gdenby

Can you attach a quick image of what you are trying to do? My guess is that you might be able to get what you want by using a text path, and filling it with x's

Really simple. Start w. the Arrow tool, using triangular ends. Rotate. Covert to curves, and tweak. Duplicate for the sand, and tweak even more. Hourglass.afdesign

I don't know of any single tutorial that would describe all of what is going. Its not the kind of work I like to do, but I'm pretty sure I could pull it off with AD. But it would take hours. I'd consider this an advanced project. At least 7 major operations, and lots of added finesse to put them all together. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on. You would need to define the body shape as a layer. The text, as "artistic text" could be built w. a lot of work. All those fonts, all those sizes. Then some portions would need to be combined and given gradient fills. Other text, grey scale, or nested objects fills w. transparency gradients. And so forth and so on. First step. Make a bunch of text. Use the transparency tool to fade the edges of the text group. Make an outline drawing, and nest the text inside. Along the way, you might need to use a layer adjustment to turn an image into a simple black and white form that becomes both a grey scale image, and the container for more text. If you want to do it, the program is up to it. Again, lots of work even if you already have the skills.

I've been trying the timed trial of NeoFinder. It is very fast. Cataloged a folder of pictures w. 23K images in less than 10 min. Allows multiple files to have Mac tags or comments added in batches. Will quickly find all those w. the same comments, etc. Reads and records EXIF data. Was able to go thru my AD project folder and catalogue over 800 files in about a minute. Provided previews. Works with many other kinds of files. I've just dabble with it a bit. I had little use for Adobe Bridge, and have no experience w. LR, so I can't compare. I did use the Extensis Portfolio DAM professionally. NeoFinder does a lot of what Portfolio did some years ago, but seems to be limited to a single user environment.

Ooops, I must have inadvertently saved when I opened in 1.5.6. Attached is the original as saved in 1.5.4, the 1st version I had. ShapePrimGamut1.5.4.afdesign

Hi, irvson, I've been using graphics software for quite some time. One of the things that knocked me out about AD was the built in shapes. All of them have variations. The total of variations is in the hundreds. And then you can modify many of them w. the corner tool. And if you "bake" the corners, every acute corner can also be modified. I spent maybe 3 weeks w. AD just exploring the shapes. For your enjoyment: ShapePrimGamut.afdesign

When I break a curve, and then re-close it, the break point does become the new start, but the control handles usually seem to change, giving a loop in the stroke.

Try this. Draw the shape. Select the red start node, and click on break curve. Go to the node where you want the start. Break curve there. Don't move anything. The 2 new curves should be selected. Use the Boolean add. The 2nd break point turns into the new start point. See three variants:

Don't know if this gives the result you want, but try changing the phase to 1. The corner dashes will double, but they will be square.

Check out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNZbmvjtdmU. You can make brushes, I've done a few for myself following the tute. Don't know enough about converting PS brushes to say anything. The painting capabilities in Designer are similar to Photo, but Photo certainly has filter effects that Designer doesn't. (GIMP isn't so bad, there are some really nice functions, depending on what has been added in to the base release. But it is not very easy to use in quite a few ways.)

It appears the brush stabilization helps, a lot. See the attached. The 1st circle is at the zoom I usually work in. By the time I'm zoomed out to 25%, which makes the work area smaller than a credit card, the circle becomes pixellated. With stabilization on, much smoother, altho again at that size I can't work well.

There's a cataloging program called NeoFinder you might want to look at. I came across a mention of it last week, and it seems pretty full featured and very efficient.

I too am old enough that it was expected one might have to read a few thousand pages of manuals just to do the simplest things. There wasn't point and click, there wasn't WYSIWYG, or any intuitive work space. As a result of being the 1st staff member to have a personal computer, I ended up doing some departmental support for the rest of the staff. One thing that always bemused me was that people with advanced degrees, sometimes several, just could not get the hang of computer use. And I'm not talking about anything really complicated, like photo processing can be. I'm talking e-mail, or simply understanding the file system. The best I could do was encourage people to take notes, practice the same thing repeatedly until it became habitual, and would encourage them to be able to describe what they were doing when something didn't seem to work right. I suspect some of it is personality type, but more often, its just background. One of my friend's on the staff was a professional photographer, but he never liked working with the "new fangled" digital cameras. As soon as a younger fellow joined the staff, he got the fancy Nikon, and the full Adobe package. The older fellow happily switched to learning how to make Daguerreotypes.

AFAIK, the brush engine for both Designer and Photo is the same. I have Designer, and do not get that problem, either when using a mouse or a tablet. Perhaps its a system issue. As a point of comparison, I have an 2015 iMac Retina

A late comment to this thread. Draw the vector shapes, however fancy you like, within the right proportion for the image. Group them. Use the fill tool, and choose bitmap. Select image. Then, ungroup, and the bitmap sticks with the vector shapes. Down side, the bitmap is duplicated in whole for every shape. The file size can end up quite large, depending on the number of puzzle pieces. The puzzle file was in excess of 24 Mb. Drawing the vector shapes was somewhat tedious, but a later attempt to break the image into pieces that would fit into each puzzle piece, and so reduce file size, was more than I cared to do. I only wanted to make 1 or 2 puzzles, but I suppose a couple of hundered would be worth the effort.

The shape, the vector is defined by the position of the nodes, and the paths that connect them. The fill what can be placed within that perimeter. The stroke is what can be drawn along that perimeter. If you select a shape, and change both the fill and the stroke to none, in vector view, there will seem to be nothing. But if you switch to wireframe, the underlying object appears. It just has no 2-d attributes. When objects that have strokes are subject to boolean operations, the results will also have strokes. Those can be turned off, if so desired. Or the strokes can be position outside the fill, in the middle of the path, or inside the fill. If, for instance, the stroke is set to be inside the fill, where adjacent object touch, there will appear to be a thicker line. Hope that clarifies.

There is a not too tedious work around for 1. Take the vector shape(s) and do a serious of power duplicates, and nest the duplicates inside another vector. I haven't used Illustrator in years, and not much for years before that, so I had to look up "live paint bucket." Do realize that a lot of Illustrator and Photoshop features were not available for decades. Affinity at about 2 years is where the Adobe products were at maybe 5, and Affinity's lay out is a lot nicer than Adobe's was at a similar stage.

Pretty nice. I haven't messed w. brush making much, but this reminds me to get back in practice.

I went back and looked at some of my work around results. Turned out that when I zoomed in quite a bit, I could still see traces of grey, not pure black. When I put some into the vectorizer, and did a little adjustment w. the parameters, I could get pure black all thru, w edges that were more or less smooth, depending on the parameter settings. Attached, the original .png quadrupled on the right, exported, and the vectorized output on the left.

Yes, it looked sort of greenish to my eyes, but much closer to grey scale than something like sepia or indigo tone. FWIW, I tried the work around starting with a pale tan stroke, and it took over 20 copies to approach solid black.

My guess from what you wrote is that the stroke was made w. a textured vector brush. Those are strokes created by dragging a monochrome bit map, in this case, a grey scale, over a vector. The edges of the shape cannot be expanded because they are not vectors. They have various tones by design. Assuming the stroke is a vector stroke, here's a work around that might do the job. Select the curve, and set the blend mode to multiply. Copy and paste it repeatedly on top of itself. My strials need 10 or more copies for the stroke to turn to a solid rough edge black. Those I was able to export as .pdf, .eps, .svg, etc. If for some reason you need actual vector outlines, use an exported tiff, and run it thru an image vectorizer. There are online services available, very inexpensive dedicated app, or freeware Inkscape, tho' it is a bit more complicated to use.

I don't know what model my daughter has, but she uses an MS Surface with Photoshop. She said it was less expensive than a Cintiq, and I know she has been using it for more than a year. It seemed rather small to me, but she has good eyes, so apparently the display isn't a problem for her.

Also of limited use, try either the 3-d fx or the emboss fx. In my image, the rounded edges the effect gives have been cropped by overlaid rectangles.

I couldn't figure out how to fade the section of the light curve that seemed to go around the back of the dark. Using the node tool, I moved the nodes. Then I started adding transparency gradients, and saw the overlap. With snapping on using the node tool, I added and tweaked nodes to get the lines to touch. That way as I faded towards the edge, there was no overlap band. Along the way I noticed there was a small stroke on both, so I got rid of that. I suspect working on the pixel fills by adding light levels of pixel mask would have also been a good approach, but most of the stuff I do is vector work, so that was the direction I went in.

Vectors are certainly "artificial." Not at all easy to work around that unless the vector boundaries are fractal complex. So here's what I managed w. your file. Thinking it could be better. But for what its worth: mountains-example_mod.afdesign