Hi Rik,
There's two different modes related to drawing/painting (called Personas in Affinity) you can use in Affinity Designer.
One is Draw Persona, and it allows you to work with vector tools, like Xara does.
The other is Pixel Persona where all tools work with pixels like in Photoshop (bitmap based tools). There's no equivalent of this mode in Xara.
You can change between those two modes with the first two icons below the window controls on the top left corner. And you can mix vector layers with raster layers from both modes.
Additionally you can make Affinity render your document (no matter if there's vector layers there or not) as pixels. You can activate this going to View -> View Mode -> Pixels
With this view mode enabled you can draw with all vector tools while the document is rendered in pixels (similar to what Adobe Fireworks does). Basically it allows you to draw with pixels using vector tools to control your shapes/paths.
Swatches panel
The Swatches panel makes it easy to use predefined colours, and also to define, store and reuse your own selection of colours.
About the Swatches panel
The Swatches panel stores your recently used colours and lets you access a range of predefined palettes, each containing solid or gradient fill swatches. These can be selected for use with various tools and for applying directly to objects. You can also create and store your own swatches as custom colour palettes either for the document, application or system-wide, as well as import any exported Affinity .afpalette from other users or import Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) palettes.
As well as accessing palette, you can create global and spot colours, and make colours overprint. Your registration colour can also be customized.
Swatches panel: (A) Colour 1/Colour 2 (left) or Stroke/Fill colour selectors with colour 'none' swatch and 'swap' arrow, (B) Colour picker tool and picked colour swatch, (C) Category list (showing Application, left, and Document, right), (D) Category colour palette swatches, (E) Search, (F) Panel Preferences, (G) Opacity control, (H) Recently used colours, (I) None, Black, Mid-grey and White swatches, (J) Add current colour to palette as a global colour, (K) Add current fill to palette, (L) Registration colour, (M) Global colour, (N) Overprint colour, (O) Spot colour.
Markings which distinguish specialist colour swatches: (A) Global, (B) Overprint, (C) Spot.
Like the Colour panel, the Swatches panel has different states depending on the active Persona and on the selected tool. The large colour swatch selectors indicate the currently selected colours.
The Swatches panel also shows None, Black, Mid-grey and White swatches, recently used colours and an opacity control. Swatches are organized into colour palettes by category.
To add a customized registration colour for professional printing, click Panel Preferences, then select Add Registration Colour.
Preset colour palettes (available from the category list pop-up menu) include macOS colour palettes such as Apple, Web Safe Colours, System, and Crayons.
To list swatches by name instead of thumbnail, click Panel Preferences, then select Show as List.
Colour selector swatches
In Draw Persona, objects have stroke and fill properties. The stroke colour is represented by the cutout colour selector swatch (A below). The fill is represented by the solid colour selector swatch (B below).
Here's the swatches that you'll see for vector and pixel tools.
The selected swatch selector is at the front. In this illustration the selected colour selector swatch is: (A) Stroke, (B) Fill, (C) Foreground (Colour 1), and (D) Background (Colour 2).
The active swatch is whichever is shown in front of the other. You can quickly switch between swatch selectors by pressing the x .
These swatches change appearance for some vector tools.
Fill Tool: When selected, only one colour selector swatch is shown to represent the fill only.
Vector Brush Tool: When selected, the panel shows foreground and background swatches that can be swapped by clicking the adjacent double arrow.
Working with palettes
The ten most recently used colours are automatically added to the panel on a temporary basis. You can permanently store custom colours and gradients that you use most often in any of the palettes or you can create custom palettes to host them.
Although you can add colours to any of the predefined palette categories, we recommend that you always create your own.
The following types of palette exist within Affinity Designer:
Document—these palettes are saved within the current document.
Application—these palettes are saved within Affinity Designer. These palettes are available to any Affinity Designer document.
System—these palettes are saved to your operating system. These palettes are available within Affinity Designer and other applications installed on your system.
PANTONE®—these palettes are based on PANTONE® Colours. These palettes are available to any Affinity Designer document.
Saving and deleting custom colour palettes
To create a new palette:
Click Panel Preferences and choose an Add Palette option.
From Panel Preferences, you can also rename and delete the selected palette.
To save a colour or gradient to a palette:
On the Swatches panel, select a palette from the palette pop-up menu.
Do one of the following:
-click an object, then from the pop-up menu, click Add to Swatches and choose to add colour from fill, stroke or both.
Select Add current colour to palette. Use the Stroke/Fill colour selector to target the colour.
To edit a saved swatch:To delete a saved swatch:
Generating a palette from document
You can generate a palette from the colours used throughout your document.
To generate a palette from document:
Click Panel Preferences and choose an option from Create Palette from Document.
A new palette is created (named after the document) using all the colours currently in the document.
Sharing custom palettes
You can also share custom colour palettes for use by other Affinity users.
To export a colour palette: To import a colour palette:
Click Panel Preferences and select a palette type from the Import Palette sub-menu.
Locate the file you want to import and click Open.
The newly imported palette will now be available to choose in the palette pop-up menu.
Using the above method you can also import palettes from Adobe applications (such as Illustrator, InDesign and PhotoShop) using an Adobe Swatch Exchange file (*.ase).
By default Affinity Designer works in vector mode (Draw Persona).
To get your normal image tools, change to Pixel Persona (although keep in mind that at heart AD is a vector design program with raster features, Affinity Photo might be a better match for image manipulation features).
