nmurray

I saw the video on Layer Blend Options and wanted to try something with that, along with masks. I got a little carried away. The full project is 182 MB. The eyes make it look a little like Fozzy Bear from the Muppet TV show.

I started with an all-brown drawing and used very low transparency brushes to overlay color

I tried to use as many of the brushes as I could. Starting with a black background saved me a lot of work. Keeping foreground, mid ground, and background in separate layers also helped a lot. The texture brushes are a blast to use.

I tried to keep the total time below 2 hours and 1 Brush. This is based on a photo of the waterfall that run through the center of Camden Maine. I am liking the speed and responsiveness of the brushes, and the program in general. Fast and so far no crashes or problems. Very good.

I didn't know about the size adjustments. Fantastic. The paint mixer brush is interesting but I'm not sure exactly how I would use it. For blending I would be looking for something similar to what Painter or ArtRage has, which gives you a gradual transition from one color to another along the boundary. The Paint Mixer Brush seems like it would be useful to get an intermediate color that you could use between the other two but it still seems a little difficult to use for blending. Many of the interviews I've seen with illustrators suggest that the common Photoshop way of doing it has been to use lower transparency once the main color areas are down, and then constantly resample color under the pen (with a shortcut key I would assume) and build up a smooth transition that way. That is a lot of work. Thanks for the response and information.

It was a nice surprise to find the art brushes in Affinity Photo. Here is a painting based on a couple of photos I took in Maine. The work took about 3-4 hours. The program could be better at painting with a couple of simple additions: 1 A good blender brush. Smudge and Blur aren't that useful for this. 2 A simple and easy way to change brush size without having to go to the slider - shortcut keys - control click and then drag to set size