Vector Symmetry & Symbols in Affinity Designer for iPad V1 | Modern Folk Art Insect Illustrations

1. Welcome! | Class Project: Hi. I'm illustrator and photographer [inaudible] and welcome to my class all about creating beautiful modern folk art insects using Affinity Designer for iPad. Bugs, they can be creepy and crawly, but they're also beautiful and oftentimes whimsical. In this class, we're pulling VD direct from nature and creating perfectly symmetrical, modern full garden spider insects right on our iPads using Affinity Designer. First, we'll take a look at Boolean operations which allow you to create a wide array of shapes using geometry. Now, don't worry, no mask goes are needed. Designer does all the work for you, and I'll show you how you can use these operations to combine multiple objects to create complex shapes for your insect designs. Next, I'll show you how I use the Symbol Studio to set up my background, mirrors, so I can add perfectly symmetrical elements behind my insect shapes. Then I'll show you how to use that same method to set up your bug shapes, creating a set of symmetrical wings that will allow you to add an object to one side, so that it's automatically added to the other in a mirrored fashion. After we create our bug shapes, we'll begin to add beautiful botanical elements and texture tore insects, giving them depth and dimension. I'll show you how I use a mix of assets and the built-in drawing pools to add both simple and complex shapes to my insect illustrations. This intermediate class follows my last class all about using my simple symmetry method to create symmetrical vector floral illustrations using Designers Symbol Studio. Well, you'll be able to follow along with the process in this class. If you'd like to know more detail about how symbols work and the various ways that you can use them, I recommend taking that class first. When you take this class, you'll receive as a free download my modern folk art insects assets pap filled with single layer vector, insect, floral, and leaf shapes that I created, especially for the class. You can add color and texture to these assets and use them to create your own whimsical modern folk art inspired bug creations. The project for this class will be to create your very own modern folk art insect illustration using the symbol symmetry method I teach in the class. You can use any of the methods I demonstrate to add color, texture, and dimension to your illustration and bring your insect to life. I'd love to see what you create and as always helpful for others considering the class to see what can be achieved by taking it. I'd love it if you'd share your projects to the class project section. I'm looking forward to seeing what you create. So let's get started. 2. Downloads and Resources: As part of the downloads for this class, I had included a resource guide and my modern folk art assets pack, which includes single layer vector shapes you can use along with the drawing and shape tools to create your own designs. Now, to access the files you're going to need a password which I'm going to put up on the screen now. Once you've accessed the files, you'll see two items for download. Now, if you already have the Dropbox app on your iPad, by default it's going to open it up and ne'er, so your screen might look slightly different, if you don't have the app, it's going to open it up in your browser, there's two files for download, the first is the assets pack, and I'm going to show you how to load that into design or in a moment. The second is the resource guide, and this just provides you information about the class itself, as well as information about designer and the company's serif who makes it, it also gives you a link to my two Pinterest boards where I find a lot of inspiration from my own modern folk art pieces, as well as written information as far as how to import the assets pack and the designer, and again, we'll go through that in a moment. Then I've also included a link to all of my favorite texture makers who also happen to make some brushes for designer as well. You don't have to add texture to these illustrations if you don't want to, but if you'd like to check them out, I'm included the links here. So let's go ahead and take a look at how you can import the assets pack into designer. Once you've accessed the files, you'll see two items for don't mode. Now if you have the Dropbox app on your iPad, it's by default going to open up in the app, if you don't, it will open up in a browser. The screens look a little bit different, but there's two files regardless of how it opens it. The first one is the assets pack, and I'm going to show you how to load that in a moment, the second is the resource guide, which provides you information about the class as well as affinity designer, it also gives you a link to my Pinterest boards where I find a lot of inspiration for my own modern folk art pieces, I'd also giving you written instructions as far as how to import the assets pack because it is different than other programs, but again, I will go through that in a moment, I've also included link to all of my favorite texture makers. You don't need to add texture to your designs in this class, if you'd like to, I've included a link to some of my favorites, so let's go ahead and check out how you can download the assets. The first thing that you're going to want to do is whether you're in the app or in a browser, is to download the file to either your iPad or to an iCloud file. Either way, you need to be able to access it within the Affinity Designer app. Unlike other applications, you can't simply go to your files app, tap on it and it will automatically load. You have to be within designer and import it from there. So let's go ahead and take a look at how we can do that. Once you're back in designer, you're ready to start importing your assets pack, and the first thing you're going to want to do is go to the Asset Studio, which is this set of nine squares, my screen is flipped for a left handed person, if you're not left handed or screens are just flipped opposite to one another, but everything works the same. If you can't find an icon, just tap and hold on the question mark at the bottom and labels will pop up, so I'll go into my Asset Studio and I already have the assets loaded here, for you to load it, just go to the [inaudible] menu at the top, tap on import category, and it's going to take you to your files. You can find the file again, whether you said it directly onto the iPad or in a Cloud file, then you'll tack on the file name and it will automatically import it into Designer. It may take a beat or two before you see it in here, but it should automatically import it. Again, you cannot go into your files app, tap on it and it'll automatically import, you need to be within Designer and import it right from inside the Assets Studio. If you have any trouble imparting anything, just reach out to me, I'm happy to help. In the next section, we're going to take a look at those Pinterest boards that I mentioned from the resource guide and how you can use various forms and inspiration for your own pieces. I'll see you there. 3. Finding Inspiration for Your Folk Art Illustrations: When it comes to finding inspiration from a modern folk art insect, no shortage of beauty there to draw from. My main source of inspiration, first and foremost is nature itself. Just take a look at the world around your own home and you're going to see an amazing array of colors, shapes, and symmetrical markings. Even the common firefly can provide you inspiration for a folk art piece. Beyond the outside world, you can find beautiful insect photos right on Pinterest. As part of the download packet, I included a link to two of my Pinterest boards. The first is this butterflies and beetles. There are a number of different specimen photographs here that you can draw inspiration from. Whether it's the different types of antennae or legs, or the beautiful colors and symmetrical markings. Or even your organic quality of this walking leaf. You don't necessarily have to pull from one photo, find your favorite qualities of each of these beetles and combine it into one whimsical drawing. I've also included a link to my folk art Pinterest boards to give you again ideas as far as the flowers that you might want to add to them or whatever elements that you plan to add to your insect. You don't have to stick to the bright colors of Scandinavian art. You can also play into more of the American folk art that has more of a darker rustic feel. I hope you find these cheap words useful in creating your own illustrations. At the end of the day, these are your creations. Just have fun with them, add your elements, play into the color and the cemetery and just create something that you really enjoy. 4. Creating Shapes with Boolean (Geometric) Operations: Boolean operations allow you to create a wide variety of shapes using geometry. Now, don't worry, you don't have to figure out any complex calculations, Designer actually does all the work for you. You just have to decide what you want your final shape to look like. You have the option of permanently joining objects or creating non-destructive compounds that will allow you to change the original operation type or the position of the joint objects at any time. I'm going to show you how to do both. Let's take a closer look at how Boolean operations work. I have these five sets of circle pairs here and we're going to perform each of the geometric operations, Add, Subtract, Intersect, Divide, and Xor. You can perform them on any type of shape, whether you use a rectangle tool, pen or pencil tools, it doesn't matter. Let's start with the basic add and I'm going to do a permanent add first. Let me go ahead and select the two ellipses that make up the overall shape. I'll go to my edit menu and I'm going to quickly tap on the Add operation here under geometry. You'll notice a few things. First, that you have one large curve layer here in the layer studio. I can use my node tool and I can make changes to this final shape. But I don't have the flexibility of being able to move the two original shapes because now they're combined into one. You may have also noticed that the entire shape has changed to the color of the object on the lowest layer you selected. This is always going to be the case whether you're doing a permanent or a compound operation. The lowest level selected is always going to inform the appearance of the final shape, whether it's color, or any texture that you've added, so keep that in mind when you're performing these operations. Let's go back to the original two circles and perform a compound add. I haven't selected again, I'll go to my edit menu. This time I'm going to tap and hold on Add and you'll see Compound created. Now, the difference in your layers studio is it looks like you have one large shape, but if you tap on the carrot, you can see you have two ellipses, but you can move around. I can grab my move tool and I can move the original shapes, I can change their size, I can change the shape of them. With each change I make here, the overall compound is then edited. Let's take a look at the remaining operations, all of which can be performed either as a permanent or a compound operation. Let's start with subtract. I'll go ahead and select these two ellipses. Now, where are the two shapes intersect? That shape is going to be cut out of my lowest level object and the other object, the rest of it is going to disappear completely. I'm going to go into my edit menu and I'm going to do a quick tap on Subtract. You can see that the red circle is completely gone and where the two intersected one another, it was punched out of that lower layer, that pink circle. Now, again, I have one large curve layer here, so I could use my node tool if I wanted to make changes, but I can't change the position easily. Now, what it needed to be done as a compound operations. Let's back out of this. With the two selected this time I'll tap and hold on Subtract. Again, I have this overall layer here, but underneath I have the two ellipses that make it up. I can move this around, and each time I do, it changes the shape of the original compound. Let's go ahead and take a look at the rest of them. I'm not going to do a compound one in each one that you get the point that you have flexibility with it. With the intersect, where I select the two, I'm going to be left with the shape where the two shapes intersect one another. I'll go to my main edit menu, tap Intersect. It's taken on the color of the lowest level selected just like always, and I'm left with the shape where the two circles intersected. With the Divide, I'll go up and I'm going to tap Divide. Where I had two circles, I'm now left with three shapes. If I grab my move tool here, I can move these three shapes apart. I use this to get rid of the little bits that are not easy to get rid of with the node tool, for example, if I have these two hanging over the top of one another and I wanted to get rid of this little part here in this part here, I'll go ahead and I'll select the two shapes. I'll do a divide. It creates five shapes out of the two. Now, I can go ahead and I can grab this little spot here and I can delete it, and I can grab that spot and I'm left with the final shape without those little overhangs. Then finally, Xor here is actually a combine function. This is going to allow you to merge objects into one complex object, but leaving a transparent spot where the two intersected. Let's select these two, and I'll go ahead and do Xor. You can see where the two circles intersected, it's now transparent and it leaves me with these two spots that were overhang, and it took on that pink color of the original one. Now, why would I want to perform a compound operation rather than a permanent? Well, in the case of, for example, this quarter moon, if I didn't like exactly where it was placed, if I did a permanent subtract, I'd have to use my node tool to change it, whereas if I use the compound operation, I can move that original shape until I got it exactly where I wanted it. Now, one thing that I should know about using compound operations, if you plan that any texture to your final object, you can't add it directly to the compound as it's not a curve, it's actually a compound made up of two individual objects. If I try to add any texture, whether I'm using a place image to add a texture image file or one of my raster brushes, it's just going to make it a part of the compound. In order to be able to add any texture, I actually need to combine the two shapes that make up that compound into a permanent shape. Or if I want to leave it as a compound, I can add texture using the fill tool. Now, before we wrap up this section, let's take a quick look at some other tools that you can use with this. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to delete this, so we have some space here. If I were to use my pencil tool on fill and just draw out a shape here. Let's say I go ahead and I'm going to grab this red. I could draw out another shape. As I mentioned, you can use your operations with any tool, whether you use your shape tool or your pen and pencil tool. If I go ahead in, and I select the two shapes that made up this overall one, I could go ahead and I can do a subtract and that red spot punched out the section here. I could go ahead and I could move this red here, and I could do, let's say Xor, and I have this little shape here. I'm not going to go through each operation, but I would use this if I want to create some of the fun and funky shapes that I add to my intersects. When we get into actually creating the intersects, we're going to go ahead and do that. In the next section I'm going to show you how I set up my Canvas so that I can add the mirrored objects to the background of my intersects. I'll see you there. 5. Setting Up Your Canvas for Symmetry: I'm going to go ahead and set up a new canvas so I can show you how I prepare my background for the symmetrical objects behind my insects. Now for the purposes of this class, I'm not going to go into detail about how symbols themselves work, as I covered that in full in my last class, about creating symmetrical floral illustrations using symbols. You'll be able to follow along with my process in this class, but if you'd like to know more about how symbols themselves work and how you can use them, I suggest checking out that class, and I have the link to that about section of this one. Normally I have a master document set up here in my gallery that I just duplicate each time I want to create a new symmetrical illustration, that way I don't have to start this process each time. For the purposes of the video though, I'll start a new document and show you how you can create your own master document as well. Go to the plus sign here and then I'm going to select ''New document''. Now, I'm going to create a 3,000 pixel document, you can set your document to whatever size you'd like, just keep in mind that if you plan to print your illustration, especially if you've added any raster elements like texture, you need to make sure that your original document is set to the largest size you plan to print, as well as 300 DPI, so that you don't accidentally run into any many textures or pixelation. I have a square document, I don't need to worry about orientation. I'm not going to work on a transparent background and I don't need an art board, so I'll click ''Okay'' and it's going to create my new canvas. The first thing I always do when I get started is to create a background shape layer, and I do this for two reasons. One is to snap back harsh white color here, the more important reason is I use my background as an integral part of my overall illustration, whether it's the color or adding texture to it, or in this case, adding background elements to it. I might change the color throughout the process, but I'm going to go ahead and start with an off-white. I'll make sure my snapping is on and select my rectangle tool, I'm going to go ahead and turn off the stroke, and I'll go into my swatches here and just grab this off-white color. I'll drag out a square and with snapping on, it'll snap right into place from one corner to the other. Now I'm going to lock this into place because I'm not going to do anything with this layer right now, I just want to keep it in place and I don't want to accidentally move as I'm adding elements. I've gone ahead and tapped the lock in the layers studio here, if you don't see that lock, go up to the burger menu and select ''Show unlocked'', it's the easiest way to lock and unlock your layers. Now I'm ready to start adding my symbol panels so that I can add my background elements to it. The first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and deselect that rectangle so I don't change it. I want to turn off my fill, my stroke is already off, I'm going to again make sure that my rectangle tool is selected, and I'm going to drag out a rectangle from the top-left quarter to the middle of the canvas, and you can tell it's in the exact middle by the green line that appears because snapping is on. I'll go ahead and release this, now it's invisible, it doesn't have a fill so you can't see it, but if you go to your layers studio you'll see there's a rectangle here. I want to turn this rectangle into a symbol, so I'll go to my symbol studio with it selected, and if you can't find that just tap and hold on the question mark and labels will pop up. I'll make sure sync symbols is on and go to my burger menu and select, ''Add symbol'' from selection, again, you can't see it because the layer's invisible, but if you go back to layers studio, you can see you now have a symbol layer, and that original rectangle is clipped underneath it. Now I want to create a right panel from my background layer. I'm going to go ahead and with it still selected, go to my edit menu and tap ''Duplicate'', so now I have two symbol layers. I need to flip this one so that it mirrors the left side, so I'll go to my transform studio and then select ''Horizontal flip''. You obviously can't see anything happen now, but once we start adding elements, you'll see that the two are mirroring one another. I'm going to go back to my move tool here, and I want to move this top one to the right side. Now one of the things about how symbols work is that anytime I make a change to one, it's automatically going to change another and that includes the name of the layers. If I were to change this one to left panel, it's automatically going to change this one to left panel, so I just need to keep track of which is which. As we start adding the mirrored elements, you'll be able to see it because it actually starts with a picture and you can see which direction is which, but for now I just need to note that my bottom one is the left panel and the top layer is my right. I am going to go ahead and group these, because as I mentioned earlier we will have at least two sets of symbols, and this one is specifically going to be for the background. I'll select both of my symbols and tap ''Group''. Now I can rename the overall group layer, so with that selected, I'll go to my layer options, tap on ''Group'', and I'm going to change this to background. Now we have the two symbols grouped together in this background layer. We're ready to begin adding the symbol panels for the wings as well as the rest of the insects body, and we're going to do that in the next section, so I'll see you there. 6. Creating Your Bug Shape Using Symbols: We're all set to start creating our bug shape. Now, I always start with an idea in mind as to why, why my overall shape to look like but I don't typically start with a sketch. The beauty of using the symbol symmetry method on the vector side as I can easily make adjustments on the fly as I don't like how something looks. If you feel more comfortable starting with a sketch, you can certainly do that. Let's go ahead and begin by creating the body. Now, I don't usually add symmetrical elements to the body itself, given most of it's covered by the wings. I'm going to stick with a single layer. It doesn't need to be part of these symbol layers. If I do add any symmetrical elements, they're usually minimal and snapping works just fine for that. If you want to have a more or neat symmetrical body, you can certainly do that simply by following the same process, I'll show you with the wings. But again, for the purposes of this class and just for ease of use, I'm going to stick with a single layer. Now, you can add yours using the body shapes that are included in the assets pack here. I'm going to go ahead and create mine using shapes so that you can see how I built those. I've gone ahead and I'd added a layer here by tapping on the plus sign and choosing vector layer. The reason I did that is because I don't want it to be a part of these two symbols, because again, I'm not adding any symmetry to them. I selected a green fill and I'd left my stroke empty and I'm going to select my Ellipse tool. I want a little paint a short round bug. I'll just drag out a circle. If you hold your finger down while you do it, you'll get a perfect circle and I'll just release that. Now, I want this to be in the middle of the Canvas, because again, we are going to be adding symmetry to the wings and I want the wings in the right place. Let's go ahead and add a head to this. I'm going to grab my Crescent tool, and you can honestly keep it on the Ellipse tool as well. Make a tall, narrow one here. I'm going to rotate this by holding my finger down so that I get it rotating and perfect 15 degree angles, and I'll just drag this down until it's midway across the Canvas and it's overlapping my lower circle. Now, I have two options here. I can create a compound sheep out of this, so that is if need to I can move it around, or it can create a permanent shape out of this, so that it makes it one large curve. In this case, because it's pretty simple, I'm going to go ahead and just make one large curve at it by doing a permanent add. If I show you this moth that I created, the body is actually made up of multiple parts and multiple shape layers. I originally created this as a compound add, so that I could easily move things around once I added the wings, if I didn't like where it was, then once I was ready to add the texture, I went a head and just created one large curve out of it. I could have also used the fill method do this as well. But in the case of the one we're creating here, I'm just going to give you one large add. I just want to make sure everything's where I want it before I do that. I might make this a little bit wider and I'll move it back into the middle. Now, I'll select the two, go to my Edit menu and quickly tap on Add and that creates one curve layer. Now we have the under layer, the body part of the bug. Let's go ahead and adds the wings. We're ready to start adding some wings and we're actually going to make symbols out of the shapes that we create with the wings. Let me just show you the final thing that I did here with this. What I end up doing is creating a crescent shape that I turned into a symbol similarly to what we did with the rectangles we created for the background. I'm going to go back in here, go back into the new one, and I'm going to grab my a Crescent tool and I'm going to deselect this, so I don't change the color red. I think I'll select this blue color here for my fill. Again, I'm still leaving my stroke empty, and I'm just going to drag out a crescent shape and then turn it into a half circle. You can make this any shape you want. If you wanted to, you could also turn it into a curve. You could use your node pool to make changes to its shape. It's totally up to you. Again, there are some wing shapes down here in the assets pack as well, if you want to use those. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to move this to where I wanted, maybe they get a little bit wider. I like to have some space to add my falls too. I like the fact that this is hanging over here and it's not going to matter in a moment anyway because we're going to rotate these out. I just first want to make sure that this is in the middle of the Canvas. You can tell that it is again because that green line shows up. Now I want to create a symbol out of this left-wing. We're going to duplicate that symbol, flip it, and then move it to create the right wing. First I will make this symbol. With it selected, I'll go to my Symbol studio, I'll tap on a burger menu and select Add symbol from selection and you can see it showed up there. It's also here in my layers studio. Now, ungrouped these. Let me go ahead and group these again, this is my background layer and I'll just change the name of that just so that we can keep everything in order. Here's the symbol for my left-wing. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this by going to my Edit menu and tapping duplicate. Now, if I have two, and I want to go ahead and flip this top one and move it to the right side. With this selected, I'll go to my Transform studio, do a horizontal flip and now that you have a fill in there, you can see that it actually flipped. I'm going to drag that over and I'm going to pop it into place until that green line shows up. Now, I have the left wing and right wing. They're mirror images of one another. Once I start adding to one side, it's going to add to the other side automatically, but in a mirrored fashion. The first thing I want to do with these wings now that I have them both in place, is I want to rotate them out a little bit, and I can rotate either one and it's automatically going to rotate the other side in the exact same distance. I'm left-handed, I always start with my left side. You can again rotate which ever one you want. The easiest way to rotate this as using your Move tool and turning on your transform origin plans, this little bullseye looking icon down here in the contextual menu. You'll see it'll show up here. Right now because it's in the middle if I start rotating it, and it's going to rotate this crescent around its center, and that's not what I want. I actually want to rotate it at this point. I'm going to drag this up until it snaps into that corner point and as long as you have snapping in place it'll do that. I'm going to grab this curve model. You don't want to grab the symbol lever, but the actual shape is what you want to grab. I'm going to take my Rotate tool here, and I'm just going to start rotating this around. You can see that as I do that, the right wing starts moving in the opposite direction, the exact same distance. You can also see at the top here that section that was peeking out is no longer peeking out because the wings are covering them. Now at this point, I think when I rotate it out, I think the wings are a little too wide. I'm going to go ahead and while I have this selected, just narrow them up a little bit. Again, it narrows the other side the exact same amount because these are mirrored symbols of one another. Anything I do to this one will automatically happen to this one, just in the opposite direction. I like how that's looking. I'm fine with the top with that peeking out because that's actually how a bug will look. I am going to start and add some a little background elements like our feet, antenna, and eyes. Let's go ahead and do that. We're at the point where we have two sets of symbols, the one for our wings and the one for the background layer. We're going to start adding our legs, antenna, and eyes and I'm going to do that to the background symbols. We're going ahead and group my two wing symbols here and rename the group. It's always a good idea to keep everything labeled just so that you're not adding to the wrong spot, because once we start adding elements to that, you want to make sure you're adding them to the wings if you want them on the wings and of course to the background elements if you plan to add anything underneath it. We're going to take that aside for now, we're just going to focus on the background symbols. I'm going to start by adding the legs. I typically do this using my Pencil tool on stroke. You can do yours however you feel most comfortable, the Pencil tool on fill, the Pen tool, the Shape tool, whatever you'd like to use. I'll go ahead and I'm going to select the stroke color. I'm just going to choose this little rusty color here. My Width tool, I've moved up just to about 33. You can move it to whatever you'd like. Now if I draw out a shape here. You can see it's a pretty random shape and it's actually wobbly. Let me go ahead and try and draw a little bit straight so you can see what I'm trying to do here. If I go ahead and start changing my pressure settings on this, you can see it takes on a little bit more of a pen or the buggy, for lack of a better term shape that I can use for my legs. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to delete this and I'm going to keep the pressure settings where I have them, I can always adjust them if I need to. I'm going to start on my left side. You can start on whichever side you're most comfortable with. I'm going to tap on this rectangle just to get myself in that symbol layer. I'll grab my Pencil tool. I'm going to start drawing out that first leg. You can see it coming out from under. I'll just make two little section there. It automatically added it to the other side. This other symbol, because I was already in this symbol, I didn't have to clip anything. I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm already in my symbol layer here. I'm going to go ahead and start drawing out another leg. I'll draw out my third one. Now I have my three legs. If you wanted to go and make changes to these, you certainly could do that. If I, for example, wanted to make the little feet here point here, I could go ahead and grab those three layers and I can change the pressure settings on them, just to make some changes to those. I could also make them a little bit more narrow. If I wanted to change the thickness of the legs themselves, I could certainly do that as well. I like how that's looking. Now if I wanted to add any texture to these, I need to convert them to a fill first, you can't add texture to a stroke. I can easily do that simply by converting these three strokes to a fill. It will automatically convert these, because again, they're symbols. I'm going to select all of my layers here. The six layers that make up these three legs. I'll go to my edit menu and I'm going to tap "Expand Stroke". What that did is turn them all into cells. Now I can easily add texture to them. It also changed them over here as well. I'm also going to create one large piece out of those. I don't have any need at this point to move them around, I like how they look. I want it to be easy to add texture to them and I already know I'm going to add one main piece attached to all of them. So I'm going to go to my edit menu and I'm going to do a permanent add. Now you can see in the layers studio I have the three legs. They're all one shape and it's created the same one shape on this side. Now I can add texture to them. We're done with the legs, let's go ahead and move to the antenna. I'm going to drop the size of my stroke, but I'm going to keep the pressure settings the same, I want to make it about eight or nine. Again, you can do it whatever size you'd like. I'm going to grab my Pencil tool again, it's on stroke. Again, I want to tap into that left symbol. You can start with the right as well. I'll just start drawing out my antenna here. You can create yours however you'd like. I like to have these little curly cues. You can just use straight ones, you can make them thicker if you'd like while selected, you can go ahead and change that. I think I'll keep it at that thickness. Now again, if I wanted to add any texture, this is a stroke and not a fill, so I would need to go ahead and convert it by expanding it to a fill. I've gone ahead and done that. Finally, let's go ahead and add some eyes to this. I'd like to do that on the symbol layer as well, just so that I can get them in the exact same spot. I'm going to grab my crescent tool for this. I'm going to keep it at that little rusty color. I'm going to drag out a crescent shape. Let me turn that to a fill. I'm going to drag this little red dot out to make it a perfect half-moon. Now in this case, even though I tapped into the symbol that actually added it as the top of the layer stack. I want to drag this down to this symbol, so that it adds it to this side as well. I'm going to drag this, clip it to the left symbol panel, and now it's added it to the right side as well. You can see it's a little bit laid, but you can see which direction we're dealing with now. If you look at this crescent's going this way, so this is the right symbol panel. This one's going this and it's on the left. Now I can use my Move tool and move this up into place. It's going to pop both of them right where I want them, in the exact same spot, just opposite one another. That is the quickest and easiest way to start creating your bug shapes. Again, you can go in and you can make any changes you'd like. If you want to use your Node tool to make changes to the wing shape, you could certainly do that. If you wanted to change their rotation, you could easily do that. Just make sure that you're always working with one or the other of the sides and it's automatically going to make whatever changes you make here to the other side as well. At this point, we're ready to start adding our botanical elements to the wings of the insect. We're going to do that in the next section. I'll see you there. 7. Adding Simple Elements Using Assets: We have our bumps by him place and we're ready to start adding some botanical elements. Now we're going to keep it pretty simple in this video. I'm going to show you how you can use the assets pack that came with the class to add some elements to your insect. Just so that I can show you how when you add it to one side, you can automatically add it to the other. In the next video we're going to make it a little bit more complex. We're going to use the same body, but I'm going to show you how you can mix, using all of your tools, including the pen and pencil tools, to add some additional elements to your bugs. Let's get started. Typically, I like to start by adding some of my larger elements first, I think I'm going to start with some of these little swirly things here. I'll go ahead and tap on it, hit "Insert" and it's going to give me this single layer shape. I'm going to create this in an off-white color. I'll go ahead and I'm going to scale this down. I like to focus on one side. I find it easier to keep track of what I'm doing if I just focus on one wing because I already know it's going to add it to the other in the exact spot. I start with my left side because I'm left handed. If you feel more comfortable starting with the right, it's totally up to you, it's going to work both ways. I'm just going to go ahead and place this spread where I want it. I think I'll rotate it this way, maybe scale it down a little bit. Now there's a couple of things about this. I'm wanted to show up over here, so I need to clip it to the symbol, but it's also hanging over the wing, and I want to clip that off. If I were to just drag this down and clip it to my symbol layer, everything that's hanging off is still hanging off. Now, I can drag it over if I want and that's fine. But what if I like where it's at and I just wanted that little section to be clipped away. I'm going to drag that down to the curved layer and clip it directly to the curve. Then you can see that everything that was hanging over the edge there is now gone. Let's go ahead and keep adding some elements here. I think I'm going to grab this little symbol swirly. I'm going to use that same color, and I'm going to flip this using my transform tool and just going to drag it in the edge here. Now there's nothing hanging over on this one so I can clip it just to the symbol layer. If you feel more comfortable always clipping it to the curve layer, that's totally up to you. You just drag it down and clip it to the symbol and it's going to add it to the other side. I think I'm just going to grab this one other simple swirl here, and I'm going to add it to the bottom. I rotate it a little bit and drag it down here. Now I want it to show up on the other side, but I don't need to worry about it hanging over so I can just clip it to the symbol layer. Now I have that in both spots. I might make this just a little bit bigger. If you tap a few times, you'll get to the layer that you want. I like how those elements are looking. I'm going to go ahead and start adding some flowers in now, and I'm going to scroll down to here and grab this, a truly looking flower. I think I will make this, this red color or maybe yellow. Actually I'm going to stick with this orange color. I'm going to go ahead and use my transform tool to flip this. I want to bend it this way. The great thing about this method, if I place this and I don't like it, I can always move it. I just start placing things and see what I like, inevitably I will make probably 40 or 50 edits to something before I call it that and even then. It may not be done but this whole process makes it really easy to do that. Now, I like a swirling and actually want it over the top of that. Not only do I need to clip this to the wing layer, I need to keep it to that curve. I'm going to clip it and drag it beneath the swirly curves so that the swirl is over the top of that flower. I'm going to go ahead and add any gold leaf layer here, and I want it to blend into background. I'm going to go ahead and grab this leaf here. I'll do an insert, and I'm going to change it to this off-white color. I also want to flip it, make it smaller and I'm going to keep it rather large because I'm actually going to blend it into the background so it won't matter. I want to drag it down and clip it to the wing. Again, because I have overhang here. I move it a little bit too far to the right, so that's fine. I'll just move it again. Now I'm going to change the blend mode on this so it blend into the background. If I choose the blend mode on one side, it automatically going to change it on the other and I might just drop the opacity a little bit. I really just wanted something in the background. I like how that looks. I don't want to add a leafy element here, I think, so I'm going to grab one of my stock, like leaves down here, I thing I will grab this one. I want to make it this same orange color that this was at top. You can always change the colors. I like to stick with a color palette, and I can always change it if I don't like how it's looking, but I find sticking with something limited makes it a little bit easier as I'm creating these. I'll go ahead and drag this down and I need to clip it to the wing, and it's gone ahead and added it to the other side. I'm going to get a little bit bigger just so it stands out a little bit more. Now I want to add some flower elements to the top of this. I'll go back in here and grab some of my single flowers. I like these little weird shaped poppy things for this, so I'm going to go ahead and add that. I'm going to keep them as off-white color. I'm going to add them so they're laying on top of this leaf layer. I'm giving this underwater vibe I think. Let me go ahead and drag this down and clip it to the symbol so it's added there, make it a little bit smaller. Now I want to duplicate this because I want this to be laying on top. I want a few of these laying on top of this leaf shape, and I'm going to make them different sizes. I'm going to go ahead and with it selected, I'm going to finger tap and drag. When I do that, it adds it to the other side as well. Then go ahead one here and maybe make it a little bit bigger. Maybe one more, just to increase the size. We have some flower elements. If I wanted to make a change to the color of this, I could certainly do that. I think I may actually change the color of that background to something else, maybe those green color just so it blends on a little bit more. I might change the color of the four flowers here to something a little bit more bold to get them to stand out a little bit more. I like how that's looking. You can see how you can just add some basic elements to one side, and it'll automatically add it in a symmetrical fashion to the other. What if we wanted to make a little bit more complex illustration? Well, we can start adding in other elements using our pen and pencil tool, and we're going to do that in the next section. I'll see you there. 8. Adding Complex Elements With Raster Files and Drawing Tools: I have my basic elements added to my beetle here. I mentioned in the last video, I tend to start with my larger pieces. What typically happens when I do that is that theme starts to arise. If it doesn't, I just play around and move things around until I start to see something. In the case of this beetle, I have an underwater vibe going between this sea urchin type flowers and the little swirls that makes me think of the undulation in water. I'm going to play into that and start adding some more complex elements just to add to that whole underwater feel. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use some of the other tools within Designer to do that. I'm also going to add some texture to the three pieces that make up this beetle, the wings, the body, and the under section, just to give it a little bit more dimension. Let's get started. I'm going to start by adding texture to my beetle. You can add yours at any point in the process. I'm going to add it now, so that when I start adding smaller elements, I can make sure that nothing's really getting lost. Because sometimes when you add grungy texture, you might find that it covers up things that you've put out there. I'm going to add that first, and then get into adding more of my smaller elements. Now, a couple of changes that I've made. I actually moved all of the elements that are on these wings and clipped them to the curve. The reason I did that is because I'm not going to add individual texture to each of these flowers. If I were to leave them above the curve layer and just clip it with a symbol then when I add the texture, it's going to be laying on top of the texture and be a solid piece, and that's not what I want. I've just moved everything down so it's clipped to the wing itself. That way, once I add the texture to it, it's going to be laying on top of all of these and add texture to all of them. The other change that I made is I created one large piece out of the arms. I'm sorry, the legs, the eyes, and the antenna. I'm going to add one texture image file to the whole thing. Since these aren't the focus of the illustration, the wings are, I'm not going to spend too much time adding texture to them so it makes it a lot easier to be able to add it to one piece. I'm going to start with the back section here. I'm going to do a place image by going to my documents menu. I have mine in the Cloud here. Grab a lighter texture color. I want to drag out large, because I always want to start large and you can always make it smaller. But if you don't start large, you could run into issues with pixelation and things like that when you go to print it. I'm going to go ahead and drag this down and clip it to this curved layer that makes up the legs. When I do that, it also adds it to the other side. If you open this up, you can see that there was a texture image file on there. I'm going to go ahead and change the blend mode, and it will change it on both sides as well. I'm going to change this to overlay. I like how it adds some light as well as the texture. I like how that's looking. I think I'm done there. I'm going to go ahead and add some texture to the body now. Again, this is a single curve, so I'm just going to go ahead and grab a place image. I think I'm going to use this stripy, grungy texture I have. These are the textures from Two Little Owls. If you look at the resource guide in the packet, I have a list of all of my favorite texture makers and these are definitely one of them. I'm going to go ahead and drag that down and clip it to the body. I actually like how that looks, but I want that green to come through, so I'll change the blend mode. I think I'm going to go with soft light and just drop the opacity a little bit. Now we're at the point where we can add texture to the wings. I can add it to one side and just like with the legs and the antenna, it will add it to the other wing as well. I'm going to start with my left wing and I'm going to do another place image. I'm going to grab one of these lighter ones. I don't want it to be too dark, because I don't want it to overpower the elements that are already on there. Now, I have this there, I'm going to go ahead and tap to place it. Then I'm going to go ahead and clip it to my curve layer and it's automatically added it to the other side. Now I'll change my blend mode. I'm going to change it to soft light. Again, I don't want it to overpower everything in there. Now, you can also start moving it around. If you see certain spots, I like how it has a little bit of greediness here. I also like this up here so you can move your texture around and also tilt it if you find that it works nicely to add some texture and dimension. I suggest just rotating things around and moving it until you find the exact right spot that you want for your texture. Now again, as I mentioned earlier, because I moved all of these into the curve layer and nothing is sitting on top of it, the texture is not laying on top of everything and all of the elements on the wing have texture on them. We're set with our texture. We're going to go ahead and start adding some more complex elements to the wings to play into that underwater field, so let's go ahead and do that. One of the things that I'm thinking I want to add to this just to give it that underwater vibe is some bubble type things and I find it the easiest to do that with my stroke on my pencil tool. I'm going to go ahead and grab my pencil tool and I'm going to use an off-white color. You can always change the color if you want. I just want to play into the swirls here because I feel like that keeps it consistent with that water feel. I'm going to change my pressure settings here and I'm just going to give it a little bit of that same wonkiness, for lack of a better term, that we use with the legs. I'm going to make this a little bit smaller. Now, if I tap into my curve layer here and start drawing, it should add it to the other side as well. I'll go ahead and start drawing out some little circles. Now, it's a little too dark. It's actually gray, so I'm going to go ahead and change the color. That's a lot better. I'm going to make this a little bit thinner. I'm just going to keep drawing out some circles to give it a fun little bubble feel. I'm not going to worry about these being closed because I'm not really planning on making any additional shapes with it, so I'm just leaving the messes. As of right now as I'm doing this, my end points are not closed and that's okay because I'm not adding any texture to these. I can actually drop them below the texture line and it'll automatically add texture. If I were adding something, individually I would need to convert these to a fill and I'm not going to worry about that. I like that at the top. What I like to do though, is to group them together just to keep everything in its place. This is my little top group. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to drop this below the texture here. It's not technically adding texture to those strokes because again, you can't add texture to the stroke. You can only add it to the fill. But It's also not blocking the textures, so I like to drop it below there. I'm going to go ahead and keep adding some, then I'll grab my pencil tool and I think I'll add some here. Don't be afraid to draw over the top of other elements, because it gives it a layered feel. Really, that's ultimately, in this case, how water is. If you're under water, you're seeing plants and they're all layered. Now, in the case of some of these that aren't closed, I am going to go ahead and close them because it's not really looking bubbly so much as it looks like a horseshoe shape. I'm just going to go ahead and grab this and drag it until it snaps closed. I always like to zoom in and just check things and make sure everything looks okay. I think the rest of those are looking fine. I may add a few more, maybe some up here. Just vary your shapes, because that's what ultimately gives it that organic feel. You could also take some from up here and bring them down here. I just like to make sure that my shapes that are next to one another are varied. I'm going to go ahead and group those together. Now, they're already under the texture layer, and I think I'm going to add just a few here as well. You can also take the group and use your move tool if you want to make it smaller and move it to another section. I'm going to do that. It's a little bit too big and then I'll just finally group this last section here and maybe move it a little bit tilted. I've added my little bubble layers here now you could, if you wanted to change the blend mode, just to get them to blend in a little bit more. For example, if you use soft lay or overlay, it just blends in a bit. I'm actually going to keep them on normal and maybe drop the opacity slightly and now I'm going to start adding some swirls using my vector brush. Some of the brushes that are actually built into the designer are really great for adding texture. I definitely recommend running through the built-in brushes and making swatches of them so you can see how they work. For example, the glazing brush in the acrylics section is a great one to add a textural swirl to something. I use it a lot as a background to give a cloud effect if I'm doing something in a sky. I'm going to grab this acrylic tool and I'm going to grab my vector brush tool and just sneak a medium-sized brush. If you scrub up from the bottom here you can see that circle changing size and I'm going to stick with that same off-white color because I'm actually going to blend this end. I want it to clip to the curve and when I do it on here, again, it's going to add it to here. I'm just going to start swiping in and you can see that great texture there. It's one of my favorite brushes and I just start in different directions but I always start from the outside because of the way vector brushes work. You get a swirly on the end but I don't want that to be part of the illustration. Now, one of the best parts about using these vector brushes, and I know it looks like it's overhanging, but it won't in a second, you can use your node tools when you use the vector brush to change the direction of the nodes, you can make them a little bit more bendy here. I'm going to go ahead and group these and now I'm going to clip it to this curve. Even though I tapped into the curve, it actually dropped it above it so everything's hanging out and you can see it hanging here. I'm going to drop it down and I'm going to clip it to my left layer here. Now it's clipped it on both sides. I don't necessarily like how that second one is looking there, I'm going to go and change that and I want this group to be below everything because I really want it to be a part of the blue and I don't want it to overpower anything. I'm going to first drag this down here so that it's beneath all of the elements that I've added above it. Now I'm going to change the blend mode to soft light and it's really subtle but you can see the swirling. You can even move it so that it moves in line with some of the little swirls here but I actually like how it's looking I'm going to keep it that way. Now one final thing I want to do is to go ahead and use my pencil tool again and I'm going to add some more leaf formations. Now you could add them with the assets pack, but I'm going to go ahead and grab my pencil tool and I'm going to grab a green color here. I'm also going to change my pressure settings. When I tap and you reset pressure, if you tap and add a node in the middle of your pressure settings and then you drag the other two down, you'll get a leaf formation. I'm going to make that a little bit wider. I'm going to use that just to add some seagrass here and again, I'm going to tap into the curve, it's likely going to drop it above it, but I can always move it down. I'm just going to go ahead and draw up and I want to play into the curve of the bug. I'm going to go ahead and group these. I might also change the color I think it's a little too dark. I'm going to grab this lighter color I think that's better, then use the same color for this one and I want to drop them below everything again. I'll go ahead and I'm going to drag it down so that's below all of my other elements but above the vector brushes that I used. I'm just going to move them a little bit. They're a little too overpowering. The other great thing is because I use curves, I can also make them a little bit more narrow if I feel like they're a bit too big and I think they are. I'll go ahead and grab. You can move them around, you can use your node tool, you can rotate them. It's one of the things that I love about using vectors, is that there's none of this erasing and other things that you need to do. You can actually just change it. It's very flexible that way and I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing with this one, I'm trying to make it a little bit more narrow. Now I could keep it that color since it is actually behind everything. I like it. I'm going to keep it the same blend mode and normal but I'm going to go ahead and drop the opacity of both of them just so that they blend in a little bit more. You could also try changing the blend mode just to see if there's something else that you like. I know it loses the field that I'm looking for when I do that so I'm going to keep it on normal and I'm just going to drop the opacity slightly. I don't want it to overpower anything. You could even have fun with it. Let me get another color if I wanted to add a cup of tea or something into this. These are your illustrations. Have fun with them. They don't have to be realistic, they don't have to be exactly and there's really no beetle out there that looks like this. Make it yours and actually I like how the tick is looking at. I think it makes it look a little less overpowering than the green. I'm just going to move these around. I really like to layer things underneath just to give it some depth and dimension. One final thing I wanted to do is add a little bit something to the body of the insect here. I don't add symmetrical elements but I want to give it a little something more than it has. I'm going to use my assets for that. I have this little bubble formation here and I'm going to add that in an off-white fill. I'm going to turn the stroke off actually to manipulate here with my move tool until it's laying over the body and then I'll go ahead and clip it to that curve. Now I don't want it to be that obvious, so I'm going to go ahead and drop the blend mode to soft light and drop the opacity a little bit. I like how it has a little bit of something there and I'm going to add one of my suns here and I want that to be an off-white fill as well. I'll just drag that to the head pallet here and it gives it that sun over the water fill. Again, I just want to make sure that it's blending in. I don't want it to be too obvious. Maybe make it a little bit smaller and you can just play around with it. I had an intention for that and I don't necessarily know that I like it but I could play around with it until it's exactly where I want it I could make an orange, I could do all things and back. Let's try orange and see how that works. Now, it's not really that great but I'm going to go ahead and stick with that, I like the idea of having something up here. You could add any element. You could pull some of the things up here. I'm going to go ahead and just get rid of that sign because it's not really working the way I wanted it to but I do like how the little bubble formations play into the rest of the water here. That is how you can add complex elements to your beetles and again, have fun with it. Nothing like this exist in nature and that's okay. It's all about creating something fun and beautiful and whimsical and that just place into that folk art [inaudible] with the symmetry. Create to your heart's content. Find a theme and just start adding elements whether it's using the assets or using your tools over here, just have fun with it. In the final section, we're going to wrap everything up. I will see you there. 9. Folk Art Insect Start to Finish (Time-Lapse): In this final video, I'm going to create one of my modern folk inspired insects from start to finish. I I'm going to speed up the process, but you'll be able to see the steps that I pick throughout, and I'm going to use a mix of my assets as well as the other tools of pencil pen tool around. I'm going ahead and get started and I'll see you on the other side. There it is. Start to finish my modern [inaudible] to feel with the stars and the blue spots here and everything like that. Trying to leave it with some summary July colors with the flowers and everything like that. I'm going to call this done. One thing I did not do on previous videos, but I did in this one, is I added texture to my background layer and sent it to single layer. You can easily do that. Then I also added a textural layer at the top that I had set to a later blend mode is to give it a little bit of something on the top of it. That is that does it for the class. I truly appreciate you taking the time to take the class. Again, if you'll share your project to the project section, that would be wonderful. I would love to see what you create. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. Thank you again.