot of fun experimenting with those assets that were already in my library. This one we can put a little bit here. Make it a bit bigger, but I still want to see the outline of those leaves. Next, I wanted to add it in some extra flowers because I wanted to keep the pink bright colors. The nice green leaves can be a very good background to my composition. You can still put the sketch on top and now we can go to the category of leaves. I chose basically just this one leaf and placed it behind my vase actually behind everything. The first leaf, went here. I made it a little bit bigger than the leaf that is on top. Then immediately two fingers on the screen, I made a copy, which I placed under that original leaf and I tipped it more to the side because I knew from my sketch, I want to have a few of those flowers cascading in this direction. I wanted those leaves, which will be on the left side to be a nice backdrop for those filler flowers. Now we will deal with the fillers. For those green leaves, I'm going to group them because otherwise you keep adding all those elements and your layers, the number of layers is growing. I tried to keep track by grouping everything nicely. Then I was looking for a nice simple flower for my fillers. It could be this one, for example, this one is really cute. Ultimately, I wanted something a little bit more geometric and I wanted it to be much brighter. The colors from my asset study are just a starting point. Sometimes they match because I'm choosing the colors that are my favorite colors anyway. But you can change them right away so that they fit your illustration better. I'm going to make this middle a bit bigger because the flowers themselves will be a little bit smaller, so I want it to be obvious that there's some a middle in those flowers. And now it's just a copy paste to fingers on my screen. I'm making them also a little bit smaller, I rotate them a pa, and I create a few copies. Sometimes I make them bigger again, I rotate them, then I make them smaller again. I rotate them so that they don't look the same. This will look nice. It sticks out a little bit outside of the vase and it also goes beyond to touch those green leaves. The last one will be the smallest, let's say. Maybe one more because I really like how they look on this green background, and I'll see if this is too they are a little bit too much in line right now. I'm going to remove it and maybe change their positions a little bit. But all of them are rotated and they are scaled up or down so that they're not the same and then all those filler flowers. I'm going to group them and rename them as my fillers. Next, I thought when I was creating this illustration previously, I thought that this already looks quite nice, but I would like to have something non invasive that is still in the background. I opted in for those super simple leaves. The ones we created together, this one I created for another project, and I basically used them as fillers for my background. I went to the Asset studio. I looked for those super simple leaves. My starting point was actually my background. I sampled the colors from my background because it was also the slight green, and then I played a little bit with the brightness. I'm going to go ahead and sample it from my original illustration to save some time. I also wanted them to be a little bit more bluish, and I want the middle of those leaves also to be nice and bright. So that those leaves are not too heavy. They're supposed to fill in some gaps, but I don't want them to feel too overwhelming, overpowering the composition. That's why I kept the color very light so that you see when they're behind my main elements, they are not competing. Before I position the leaves that stick out, I placed a few really in the background. So that they fill in some gaps. One was here. You can also change their size in their shape. This looks quite nice. It's not exactly the same, but I'm going to keep it. Then I was using them up remembering my sketch that most of my arrows were going in this upward direction. Switching of the sketch. The sketch is just to have a nice starting point and then you don't have to use it anymore. You can just improvise. Zooming in and out. I'm actually not going to be looking at my original illustration and I will see what I come up with spontaneously. Maybe this one should also be a little bit pointy, but not in the same direction like the leaf above. In case it switches itself back to the node tool, make sure to go back to the move tool. That will look good. From another project, I created this leaf shape. This will look very nice and I'm also going to cheat my way. I can also select one color and from the move to go to fill color. See it selected only this one color and select one of the colors that I used previously, and then this color from the move to, same fill color, and it finds the same fill color. Now I can choose this other color. Is this the other one? Yeah. This is actually a stroke. You can do the same on the stroke. You just go to same stroke color, and we will change it to this super light sage green. This is how fast you can recolor your elements. Those guys here, those filler leaves in the background, I'm going to group them and this extra filler leaf, I will bring it all the way down. Now from the move tool. I think I'm just going to use one. I will position this leaf in my background. I think that looks nice. See this sunflower, the petals are in a multiply blending mode. I really like this effect. I think it looks very original, so I'm going to leave it as it is. I think this is it. This is my composition. Yeah, it looks the same slash similar. I wanted to save a little bit of time by trying to replicate the steps for this composition. But I am very excited to see your botanical compositions because now that you have this entire library of options, you can build basically whatever you want. In this video, I wanted to demonstrate that the library is only your starting point. You can still add in new elements. You can make copies very fast. If you have ready made compositions, like in the case of the sunflower, just Don't be shy. Just drop it onto your document, use it. This is why you were doing all the work before. I know I'm talking here quite a lot trying to explain things properly. But believe me, when I was creating this illustration alone, I think this very step here took me 5 minutes or something like that. It's not cheating because everything was created by you anyway. So it's your original work. That you're saving a little bit of time, and then you can mix and match and you can have a lot of fun with those assets. So join in the next video, we will be working on some extra details and the beautiful, beautiful texture on some of the elements using texture brushes in infinity designer. 23. Poster: Texture & Final Details: All right guys. In this lesson, we will be adding some final details. I added in a very soft wallpaper design, so to say that is so gentle that you can hardly see it. I also added some texture lines on my table cloth, texture and shadows on my vase, and that's pretty much it. Fort starters, I wanted to add this extra dimension on the background. I found my wallpaper a little bit too flat. What I do, usually, it's very automatic with me is I grab a triangle. And I change it to be at 90 degrees. Next, I get rid of the stroke, and I will pre select the color that I had previously, but in general, you take the color of your background and then you make it darker. Then I went to the groups that contain my wall layer and my table layer, and I clipped this extra shadow onto the wall layer, and then from the move tool, I positioned it in place so that there's a little bit of a nice shadow in the background. That the wall is not too flat if it makes any sense. The way we did also with this shadow, which is underneath our vase, from the same triangle method, I will add this shape over here even though we can either use a triangle or a rectangle. Let me actually show you a rectangle. So I'm just going to exit this group, click on the vase over here, back to the rectangle to. Now I'm going to draw my triangle. And then what I did, I took the original color of my vase, and you can either change the blending mode to multiplied or you can make it darker here. What I'm going to do is change it to multiply because when I apply my texture, the multiplier will also work with this texture, so some of those dots will be a little bit lighter. But the dots that are on this multiplier shadow, they will be a little bit darker. That's a nice trick. Multiply the same color like the vase. I am clipping it. Now we can just rotate it and from the move tool, you can position your shadow somewhere on your vase so that it all looks pleasing. You might then also reposition your flowers a little bit differently. For example, from the move to I can tap on this flower, make it a little bit bigger, and I cannot explain it. It's just more pleasing to my eye when it cuts a little bit of this shadow so that some of those floral elements, they're not just in this dark purple area, but also in this original lighter purple area. I go back to my shadow as a reminder. It's a multiply, but I think it's a little bit too harsh. For now, I will reduce it by half. As I add the texture to the vase, I will see if I need to reduce it even further. We have to shadow for what is happening underneath the flowers. I will create another rectangle, and I'm going to use it to create this shadow at the bottom of the vase. The easiest way to do that because it's basically going to be the s, it will have the same properties like the shadow that we created here. I'm going to go to the shadow that is already created, three dots menu, that's a handy little trick copy. Then I will move to this new shadow rectangle. Again, three dots menu, and then paste style and then it will basically paste in the same properties for this rectangle. Now I will scale it a little bit, change the dimension su dimensions and positioning position it where I want it. Now we have all the shadows. Before you add in any other extra details, I recommend that especially at this stage where you added your main elements for your composition and all the shadows, the shadow on the wall, the shadow on the vase, and the shadow underneath the vase on the table. I recommend that you go to the navigator and change everything to gray scale. See, for example, this is blending, this is not good. We cannot differentiate here well between the vase and the sleeve. Without exiting this gray mode, I will select this one green fly green color and make it a little bit darker so that there is sufficient contrast between the two. Now I see I also have to change the colors for those veins. I will use the same color and just make it darker. I forgot to group it, so I have to do it again. I will change the color for this entire group. Then again, from the color studio, from the HSL sliders area, I will make it maybe a little bit darker so that the contrast is better. Since I'm at it, I can do it for the rest of the leaves. For example, this leaf is supposed to be underneath this leaf. I wanted to be a little bit more in the shadow, so I will make it a little bit der. Then I think it would also look nicer for the contrast. If the lines on this leaf that is on top, where darker as well. Again, something is not grouped. So I'm fixing this. I'm applying this new color and I make it a little bit darker. Now I think things look better, so there's better contrast between my vase and my leaf. Here it all looks good. This stem also has sufficient contrast. Try to zoom in and zoom out. There's one petal that sticks to the background and maybe doesn't have enough contrast. But from where I see it, maybe you can see it properly in the video. It's still okay. My background leaves. They're light enough. It's a lighter green color applied, but they are still visible. They're not entirely merging. This looks okay, even though I could still select this green, make it a little bit darker. Yeah, now the contrast is even better. Those guys, those leaves, I adjusted them previously. Maybe the middle of this flower. I can make it a little bit lighter, see. The contrast improves, I would even say dramatically. It's a subtle difference because when you go back to your navigator and you go back to color, it looks as if you didn't do much, but for example, we adjusted this leaf and in the end, it's more pleasing to the eye. Hopefully, when you print everything out, it will also translate to a good print. Okay. Texture. I think everyone who's watching this video is like, Come on, do the texture already. So how did I make this texture on the vase? There's a bunch of vector brushes for affinity designer that come absolutely for free, and they're absolutely sufficient. In the meantime, I'm going to go back to my home page. Hamburger menu and it safe so that no progress is lost. I've mentioned at the beginning that when you register with affinity designer, there are a few brushes that you can download completely for free. For example, the Artista affinity designer brushes, and they will be then available from your account. Here, you will have this download icon, you will be able to download it and once it is downloaded, it will give you the size of this download and this green tick, which will be a confirmation that those brushes are there. Then when you go back to the document view brushes. In your library of brushes, you will be able to find the brushes that you downloaded. For example, those artista brushes have really cool effects for brushes for sketching, for example, but also brushes for texture. And some nice shading. For example, there's this nice spray brush. Now, the biggest tip that I can give you when you're testing out those vector brushes is to switch to the vector brush before you choose any of those brushes, and then to go to the color studio, and then from the stroke menu, just to turn it into black. The vector brush icon is over here. Color studio, change it to black. This is where you can change. You see also the size of your vector brush. Before I apply any vector brush, unless I really know it intimately because I've been using this brush over and over again, I test it out very thoroughly. For example, I see the spray brush and I wonder, will it be a good texture for my vase? I apply it and I already see no this is no good and this brush is already at its size limit. I'm going to go back and I will look for other brushes. There is a super nice hatch brush, which you could, for example, use on those leaves. I'm going to make it bigger. You can make this hatch structure, and then you can of course change its color and clip it to your leaves. And I come at those conclusions at what vector brushes I enjoy using by testing them. Again, go to the vector brush, change its color to black and first experiment with it by using it outside of your shape in black color. Because once you know, huh, this is the effect that I'm looking for, then you go back to the move tool. You have to exit your vector brush. I'm going to just stick it out here on top because it's a random shape. Then you can go back to the color studio, and then, for example, you can take the color that you want and you can adjust the color from here. You cannot make color adjustments when you're directly in this vector brush. That's why again, my recommendation, vector brush, color studio, start with black, just like before I'm using the pencil brush, I do some test lines or test blobs, the same with the vector brush. I have also a whole YouTube video showing a demonstration for a children's book illustration where I'm using vector brushes and I'm explaining them in much more detail there. With vector brushes, you have to experiment and test them out. Some of the brushes I bought them, for example, this is the I'm not sure how to pronounce it the Bazer body by true grid texture supply. You don't have to buy new brushes. For example, go to dry Media. This is completely for free, and I don't know. Let's try this charcoal dry brush, really see increase the size of this brush and start drawing. This doesn't look good, but to see what I mean, let's go back to the Move tool, select what you just created. This is all raster texture on a vector path, but it's also infinitely scalable. I have a whole article about the properties and the nature of texture brushes on my blog post. I will also link it so that you can read about it. I know it's raster. But it's on a vector path, the sin little line that you see here. It retains vector properties. That's why I love using those brushes. Then I can group this texture. I am out of the vector bruh studio. I go simply to the move too. I apply this purple color for the vase. I'm going to open the vase and clip it in. I will position it underneath my shadows, and now I'm going to adjust the color. See, and this is how you create those effects. Again, you go to the vector brush, you change the color to black. Where am I switch this off for a second, get completely out. You switch it to black. Of course, you can chos another color, for example, here, green, if you know, you can already start drawing in green. But the reason why I switched to black is that I want to see things. Just like with our Adobe fresco shapes that we are creating, black silhouettes give you the best idea of the end result. That's why I really recommend to get into this habit of testing out your vector brushes in black first. Dry metes for free, I have a whole bunch of Franken Tune brushes, which I paid for. I love them. Gua super super nice. You can create gah effects. For example, take this a little bit watery brush, and then do a few lines and then go back to the move tool, change the color, clip it to your shape, and then see for yourself what it looks like. For this particular brush, I need to find it in the library. It's also for free. When you sign up with your affinity designer account, you can download those vector shader brushes for free. They will be in your library. You can find them under vector shader brushes, and this is one of the noise brushes. I think it might have been noise brush seven. Of course, I need to make it bigger. The circle will more or less show you. You can always change it by the way. You can make it smaller. But first, maybe I go back to my original empty vase. This is why I do everything in black because I can see things better. That looks good, I can make it even bigger. Again, I'm trying also to go out of this shape and as evenly as I can to add in this extra noise. This is the nose shape that I created with this vector brush. I go back to the moto, then I clip it Underneath my shadows. What else will I do? I will change it to the color of the vase and I will make it darker. This is how I created this texture. When you zoom in, you will see also that this shadow layer is working with this blending mode that some of those dots from this noise texture are darker and the ones that are not in the shadow, they are lighter. It's a very subtle difference again, but This is pretty much how it works. Now, let's work on the texture for our table cloth. This is good, by the way, speaking of vector brush properties. This texture here, I'm just going to label it as vase texture so that I can differentiate it better. You can still go to the stroke studio, and you can adjust its size and its width. So because it's on a vector path, you can still work on its properties. Sometimes you start moving your shape, and then you cannot go back to the original shape because the brush went beyond its size. So that's why when I do this test block in my black color, I already try to arrive at the shape that is my end shape so that I don't have to change it here in the stroke studio because especially for bigger formats like 50 and 70 centimeters poster format is not the smallest one. That means that even those vector brushes will come at their limits, so to say. It's better to do your test and to already try to arrive at the size of your texture as you wanted. Do. Now we go back to the table. Do you remember the steps? Vector brush, and then black. I wanted something painterly, so I go to the gash brush and I will test out which one did I use? Maybe Dance. I think Dana 01. Ops, back to the vector brush, and I will be drawing a few lines for the pattern on the table cloth for this illustration. This will be option number one to already find the brush, which will be your perfect brush. Back to the move tool. We group everything and then you have to clip it into the table. Then from the move tool on the stroke level, we change the color to the original color of the table class. But in the layers panel, we can change it to, for example, to multiply, that it nicely merges also with the shadow and with the rest of the table. If it's too much, then you can lower its opacity. Multiply would be one choice. I also like those blending modes that make things lighter. Here the guage texture is very, very subtle. But instead of multiply, you can also go for either add or screen. I think it was add and color dodge a little bit too intense, so I used screen. You see this nice texture. It's very, very subtle. I'm going to rename it to table texture. Then I'm going to make it invisible. I wanted to show you one more technique. You can use the pencil tool. Make a test block. Maybe use white on the stroke, flip the fill. Auto clothes cannot be selected because we will be using lines and I don't need any stabilization and from the stroke studio, I can make it a little bit more narrow. This is a simple line without any texture. We can start with this. We can draw the texture on our table clos more or less. To. Then you can group everything together. Change it to the original color of the table cloth, go to the layers panel, change the blending mode to screen. Now, from the move tool, we can go to the brush studio, and then you can experiment with using different vector brushes. For example, I can go to dry media, and I can see will it look nicer? With the dry media, for example. Sometimes you have to adjust the size. From the stroke studio, you have to make it a little bit brighter. For instance, actually, I like this quite a lot. In my original illustration, I use this squash brush. It's completely for free. You don't have to buy any brushes. Also, those lines are created from the dry media category, also super super cool. So I think I'm going to keep it. I think I like it even more than this one because it has this nice texture throughout and on the edges, and it's a little bit more visible, so to say, this one is more wishy washy because it's a guash brush. So dry media texture. You can also take your personal notes so that for future illustrations, you have a few brushes tested out. And for you to remember which vector brush you were using, it's nice to take notes, so to say, on the group level area for future reference. Okay. Move tool, I'm tapping anywhere outside of my Canvas so that I can see things better. Now I created this, let's call it wallpaper, also using my assets. In my original botanical category, I had a few details and stars that I created. This one is super easy. I'm going to insert it right away. But it's very, very easy to create this shape. You basically need to go to your rounded rectangle. It remembered my previous stroke. That's why it looks so weird that we're going to make the fill white. Make it super round. Then we go to the move too. We make a copy. Tip two fingers on the screen. They have to be perfectly aligned, so we align everything center. Then we make a duplicate, and we make a 90 degrees rotation. It was a trial and error, for example, for this one, I see the distance has to be bigger. Now, I select both of them. I make a duplicate. That's why I like to save those things directly into my asset studio because sometimes it was just a happy experiment. I created this shape. I'm going to delete the extra, and then I built my library out of it. I used actually another one. This one is built exactly in the same way. You need rounded rectangles and you need two and ellipse, a circle from the rectangle tool. Then I made it bigger. From the move tool, I went to hear the wall. We have our shadow there. I want to position everything behind the shadow. I will put the shadow as multiply. And take the original color of my wallpaper so that not the wallpaper the wall so that I can see things better. Now what I did is, I took this shape, and I positioned it randomly as if it was a wallpaper. Two fers on my iPad screen and I was just trying to spread them out evenly as if it was a nice vintage looking wallpaper. That was also something spontaneous. I thought that the background is a little bit too empty for my liking. That's why I decided to add this extra detail, which actually maybe is not super visible right away. The toplict stopped working, then it's good to deselect again, two fingers on the screen. I think my iPad is heating up a bit to be honest time to finish. Then I grouped everything into a folder, and my wallpaper was practically done. This is very optional. At a minimum, in this lesson, I would warmly encourage you to practice at the texture on the vase. You can go even beyond and you can add extra texture everywhere all over, for example, the leaves. Try not to overdo it, though, because texture is also good when it's well balanced and it's not too much. So always go back to your navigator as well and switch to gray scale and see if everything has good contrast. Then I would encourage you to think of some a very light wallpaper, just to practice adding in some extra details to the background. I would like to encourage you to create the stable cloth and experiment with using vector brushes for your botanical poster. So now we have everything. It took me literally 15 minutes when I was preparing for this course. Right now, I need to explain a little bit more, but in general, this process is very, very fast because the majority of our work was already done. For the class project, any of the botanical illustrations that you would like to share with me if you're taking this class on Skillshare in the project gallery, if you take this course over Gumroad or my own platform, maybe you want to share it on your social media or in our Facebook groups. I really encourage you to create as many beautiful compositions as you can or as you want and to have fun with the assets that you created and to see how easy it is to recycle the work that you have done once. On top of that, we practice adding vector textures. Remember again that to get access to those extra brushes, the Artista brushes and vector shaders, you will have to download them from this interface when you register with your e mail address. Also remember to save your progress. C. Now we are done and in the last video, we will be talking about exporting our work. 24. Poster: Exports & PODs: So we created this botanical poster with the dimensions 50 by 70 centimeters. I needed it for my red bubble shop because I wanted to maybe print it out as a poster. In case you have another POD in mind or a completely different purpose for your botanical illustration. Maybe you don't need such a big format, and you will be okay with a little postcard format. You can adjust it to your liking. But I wanted to tell you that because everything is in vector shapes and vector design. Even with this vector texture, there won't be any problem with your export at all. We export by going to the three vertical lines Hamburger menu and we click on Export, and you probably know it from my previous courses that we have an option, for example, to export as a PNG, JP, or as a Tiff. This would be the most popular export files for print. I will stick to JPAC, and I wanted to show you that here under width and height, you will be able to scale your illustration up or down and it will not lose any quality. For example, if I wanted it for my social media or for my website portfolio, I don't need 5,000 8,000 pixels. This was translated to pixels. I could, for example, choose that the width will be 1080 for my social media or for Pinterest. Then I hit Share to save up this smaller export, for example, in my folders file. From here, I choose save to files and I can save it to my exports folder. On top of that, we can also scale up. For example, those dimensions, I can also save them up from red bubble and I have the best experience with my files for red bubble when at least one of the sites is 11 than pixels. This is pretty huge. The export is being generated one more time, so I could actually say regenerated and it will have different size. Of course, the bigger the dimension, the bigger the file size. But since it's pretty much vector based, only the texture brushes add in to this weight of the file, so to say. If we didn't use any texture on our vase, for example, then this file would be even smaller. We scaled it up and we chose 11,000 pixels for the height, then we click share, and we will also save it to files. Then I just hit cancel, and let's head to our storage. I wanted to show you first the export that we did for our social media. I scaled our botanical poster down, so I can tell that the size is much smaller. Then when I click on this file, It still retains what's it called its sharpness. It's a good quality export there. The quality of this export was not compromised. But what happens when we scale it up and we blow up the size even more? This is this botanical poster one biggest with 9.6 megabytes. When we open it, we see it's exactly the same quality of an export. Nothing is pixelated, and this is what I am also writing about in my blog post about vector brushes that, it's raster texture on a vector pas, but you can recolor it beautifully. You can still manipulate it in the stroke studio, and when you're exporting here from the expert panel in affinity. Even if you scale it up, so the original height was 8,200 pixel something, and we blew it up to 11,000. Look, it's okay. There's no pixelation. There is no quality loss. It's exactly the same, but it's a much bigger file that we can then use for our red bubble shop. We want to upload, especially to our PODs, bigger sizes because we will do the work only one time and this bigger size will fit more products at the same time without us having to upload different sizes so that they fit every product perfectly. Also have the expert persona here in affinity, but this makes sense when you're exporting multiple files or slices of your illustration. We're not going to be using this. Again, we will export through this export menu that you can access from the hamburger menu. The biggest takeaway is that because we are working with flexible vector art, your expert will be super super easy. The file sizes will not be that huge, and you will be able to scale this design up or down without any quality loss. I think this is the biggest takeaway. We can create your design one time and then you can resize it and work on it further, and there will be no quality loss because it's all vector. That's why I'm such a big fan of vector design. This is it. This was the last lesson. We did a lot of work in the asset studio, a, a lot, a lot of work. I really hope that you will be able to recycle all those beautiful assets in your future illustrations or for client work, and I hope that this will really speed up your entire process. 25. Final Thoughts: Yeah, we made it. Thank you very much for taking my course. We learned and refreshed a ton of information about using Affinity Designer. This is also my very first course where I am introducing Adobe Fresco and I'm showing you how I like to use it together with affinity designer. Both are iPads software. It was a no brainer for me to try to check out and see what synergies I can create with the two programs. I hope that you like learning about it. I would love to see your botanical posters. I am really really curious to see what you come up with. For example, if you're taking this course on skill share, you can share your botanical poster in the project gallery. You can also show us your work in progress photos, your sketches, how you arrived at your final composition, or you can show us a screenshot from your asset studio and show us the assets that you created after taking this course. Then if you got my course through Gumroad, you can share your work, for example, through the social media, like on Instagram, as usual, under the Hashtag magical vectors, or you can find our dedicated Facebook group for illustrators using Affinity Designer and Adobe Fresco. You can definitely publish your project there. It's a very, very friendly group, and you can even ask for critique and see what other people think about your composition, about your colors, ask any questions in general. I am also running a block section on my own website. This is where you can read some knowledge articles about affinity designer, surface pattern design, and digital illustration in general. This is, for example, where you can find my most recent article about using vector brushes in affinity. I'm a big fan of vector brushes. And then if you prefer a video format, you can go ahead and visit my YouTube channel, where you can find extra free video tutorials and speed panes, process videos and so on. Every now and then, this is where I'm also hosting live sessions where you can ask me questions in real time. So hopefully, see you on YouTube. Remember that you can learn with me both on skill share and through my gum road courses. Hopefully, see you in my next class, bye bye, happy creating