Transcripts
1. Introduction: Creating vector illustrations
may seem daunting at first, but it's rather straightforward. Once you know where to start. In this course, I will show
you my process of effectively creating vector illustrations
using Affinity Designer to, we'll start out with some of the core fundamentals
of Affinity Designer to learning all about the user interface and
figuration of basic shapes. After we short introduction, we'll get straight into
a practice project. Now, throughout this course, we will sketch, line, color, and texture, a complete
character illustration. Throughout the project, you will learn all of the
essential tools and techniques you
will need to start creating your own
amazing vector artwork, such as the pen tool
and V-shaped builder. And of course, everything
you need to know about working with colors,
swatches, and layers. So we want to learn vector illustration using
Affinity Designer tool. And I'll see you inside.
2. The User Interface & Creating new Documents: Now, before we start working
on our illustration project, let's take a quick look at the user interface
of designer tool, as well as how to create
new documents first. Now, to create a new document, we can simply go to
the main menu up here. And under file, you
simply click on New. This opens up the
document creation window. So right here on
the left-hand side, we have a bunch of
different presets. You can sort proven using
this drop-down menu. Simply scroll down to
v desired section. Now, what we're going
to do is we simply select underdeveloped
code category, the full HD at ten ADP preset. Here on the right-hand side. You can edit that preset. So right here we can change the page width and the height. If we want to work with
different document units, we can select this right here. So we are going to
work with pixels. But if you're more comfortable
with inches or points, feel free to do that. For this course, we're
going to use pixels. Now, if you want to
work with an artboard, you can check that
option down here. You're not going to do that for that one canvas is more
than enough for us. Right here in the color tab, we can choose our color format. Now, we're going
to keep it at RGB since we are wanting
to be on a display, we don t want to print it out. If you want to print it out. If you work on print products, make sure that you
choose CMYK instead. Now we also can add some
margins and some pleats. We don't want that. So we can just click on this check mark right
here to turn it off. Now to actually
create the document, you simply click on the
Create button down here. Like so. Now, let's take a quick look
at this user interface. Now, keep in mind that
with Affinity Designer, what you see is pretty
much what you get. Very few windows that are hidden behind this window right here that vf not
activated right now. But that's pretty much it. Everything that we, all the options that we
have are pretty much always available
in this interface. Now, as mentioned earlier up here we have our main
menu under File, we can do very important stuff
like saving our documents, are opening up documents
and stuff like that. Now, we have these
three different icons. They are an extremely important. So these are the so-called persona's now under
B designer persona, which we are right now. You're going to do all
of the vector Berg. All vector-based tools are located right here
in this persona. Next to that, we have the
so-called pixel persona, which focuses on a
raster workflow. So all our raster tools like
brushes and stuff like that, we have available
in this persona. Next up we have our
export persona, which focuses on exporting
our documents in V, individual files in it. So V, We have a lot of
control over what we actually want to export and what file format
we want to export. Let's go back to the
designer persona. Now on the left-hand side, we have our toolbar with
all these different tools. Now, if you notice, some tools have this
right triangle, this right arrow in
the right corner. That just means that if
you right-click on it, we can see some more
tools hidden behind it. So not all tools are always
displayed right here. E.g. with the shape tool, we have a lot of
different shape options. Now up here we have a
little context menu. This changes based on
V2 we have selected. So right now with the
move tool selected, you have quick access to our document setup
and our preferences. But e.g. if you go to
the rectangle tool, you can see that we can easily change the fill and the stroke. And depending on
the tool you have selected, these options change. Now in the middle,
we have our canvas. And right here we're
actually going to create our illustration. And on the right-hand side we have a bunch of
different panels, like the color panel
and the Layers panel. Now, this is highly
customizable, which is what we are
going to do later on. But we're going to
adjust these panels to speed up our workflow. Now, that's pretty much
it for this lesson. And I will see you
in the next one.
3. Navigating our Canvas: Now, before we can dive into some more features of
Affinity Designer, the first half to know
how to actually move around our Canvas so we need
to learn how to navigate. Now, there are a few
different options we have for moving around and
zooming in and out. So first of all, we have just
like in your web browser, scroll wheels on each side, which allow us to move up and down and to the
left and the right. Now, that's not very efficient. V easier way of
moving around is by simply holding down the
space bar on your keyboard. And as you can see, the mouse
turns to our hand icon. And now we can simply
click and drag around and move around that way. This is just a much quicker and more efficient
way of moving around. Now, next up, let's
talk about zooming. Now we have a zoom tool, which is found down here, the file I can in our toolbar. By clicking and dragging, we can actually zoom
in and out like so. You can also click once or multiple times to zoom in on
these different zoom levels. Up here. By holding down the
Alt key on your keyboard. You can zoom out again, so we can see changes. You can also just use
this slider up here. Now a, an easier way
of zooming in and out. If you have a different
tool selected, you simply hold down the
Control key and value. Use your mouse wheel to scroll and you can zoom
in and out that way. So moving around or down
the space bar, like so. And zooming in and out by
holding down V Control key. This is just much more efficient
and faster way to do it. And it will become second nature if you do it enough times.
4. Adjusting the Workspace: Alright, next up, let's adjust our workspace so it suits
us for illustration. Now, we have a lot of
different panels opened, but we don't necessarily need you're going to
get rid of them and move around our panels just towards a little bit more
efficient for us later on. Now, let's start off with
removing some panels, but we don't need. So e.g. up here, you have the appearance panel and I generally
never really use it. If we should need
it at some point, we can just open it up again, but it's not very necessary. So how do we get rid of this? We can simply click
on the name up here and then drag it out. Often this panel group. And to close the panel, you simply click on
Close panel up here. Now let's do the same with quick Fx and Fy
Styles panel as well. Select it, drag it
out and close it. Now, we're going to keep the
free panels down here be transformed and navigate and
history panel just in case, especially the transform
panel so we can make some amino adjustments
should we needed. Now, we are heavily going
to work with swatches. So I want to have this
open at all times, but I also want the color
panel open at all times. Let's drag out the
swatches panel and then move it in-between
these two panels, v stroke and the brushes panel, depending on which was open until this blue
rectangular peers. And if you then let
go of your mouse, you have the panel
between these two. Now let's close the
Strokes panel as well. You have easy access to
bed using our tools. If you want to make
a panel bigger, such as the Layers panel, can simply hover in-between these two panels and
move it up and down. So now we have our Layers panel, the color panel, and
v swatches panel, which are the three main pendants which we
are going to be using in V design a persona. I actually am not a fan of the layers panel being so small. So let's drag out
this entire group by pressing in this gray area and then make it a
little bit bigger. Like so. Now you can have panels
just floating around. They don't necessarily need
to be docked to the side. Now, you can actually talk
to decide to each side. So if you move it around, you can see you can pin panels to either
side of the canvas, which is incredibly
useful if you want to have a little
bit more space. If you broke on a
very large monitor. Beautifully to do that,
it's really not make that much of a difference in
your work area. Right here. On a smaller screen,
it's not recommended. You do want to have a little bit more real
estate for your canvas. So what I'm going to lose trust, letting it flow down here. If it gets in the way, we can always just close
it and open it up again. Should we need it? Now? That's how you move
around panels, but how do we open
up new panels? So too, e.g. that's a butyl need
v Strokes panel very often and we
want to have it open. You can go over to our
main menu up here. And under Window, you can actually open up every single
panel that we've closed. So let's look for the
Stroke panel right here. By clicking on it. As you can see, we opened it up again so it's non-destructive. And it's just a click away. So you can just
close the parents, but you don't necessarily need just a little bit of
a cleaner workspace. Let's actually close this
one as well for now. So now, depending on
what you're working on, you can always adjust
your workspace. This is what we're going to
work with for this class.
5. Working with Shapes: Alright, let's take
a look at how to create and manipulate
some basic shapes. Now, our basic geometry tools can be found right over
here in our toolbar. You have stuff like a
basic rectangle tool, the ellipse tool. And then we also have this
pizza tool right here. However, as you can see, we have the white arrow. With a right-click. You can see that we have a lot of different shapes
to choose from. Now all of these different
shapes pretty much work the same or very
similar to each other. We're not going to take a look at every single shape here. Now, let's start out by
making a simple rectangle. So select it from the toolbar. Now to create a rectangle, you simply click interact with your right mouse
button, like so. Now, before you let
go of this shape, so right now I have my left
mouse button still pressed. If we hold down the Shift key, we can fix the proportions of it creating a perfect
square like so. Now if you stop pressing
down on our mouse, you can see the actual shape. Now let's select the move tool
up here, the black arrow. Now we can move it
around by simply clicking and dragging
on the object. Now, here on each corner we
have these different points. By clicking and
dragging on them, you can change the shape
of our, our object. You also have
mishandled right here. This allows us to simply
rotate our object. Again, if you press
the Shift key, we can actually snap
it to 15 degrees. Like so. Now to delete an object, you simply select it and press the Delete key
on your keyboard. Now, let's create an ellipse
using the ellipse tool. We can drag it out like so. Let's fix the
proportions to create a perfect circle like this. And let's say we want to change
the color of this object. Now, the easiest way to do it is either you select one of
your swatches right here, or you go to your color wheel and
choose a color that way. Now, you can also change
the color of the stroke. Right now, we have a stroke
color selected up here. As you can see, it's black, but we don't have an actual
stroke on our object. Now to add a stroke, simply click on this field
up here and under width. By using this slider, we can give our object a stroke. By clicking on this color field. It can change its color as well. So now we can also duplicate
shapes really easily by simply holding down
the Alt key on your keyboard and then clicking
and dragging your object. Now we've made a
duplicate of it. If we wanted to be in the exact
same line as this object, you hold down the Alt key and Pi holding down the
Shift key as well. We can fix it to it. As you can see. Now, one thing to keep in
mind is, as you can see, if I want to select an object, I can just select it like that. You even have to click on it. You have to make your selection on top of your entire object. Like so. And that is how you create new, new shapes and modify them. The art going to dive a
little bit deeper into all of this when we
create our illustration. And toffee can
actually manipulate these shapes even further
by using the Node tool.
6. Sketching our Character: Alright, now in
this lecture we're going to take a look
at the pixel persona. We're going to create a pixel
layer in our layers panel. And on wet layer, we're going to draw our
sketch for our character. Now, if you prefer to
work on a piece of paper or you have drawn it
on a tablet like the iPad. On Android tablet. Don't worry. In the next lecture, I'm
going to show you how you can import your PNG file or your JPEG file and use
that as your sketch instead. But without further ado, let's jump right
into it and select the pixel persona from our
free persona icons up here. It's this one in the middle. And first of all, we need to create a new layer. You can draw without a layer. So we go over to
our layers panel. And down here we
have these icons. So we have at pixel layer
and next layer option. Now, at layer option is
a simple vector layer. We want to work in
the pixel persona. You're going to choose
the pixel layer. Simply by pressing on it. You will create a new layer. If you want to, you
can rename it right away by double-clicking
on the name of the layer. Let's call our layout
sketch. Like that. To keep it a even
a little bit more organized by
right-clicking on it. We can choose a
color for our layer. So let's say we make
our sketch layer red. Now it has this red
marking on the side, giving us V visual
clue that this is the sketch layer or it belongs to a certain group of object. Alright, now, to start drawing, we can draw yet we still
have the Move Tool selected. Simply choose the
paintbrush tool right here, or by using the
keyboard shortcut P. And now we can pretty
much just start drawing. Make sure you have your layer
selected to keep it clean. And as you can see, we can now
make our pen strokes using the keyboard shortcut Control Z will allow us to redo it so we can easily go back if
he made a mistake. You can also go over to our
brushes panel before we start drawing and choose
a brush wet we like. Let's try. You have
a large selection of different pencils and all these different
brushes right here. Let's just try some out. I think this one will
to find phi sketch. Let's zoom in a
bit, like like so. And I want to make this cute
little penguin character. So let's start sketching now. If you have an AD or you have a different
character and mind, feel free to write
your own character. Throughout this course. If you want to follow
along with my idea, feel free to do so as well. Alright, so let's start
out with a basic soccer. Now we sketch does not
need to be perfect. Maybe make the eyes
a little bit higher. Maybe given some hair up here. Just a little bit like so. Now we can, if you want
to remove these lines, we can simply select the eraser
from our toolbar or using the keyboard shortcut E. Now this brush is a little bit
too big for my liking. So up here under width
in our context menu, we can decrease the
size of the brush. Still a little bit too
big, but it works. Switch back to our pencil. Just a really simple character. Let's add some markings so
these areas will be black. Wanted to follow it. So like that maybe. What I like to do is
if I have some parts of it are a completely
different color. I like to shake them in a
little bit just for myself. So I know I'm going to
create these shapes. When we switched to vector work. What I'm shading in right now will be a much,
much darker color. A dark gray or even a black
color. We'll see about that. This just this for
me as a visual clue. For right now, what I personally
like to do is I want to sketch in my highlights so I know that the light is going
through it from up here. So right here will be a I like maybe like so on
the arm right here, I want light to hit. This area may be as well. So I think I'm happy with that. So let's zoom out. Yeah, I kinda like it. You don't need to
clean up the sketch. After all, it's
trust for us so we know what shapes to use and how. We don't need to jump
straight into vector shapes. Having a sketch, all this helps. Alright, so if you want to
create your own character now, feel free to do
that if you prefer working on a piece of paper. As I mentioned earlier,
that's totally fine. In the next lecture, I'm
going to show you how to actually import PNGs as well so we can simply snap a photo of it and
you sweat instead. So without further ado. Let's jump into the next
lecture and take a look at how to import photos if you have met your
sketch or a wet day.
7. Importing Images: Alright, so in the
last lesson V, if Ron out this penguin and sketch directly in the pixel
persona in designer tool. However, if you prefer to
work with pen and paper, or you have a PNG or from a different drawing
program or from your iPad. You need to import the image into Affinity Designer know VR2, rapid, easy ways
to achieve that. And I'm going to quickly
show you both of them. So the first way
is to simply go to your toolbar and click
on V Place Image Tool. Now, this opens up your file explorer and then
you simply navigate to your, to your sketch file, your PNG file on the
desktop right now, you click on it and
simply click on open. Now your arrow changed, your cursor changed
to the new icon. Now you can either click once or you can
simply click and drag out the image to whatever size you want.
Me show you real quick. Like that. Now, that's one
way of importing the sketch. The other way is to simply
open up a file explorer and clicking and dragging you image into Canvas
in designer tool. This is a much faster way. And if you have it open already, it's the easiest way. And that's pretty much
it for this video. And I will see you
in the next lecture.
8. The Layers Panel: Now in this lecture,
we're going to take a closer look at the
layers panel down here. Now, the last lecture we
have imported our sketch. Or previously to that we
have drawn our sketch. Meaning right now, we have one layer sitting in
our layers panel. And we can freely move it
around using the Move tool. Now, if we want to have it as like a simple guide where
we can draw over it. You don't want that. So we need to lock this somehow. We need to fix it
to its position. Now, to do that, we go to our Layers panel, select our sketch layer or our PNG that we've
imported before. And we simply click
on this lock, unlock icon, LPF, this little
lock symbol right here. And as you can
see, you can never select it and move
it around anymore. Now to unlock the layer, if I click on this icon up here, or we simply click on the
lock right on the layer. Let's lock it. And we can also
change the opacity. Right here using this slider. Let's move it. Like 40 per cent
seems fine for now. Next to that we have some
blend modes that we can use. So they just change the way the colors
work on that layer. Elif that on normal. Now here in the middle we have all of our different layers, our art boards, and
all of our groups. Now we will see that this
fills up really quickly. So getting into a
organising our layers, that'd be really important just to keep it a little
bit more organized. But we'll talk about
that when we get there. Now, at the very
bottom of dependent, we have a couple of
different icons. So here in the middle we
have a four layer masks. We have adjustments which
allow us to adjust some colors and overall just different
ways to adjust our layers. We can change the color balance, we can add gradient maps
and stuff like that. Next to that, we have
the layer effect panel. If you click on
this menu opens up, it's extremely similar to
software like Photoshop. If you have
experienced with that. This just allows us to add some layer effects to
our selected layer. And the next of add v have all of our different
layer options. So we have v vector
layer and V pixel layer. And next to that, we can also delete the currently
selected layer. So really important, make sure
that your sketch layer is locked and vetted
set to 40% opacity. And I will see you
in the next lecture.
9. Setting up Color Swatches: Alright, so in this lecture, we're going to set up
some color swatches. Just so it's a
little bit more easy to lay down color
in our artwork. Now as you can see right here, I have already prepared
some swatches. And we're going to turn
these color fields into actually re-usable
color swatches. Now, let's go to our swatches panel here on
the right side of the screen. And to add a color swatch, you click on this
hamburger icon up here. First we have to create
a new color palette. So you can either click on
Add Application Palette, which will be a pellet
that's going to be available across all documents. Or you could click on
add document palette, which will exclusively be available in this
specific document. And that's what
we're going to do. So we're going to click
on add document palette. We can give it a name. Let's just call it illustration
and confirm with OK. So now as you can see, we have our new color
palette right here. Now, two new colors
to our color palette. We first have to select our
color that we want to have. So we're going to go up here to the eyedropper tool
in the color panel. And we're simply clicking
and dragging that I can on our first color field. Now as you can see, the color
changed to our dark gray, meaning, but it's currently
selected in the eyedropper. And then you simply
click on this field. Now it's selected
as our fill color. And to add it to our swatch, a new color palette, simply click on this
icon right here at current fill to palette.
And here we have it. Now to edit this swatch
or to rename it, we right-click on it. And here you can see we can edit the fill so we can
change the color of it. We can make a copy, and we can also rename it. Let's us call it dark gray. And that's our
first swatch done. Let's repeat that process. Go to your color picker, goose. Be next color. Set it as you
fill in the color panel. And then add current
fill to palette. Alright, here we have it. We have all the colors,
but we're going to use, now we don't need to stick
to these colors completely. If you want to add some more, we can do that later on. This is just to
get started later.
10. The Pen Tool: Alright, so in this lecture, we're going to use the
pen tool as well as V naught tool to create our
outline for the character. Now, the pen tool is right here in our toolbar, this icon. You can use the keyboard
shortcut P two selected. And now the wave, the pen tool box is
where we set points. Excel. So if we click
once on our canvas, we set this node. And then we can click
again to create straight lines. Like so. Now, we can also create
curved lines by simply clicking and dragging
our point like that. So we have these two
points right here. And using the Node tool, the white arrow, you can actually manipulate
these points. You can also move around
all our nodes, like so. Now, let's say that we want
this to be more curved. You can select a point. And then we can go over
here in our context menu, we can go to Convert, and we can click on Convert to smooth this
icon in the middle. This simply adds
these two levels to each side of the point. Now you can manipulate it. Now, one other way to
manipulate shapes, to manipulate these
lines is to simply visit the node tool selected to any straight line or
any line in general. And simply click and drag on it. That baby can create
these curves as well. So now let's delete this and create a
new vector layer in our layers panel down here. And make sure to
select the Pen tool. Now, let's start out with v hat. I want to start right here and just make my way around it. There'll be set a point. Now, in this case, I want V to be smooth, so I'm going to break it
out a little bit like so. And then just make sure
that it follows our sketch. Now here we have a sharp point and it goes
straight up into the hair. So what we can do
is we can simply click once on this node. And as you can see, the
second tangent disappeared. Now we can have converted
via a smooth curve to a smooth point to be
more straight point. You can do that by
simply clicking on a node with the
Pen tool, like so. If you're unhappy
with a pointer, you can simply press
Control Z to redo it. Now, this does not look good, but you can select the node
tool and manipulate V-shape. And you can also drag on
these sliders like so. Let's give this a color. So go to your Color panel. Make sure that you have a
color in the stroke field. Now, changing the
color as well as the stroke width is exactly the same as with the basic shapes. You can do all that
in the context menu or in terms of color
in our color pen. Alright, next up, let's create some of
these facial features. Now, a little trick is
that you simply connect these points of edges of VI and then select the node tool
and drag it up like so. Pressing the Escape key, you can start a new line. We know Tool and move it up. For the nodes. We could
just use a rectangle. Now, if we want to manipulate v points
with our Node tool, we have first to
convert this shape into curves by selecting it. And going to be Context menu, you can click on
convert to curves. And now you can see we have
more control over each point. And covered in a little bit. Maybe like that, I like it. Now, let's go back to our Pen tool and draw out
the rest of the body. Now, it does not matter if the lines intersect each other. We're going to remove all of
that in the next lecture. If you're unhappy with a
shape, as you can see, we can always just move around two points and
manipulate it later on. Now for these 2 ft, I think we're also
just going to use some basic rectangles
and modify them. Now, vSphere referees are
rounded at the bottom so we can use the corner tool, select the bottom two points, and then we can click and
drag on them to curve them. Now let's move it right here. Lace it. Maybe like that. Used to be no tool
to move around the points until you are happy. You could just copy
and paste this. So select the object, hold down the Alt key, make a copy of it, and then move it into place. Yeah, I think I like this. Now there are a few more
lines that we could add, but I think we're going
to do that separately. V separation between these between defer the
colors black and white. We're simply going to separate them later on
using some layer masks. In the next lecture, we
will be removing all of these intersecting lines very quickly and very easily
using the shape builder.
11. The Shape Builder: Alright, next up, let's remove all these intersecting lines
and clean up our line art. Now, we're going to do this is very new tool in Affinity Designer tool called
the Shape Builder tool. And to use it, you first have to select all of our lines,
but we want to add it. Make sure that you have a
selection of all of your lines that you've previously
made and event. You want to select the Shape Builder tool in
your toolbar right here. Now what the shape builder
tool allows us to do is to remove certain parts from a shape or to combine
shapes very easily. And the same goes for all
of the lines as well. Now up here in our context
menu, we have some, we can make the decision
of should we read a new shape from the
selected areas or to remove parts from our object. Now, make sure that
V minus is selected. And as you can see,
if you hover over these different
lines and shapes, turn red, meaning that we are currently working on wet area. Now, if you zoom in, here, we have an intersecting,
two intersecting lines. If we have a over V
intersecting part, only this part, they
be highlighted red. And by clicking on it,
if you Shape Builder, you can remove that
part of the line, creating this really
clean outline. And that's what
we're going to do. We're simply going through our entire illustration and remove all the
intersecting lines. This arm, e.g. is
above the body, so we want to remove that line. And this hand will be
on top of the other. So let's delete all of
these points like so. The same goes for this part
of the body for v slacks. And that's how you use
the Shape Builder to remove parts from a line to
clean up your line work. Now, right now, we
only have the outline, so if we select them, Let's actually make them a
little bit thicker, like so. And that will help us. Let me delete that real quick. And that will help us later
on in the next lecture. If creating V base
shapes for watercolor. Because right now, if we select this and give it a fill
color, as you can see, it does not fill up the area and we don't have a shape in the
middle right here. You only have the linework. In the next lecture, we're going to make
our rent around, make our way around
these different shapes and color them in.
12. Creating the Color Shapes: Alright, so in this lecture, we're going to create V base
shapes for our coloring. Now as we only have the
line art right now, he also need to
create a V-shape, but will actually be the
color of our character. Now to do that, select
your pen tool and make sure that you don't
have stroke enabled. You only want to create
some very rough lines. Now, since v hat here
is a closed shape, we don't need to do that. We can simply color in v hat
by choosing a fill color. This is not the case
for V body right here. This is made of a bunch
of different shapes. So we have V2 lie and
V2 arms right here. You also have the lower body. And all of these
are separate lines. So we need to create
one shape, all of it. Now, to do that
with your Pen tool selected, you simply click. Let's remove from it
and make your way around the entire body
shape within V line x. So now this does not
need to be clean. You don't need to. As long as you stay inside of
V outline does not matter. Now, whenever you have shapes
such as the nose here, e.g. that can be colored in
simply using the fill tool. Make sure to do that. It
will be much easier and quicker to do that with some complex shapes
like this body, e.g. that's not an option here. Now, we have made our
selection around this object. Or let's go to our
swatches panel. If our blue color selected in the front and just give it this gray color,
this light gray. Now, right now, it's on
top of all of the lines. So let's move it
all the way back. And as you can see, it now
have some basic fill colors. Now for these two legs, we don't need to do that. You can simply let
them and add lethal. But let's make sure
that they are below our line art, like so. And the same goals
For our head shape. And that's how I create
my basic colors, shapes. And in the next lecture we're
actually going to create all these different
markings like right here. And separate the character
into even more paths.
13. Working with Layer Masks (1): Alright, so in this lecture, we're going to create
the black markings. Penguins usually have
like the black fur. So we are going to
just draw them out. You don't need to be
too perfect round the outlines because
we are going to create a layer mask which will remove everything
that's not in this shape. Alright, so before
we can get started drawing out the shapes, we need to see them. So one way of doing
that is to simply move your sketch layer on top
of here vector layer. And since we opacity
is scaled down, we can see the markings
perfectly fine. Now, let's zoom in
a bit and start with these ones in the face. Select your pen tool and just draw around them like so. Now since we are going
to create a layer mask, we don't need to follow
this line perfectly. We can just go like that
and create V-shape that way and connect these two points. And let's make this
the darker color. Now. This does not look quite right because we have not made
the layer mask yet. Now to make sure that the black color is only
within the head shape, you can simply go to our
layers panel and drag our new curve on top of the shape that we
want to use, SLA. And as you can see, everything
outside gets blocked off. Like so. Now what we
can do really quick is this the correct color? And now let's do the
same for the body. You want the hands as well as V sides of your
body to be black as well. Let's go select your pen tool. We need to be a little
bit more careful here. Just within the arms. And we could just go like that. And then all the way back
to the starting point, select your color from
your swatches and move it into V curve
shape of our body. And we do the same for
the other side as well. A bit. And then just follow the lines here if you want to feed
black color as well. And then close V-shape,
select your color. And it's already inside
our new Layer Mask. If you want to remove something
from this layer mask, we simply drag it out. Like so. Let's disable the
sketch quickly. We can toggle the
visibility using this button right here. And as you can see, our character is slowly but
surely coming together. In the next lecture we are
removing v super flat Look, we're giving it some
shading as well. And then we're also
adding our light sources, which we sketched in right here.
14. Working with Layer Masks (2) - Shading: Alright, so in this lecture, we're going to add some
shading to our character. Now, we are going
to use, once again, the air masks just
as we did before. And I'm also going
to show you how you can add layer masks, lives in a layer masks so we
can go pretty deep buffers. And I'm going to show
you how to do that. Now. First of all, let's take
a look at this character. I want the light to
hit from the top left. So the shading will be mostly on this side and below the
head and stuff like that. Makes sense for shadows to be. Now let's select the Pen tool. And let's actually start
with a little bit of shading on top of the eyes to give
them a little bit more depth. Something like this. What I'm going to do
is I'm simply going to click on this point again and drag up like mad. And when four different color, select our darker shade of gray. Let's do the same
on the other side. Like so. Maybe we could actually use the node tool to slightly curved with
these two curves right here. And also, let's make sure
that we stay organized. So let's drag these two curves inside of our head
shape like so. Let's actually name this and
call this head and body. Further organize
it. We could also give it two different colors. Yellow will be the body
and orange will be V head. Alright, next up, let's add some shading below the nose
on this side, right here. Once again, we use the pen
tool and we simply drag out our shadow. Like that. Actually make this a
misprint, a smooth curve. Think I like this better? Yes. And once again, give it a darker gray and make sure that it's
inside of V head. Actually adjust these
curves, lipid, select tool. Move the points around
until you are happy. With illustration. There is no right or wrong. As long as you are.
Like the result. Let's actually
redraw this shape. Maybe something like this. Just a small little shadow. It's fine for now. We can adjust it later
on if we want to. Now, next up, let's add a shadow to this
side of the head. Maybe something like this. And for this, we're going to use the darker shade
of gray. Now drag. So now we want
this color to only be visible in the darker
areas of the penguin firm. So what we're going to do is we're going to drag this curve inside of the previous
curve that we've made for the darker
color just on top of it. And vet creates a
another layer mask. This in our layer mask. Just like that. So it's only
shown in the leg markings. Now, however, since
this is a shadow, we do want it to
also be visible. We do want this part of
deferred to also be shaded. So what we are going
to do is we're simply going to duplicate this curve by simply using control C and then Control
V to make a copy of it. But we're going to drag
it outside of this curve. Now since it's
overlapping right now, we need to drag it below
it, just like this. And then we're going to change the color to our
darker gray, like so. That way we can keep our
color palette the same. Teff everything properly
lined up and shaded. Now one thing that we can
do is a disabled our sketch up here by simply clicking
on Toggle visibility. So you see it a
little bit better. We don't need the
sketch right now. Alright, next up, let's
work on the nose. Once again, just take your pen tool and create the shadow that
we wanted to have. Select your colors from
the swatches panel. In this case V darker yellow, and drag it into the curve this time into the
nose. Like so. All right, let's
move on to the body. Next. Let's start out the right arm and just work
our way through the project. So scroll down to your body V. And then just use the pen
tool to draw your shadows. I want it to be like this. Close V-shape and choose your colors from
the swatches panel. Now once again, we want to drag this curve into the right arm. So it's not outside of the mask. I also want to add some shadows
to this part right here. Let's select the pen tool again. Maybe like this, and
drag it into our curve. Like so. You could also extend to shadow
a little bit right here. But I think we're just going to modify this shadow right here. We can add another point, drag this down, drag that out, and that's the beauty
of vector art. We can easily adjust
everything very, very quickly. Yeah, I like this. Now, let's add a
little bit of shadow below v hat as well. Just like that. Maybe adjust the
points right here. I bid, select the curve and drag it into your body. Now, once again,
choose your color. Let's actually start
with the arms first. Make a copy of it. We need to be neat, actually free copies
of this shape. Let's make three copies by
using Control C and Control V. And then we're simply, it's actually make
them invisible for now while we're not working on them and drag them
into your curves. Now, we could use
opacity as well. However, I wanted to be
the same color throughout the project without any overlaps of these different
opacity values. So I'm going to do it this way. Alright, let's track the
second one into the other arm. Make sure that it's
actually toggled on and select the correct color. Now for this one,
we need to drag it below our two curves. And trust like that, we have a shadow. Now, we could also add a little bit of a
shadow right here. Now, as you can see, it's a pretty repetitive
process at times. But that's just part
of the process. And you can really play around with all these
different shadows. Let's drag this below the arms. We also want some shadows
below here as well. Once again, use your pen
tool and drag out a shape. And use the node tool to adjust these curves to move from around until you are
happy with them. It may be like this. And
also always make sure that you track your curves into the correct position
in your layer panel. As you can see, it fills
up extremely quickly. So, especially
using color-coding can make it a little
bit easier for you. Alright, now we need a duplicate
of this two to be exact. Again for the darker markings. Again, for the darker markings, we need our colors to
be slightly different. Like so, right? You could also add a
little bit of shadow to the body to give it a little
bit more dimension like so. We do need to adjust
some of this. So this right here is
overlapping, lift the arms. So let's use the node tool
to drag these curves down. Just being a little bit
cleaner with the selection. And we could avoid
areas like that easily. But let's just adjust
our curves for now. At a point where you don't want it to be tracked down, like so. Because we want this part
of the body to be shaded. And the entrust move two points
outside of the selection. Now we do need to shade this
arm a little bit as well. So let's add some. Maybe like right here. Not too much. We want to add
some highlights to this. Like that. I really enjoyed. Alright, so I think
we are just going to add some shadows to
be legs as well. Like that. Again, make sure
that you actually track the shapes
all the way down and drag it into
the shape like so. Now, as you can see, this
process is extremely quick. You can pretty much you can really explore
different ways of shading. This is extremely simple. You could also use gradients to create more
depth to it as well. What we're going
to do later on is we're actually going to
use some pixel brushes, too spicy, drawing up a base. So we're going to
add a little bit of texture here and Val. And we are really going to use the full power of designer tool, which allows us to work with raster based
brushes as well. So that's what we're going to do after you've added
all the highlights. So I'll see you in the
next lecture where we're going to add some
highlights to this character.
15. Adding the Highlights: Alright, so now what
we have actually finished very basic
shading of our character. Let's add some highlights
to it as well. Now, I have previously sketched in some
of the highlights. So if enable our sketch layer, you can see I have
already placed the rough location of the
highlights on my sketch. So let's get started
drawing that out. So select, you could
just use the pen tool. So for some of these, let's actually just draw a simple curve and increase
the stroke width of it. Then we can just
change the color. Make sure that you
actually change the color of your stroke
and not your fill. Like so. Now, that's a very common way
of shading in vector art, just using these strokes. Like so. I'm not a big fan of this one. Be trusted little bit less. Could also move it
around like so. And let's do the same here. I do want it to be a little bit smaller here, maybe like that. And also just a little bit
of shading right here. We could also add some
light to be knows SQL needs to be much,
much smaller level. Now, we can also move this
point around a little bit. I don't like the curve too much. Something like that. Maybe move it like so. Let's zoom out. Take a look. You could also disabled we
sketch really quick. I think. I think I'm happy for now, maybe we could
reduce the stroke on this highlight as well. Maybe move this a bit up and make both of them a
little bit smaller. I want ten points. Now, we could also, instead
of using the slider, just type in our
value right here. So ten points. Like so. Yeah, I think I am
quite happy with it. Now the only thing
that's left to do now is to add a little bit
of texture to this. Then we're going to use pixel brushes in
our pixel persona, just as we did in the sketch. Now, we are going to
draw directly on top of our individual shapes. So everything is
inside the mask so we don't actually paint
over our shapes. Now, that's what we're going
to do in the next lesson. And I will see you there.
16. Adding Textures: Alright, so now that
we have a pretty much finished our
vector illustration, we do have the option to
pretty easily a texture. The illustration with
some pixel brushes. That's the great thing
about designer to, is that we can work
with vector and raster based brushes and
tools in a single software. So I'm quickly going
to show you how you can add some texture
to your artwork. Now, for this video,
I am going to be working with my pen tablet, a vacuum into us. If you don't have a tablet
and you've imported your sketch by a photo,
that's no problem. You can use your mouse as well. You will, however, not have
the pressure sensitivity. However, for what we're going
to do, it's not necessary. So don't drop. You can easily follow along
with this step as well. First of all, we have to
go to our pixel persona. And now we have to create a new pixel layer in the shape
that we want to texture. So I want to shade texture v. At first, though I'm
going into he had died, create a new pixel layer. Drag that into your head object. Now, we select the
brush tool and reduce the opacity like 25% for
now of our pixel layer. And now we pretty much just choose a brush
from the defaults. Now, let's do something really, really simple for now. And just give it a little
bit of a pencil texture. As you can see if I draw it. If this nice texture, Let's make the brush a bit
bigger, even more aqueous. Then we can just
draw overs increase. And this just gives us this
really nice texture look. Now, we could go really
in depth with it. We can add some shadows and more artistic elements
to this depending on what our styles and
what we want to draw. Let's keep it simple however, for this one, now, you do want to have the same
texture on the entire body. So let's scroll down in
our layers panel and read a pixel layer right here
in V body object TV, exact value of the
layer, 40 per cent. It use V, has a T2 40 per cent
and draw over it like so. And of course we do the
same or both of the legs. So let's decrease the
opacity again to 40. And here 240 per cent as well, just so it's consistent. Now, as I've said before, we could go into more detail. We could also not do the actual shading and
highlighting of our object, the factors we could use
trust-based brushes like this. Depending on your
style, of course, you can choose whatever
method you want. I recommend that you trust experiment a bit and
play around with it, see what looks best and
work based on that. Now I do want to add
the same texture to be nos real quick as well
before we forget that. And reduce the opacity
to 40 per cent as well. Now, that looks pretty good. I like how this turned out. Let's quickly adjust this again. Make it to ten points. Now it's more consistent. And in the next lecture, we're going to wrap up our project by
actually exporting it.
17. Exporting our Character: All right, so now that we've
finished our illustration, the final step will be
to actually export it. Now, we could just go over
to File and click on Export. And in this menu right here, we export our file. Now, up here, you can
choose our file format, which by default
will be set to PNG. You can change it,
of course as well. You can even export PSD files. Let's keep it at P and G. Now, we can set the
size here as well. And you can also use the area
of what it should export. Now by default, it will
be set to whole document. This will export the
entire document. However, we can also click on it and you have is dropped on with a single option just
being the document. However, if the actually
select this object, let's group it up, select the entire object, and then press Control
G on your keyboard. This creates a
layer group and we go over to File
and Export again. Now we have a selection made. So if you click on area, we can say that it should only
export the selection area, meaning business what
it will be exporting. So a perfect selection. Now, with this option, it will export the
white background. However, if you don't want that, You can also say selection only. And as you can see,
this will export only our selected object,
not the background. Export it. You simply click on export and save it wherever
you wanted to save. We do have a different
way to export as well. And vet is we export persona. Now, in the export persona, everything is about export. This way of exporting
is especially useful if you work in stuff like your I designed
or you have a lot of different elements
that you need to export and you need to have a lot of control
over everything. I wouldn't recommend
it if you want to export a single image. But I want to show you anyway. So if you select your object, you can't really, to export it, you first need to create
a so-called slice. Now to create a slice
of this object, all you have to do is right-click and click
on Create Slice. Now we have, in our
slices panel down here, we have this new
slides and you can see on the icon that
it's our object. And we can give it a name by simply double-clicking on it. So let's call it illustration. And here we can again
select our file format. We have a lot more options. You're going to keep it at P and G. You can set the resolution. So should it be WE resolution
should be tripled. Weird resolution. Keep it
simple and set it to one. And to export this, simply click on, Click
to export and this size, this little icon right here. Now, the great thing about
the Export persona is, let's say we want it to be PNG, but we also want the file to
be available as SVG JPEG. You can click on
the plus button. And he can select
different file format. And to export both of
them at the same time, you simply click on
this icon up here. You click on Click to export
all formats for this item. And then it will export and save all file formats
that we have set. This will sell export only, miss slice versus
blue area right here. So depending on what you're, what you're working
on or what you're feeling more comfortable with. You can choose whatever
option you wanted to export your illustrations is no
correct way to do that.
Kai Pruin, Webflow & Framer Developer
