gdenby

Sorry, in a huge rush. Brief instructions below and sample file to try out.  (No screen grabs I'm afraid.)
 
You have to do quite a bit of setting up. There may be quicker ways but  this works for me.
1) Create a new document, preferably square.
2) In Vector persona, draw a rectangle or any other shape. The size is not important.
3) Display the Symbols palette, make sure Sync: is selected, select the rectangle and create a new symbol. This will "nest" the rectangle into the symbol.
4) Let's say you want six-fold symmetry. In the Layers palette, duplicate the symbol five times, giving you six identical symbols.
5) In the Symbols palette, click Sync: to turn off synchronisation.
6) Leave the top symbol in the Layers palette as it is.
7) Click on the second symbol (not rectangle) in the Layers palette. Display the Transform palette. Rotate the symbol 60˚. (360˚/6).
8) Rotate the remaining four symbols in the same way, to 120˚, 180˚, 240˚, 300˚.
9) Click the Sync: button in the Symbols palette to re-synchronise the symbols.
10) In the Layers palette, delete the rectangle from the top symbol. This will delete it from all the other symbols too, but you may get a 'ghost' of the rectangle remaining. It will disappear.
11) At the top of the layers stack, create a new Pixel layer. Drag it into the top symbol so that it "nests" and appears in all the other symbols.
12) Switch to pixel persona. Paint in the top pixel layer. It should be replicated in each of the other symbols, rotated about the centre in six-fold symmetry. 
 
Symmetrical painting.afdesign

Open File Make a selection with the Pen Tool Fill Selection Made with the Pen Tool Go to Select > Selection From Layer (You should now have the Marching Ants around the Can) Note: Make sure you are on the Background layer, this is so you can Copy and Paste the Can to a New Layer So with the background Layer selected and the Marching Ants displayed Press ⌘+C to Copy and ⌘+V to Paste the Can to a New Layer, we'll call this the Can Layer. Now create a New Pixel Layer and drag it Below the Can Layer. Select The Fill Tool from the side menu and choose Linear Gradient The Gradient should be applied to the Pixel Layer Now you can modify the gradient to your own taste. The Layer should look something like this...

And suddenly, a face!
To step back a day or 2, it occurred to me that a lot of what you were/are doing is sort of like what I might expect from an interstellar drone transmission. Schematic. Minimal.
Ever see Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey"? That was the 1st time I ever saw CG. Check out the starting image here. I couldn't even begin to imagine how the vector graphics on the control display were being done. But when 2001 CG in reality arrived, everything was so much more detailed. Useful, I suppose, but not more evocative.

Hi, philipt18,
I mostly use Designer, but I think Photo will do 3 of the 4 samples I'll show.

Affinity has a feature called power duplicate. One can draw a shape, move/rotate/scale, and repeat identically using the "duplicate" command via the keyboard short cut. Many many items can be created, and grouped. In the example, the diagonals were done this way. The ellipses were all done just by copy and paste.
In the upper left, I power duplicated squares in rows and columns, and nested the resulting checkerboard inside the ellipse.
Lower left, it is vertical pen strokes, set to dashed lines.
Upper right, I used one of my homemade vector brushes at a width that filled the ellipse w. 4 strokes. Photo does not have a vector brush.
Bottom right, I found an old Ben Day stipple pattern in my collection, couldn't find any checkerboards, made it neutral grey, and placed it as a bitmap fill in the ellipse, adding a recolor adjustment to match the main color.
I would suppose something like these would help.
 
 

Hi, philipt18,
I mostly use Designer, but I think Photo will do 3 of the 4 samples I'll show.

Affinity has a feature called power duplicate. One can draw a shape, move/rotate/scale, and repeat identically using the "duplicate" command via the keyboard short cut. Many many items can be created, and grouped. In the example, the diagonals were done this way. The ellipses were all done just by copy and paste.
In the upper left, I power duplicated squares in rows and columns, and nested the resulting checkerboard inside the ellipse.
Lower left, it is vertical pen strokes, set to dashed lines.
Upper right, I used one of my homemade vector brushes at a width that filled the ellipse w. 4 strokes. Photo does not have a vector brush.
Bottom right, I found an old Ben Day stipple pattern in my collection, couldn't find any checkerboards, made it neutral grey, and placed it as a bitmap fill in the ellipse, adding a recolor adjustment to match the main color.
I would suppose something like these would help.
 
 

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Umm, yeah, d'oh!

Don't use White to create a texture image brush use any other colour, then you can change it to any other colour when you use the brush
If you want the black in your png not to show make it transparent
 

Also, notice the line end styles in the advanced section. The round, butt and square line ends change how the dashes/dots appear. Both the round and square will show a dot even it the dot value is 0. The butt at zero shows nothing.

I will differ from toltec, assuming I am not misunderstanding his reply. You can create a bitmap filled style. The bitmaps remain editable when applied to other works.

The iPencil rocks. It is expensive, but the response is spectacular. AD's new "sculpt" pencil mode works like liquid lightning. My younger daughter, who works very diligently w. a Surface Pro, Ps, and various pens had to admit it was way better than anything she had used.

Works pretty well. The long necktie shape kind of breaks the overall hex-nut feeling for me. It might be too old fashioned, but consider a bow tie instead: bigger hex+smaller hex+bigger hex, all horizontal centered.

Hi, Northern_99,
I don't know about cameras, but it was part of my job to set up lighting in a fine art museum. I often worked closely w. the photographers. LEDs do not have a continuous spectrum. They emit a strong blue frequency light, which passes thru various phosphors which re-emit yellow and red lights, but the specifics of those depends on the manufacturer. They are not as bad as fluorescents, but still very unbalanced. In my museum work, it took nearly eight years to find LEDs which were good enoug. This was verified by the archival photographer, who was using a top end Nikon. It had a spectral display, and when a grey card was sampled under the LEDs and the best halogens we had, the LEDs won w. the most balanced spectrum.
So to correct the images you have, if you had the original spectrum (not likely I suppose), you would know which portions of the color curves to balance. Typically, cheap LEDs for area lighting still have a very strong blue component, a much reduced green, and almost no red. I've never become skilled enough in this sort of adjustment. Perhaps someone here knows how to add color to different ranges of the spectrum

Hi, Kylelol,
If you've had some experience w. GIMP, you've taken some 1st steps. GIMP has lots of good stuff, but the interface layout is sort of clumsy, which is to be expected from an app made from group contributions. For me, the interface feels very clumsy. The Affinity apps are much better. But note, they do a ton of stuff. I've been doing computer graphics since the mid-80s. Still took me about 2 weeks to find everything in Designer. I use Photo far less, but my impression is that it is much more complex.
Consider what you might want to try. Designer is, obviously, for structured design. But it has a good selection of "paint" features. Photo is aimed for pro photo work. I don't have a decent camera, and am a wretched photographer. But I do find Photo has an even stronger set of painting tools coupled w. image manipulation.
As above, do it for fun. When I got Designer, the built in shape tools blew me away. Then gradients, then blend modes. Spent maybe 6 weeks making abstract geometric images w. dozens and dozens of layers, each w. different gradients and blends and transparencies. 

Hi, Kylelol,
If you've had some experience w. GIMP, you've taken some 1st steps. GIMP has lots of good stuff, but the interface layout is sort of clumsy, which is to be expected from an app made from group contributions. For me, the interface feels very clumsy. The Affinity apps are much better. But note, they do a ton of stuff. I've been doing computer graphics since the mid-80s. Still took me about 2 weeks to find everything in Designer. I use Photo far less, but my impression is that it is much more complex.
Consider what you might want to try. Designer is, obviously, for structured design. But it has a good selection of "paint" features. Photo is aimed for pro photo work. I don't have a decent camera, and am a wretched photographer. But I do find Photo has an even stronger set of painting tools coupled w. image manipulation.
As above, do it for fun. When I got Designer, the built in shape tools blew me away. Then gradients, then blend modes. Spent maybe 6 weeks making abstract geometric images w. dozens and dozens of layers, each w. different gradients and blends and transparencies. 

Hi, blanko.
The save profile is associated w. the specific document. The pressure may be saved as a layer style to be used in any document.  I've not quite worked thru some of the issues w. the saved style. Sometimes applying a save style makes the stroke much wider. I suppose it may have to do w. the scale w. object being set to on, but am still unsure.

Hi, Bobi,
I've been using AD for about 20 months, average at least 3 hrs/day, and I had a great deal of trouble trying to follow the tute. 
 
1st problem, I don't have that font, so I don't know how many points/mm wide it is so I can't place the first circle ellipse next to it. I also don't know if the "Q" is centered on the guides, it doesn't look like it. I don't know if the line drawn across from the circle is from the circle center, or the circle diameter. I don't know why the left, down, right, up, left lines are different sets of values and not in a grid. Tho' I suspect they are some fraction of the card's width and height. 
 
It would have been so much easier to simply give the locations of a whole set of guides to snap to instead of trying to adjust individual pen nodes.

Great work. I've spent many many hours making vector Acanthus, and it was some of the 1st things I did when I started w. Designer. I appreciate how you show the development of the work into complete vector. Affinity's line pressure for strokes makes many lines so easy.

Hey! Polygonius,
Doomed, you are. Does w. iPencil,  pencil an' vector brush in Designer it can :

Other forum members do lots more pixel work than I. You might want to look at the "Show us your work" section of the forum for samples of what can be done.
 
Note, neither Photo or Designer are focused on being dedicated "paint" programs like Krita. But there are some good tools.
 
I mostly do vector work, and am currently working on a 5K x 3K desktop image. I just opened it up, and added some 1 pixel wide line work to one of the vectors. I had to be zoomed in 81000% in order to make a 16 x 16 px drawing, each pixel a different color. Not even visible at 100% zoom, and only a dot at 150%. So I guess Designer nicely handles high resolution, and pixel level precision.

Hi, justmaggie,
You have a mis-conception many people seem to have at the start. If you select any of the lines, you will see that each one has a black stroke, and no fill. A curve in AD can be closed or unclosed. Both types can have 2 attributes, a fill and a stroke. In your work, you have all unclosed curves w. only a stroke attribute.It you click on any of them, and assign a fill, you will see a solid color that extends between the 1st and last nodes of the unclosed curve.
There is a way to remedy this, tho' it may seem a little complex. 
Select all the curves at once. Use the layer/expand stroke command. This will turn all the stroke attributes into individual black filled curves.  With them still all selected, use the geometry Add operation. This will create a layer called "curves." The spaces between the lines are empty, and not defined as vectors.
Next, use the geometry Divide operation. You will end up w.what appears to be a solid black silhouette. But note that there are now many curves, all black showing in the layer panel. You now have lines that can be colored, and shapes also. There will be some miniscule fragments left from the divide operation, which probably can all be discarded. 
Attatched, my attempt at this, took less time than typing the post.
jellypins ram filled.afdesign

Hi, Andy Lin,
I haven't figured out how to edit brushes yet on the iPad version, but in the desktop version, the position of the brush stroke ends is determined by the head and tail offset. Brushes can be made so that the texture does not go the whole length of the vector stroke. Typically, those are "wash" type brushes which are intended to look like separate brush or reed pen strokes.

AFAIK, the 2 Affinity apps do not do data merges of any kind, or data imports at this point. 
For the example you gave, there is a method that is fairly easy. Create some text strings, "I love" "X", "X", "X". Make each a symbol. The "X"s can be renamed animal1, animal2.... Save those symbols as assets. The symbols on the page can be changed all at once. But when the symbol asset is pulled back into the document, it is still in its original form "X", and can be changed to have different text and/or new sets of attributes. This can be done w. any number of items.

The style is fairly new, so I don't know that she has had anyone come back for a refresh, but she has refreshed other colored works. I have no idea about what pigments are used for color, but even dense solid patches appear faded after 5 years. At a recent family meal, I heard her and her younger brother talking about maintenance on an all color  work she did on him about 6 years ago.
I don't think either my daughter or son-in-law are yet doing all their work straight from computer, tho' I know my daughter is working on it. So providing the original paper work is probably a good idea.

Hi, leminhthahn,
Good to see your 1st AD drawing.
 
1 The pencil tool line must have a stroke width greater than zero.
2 Use the node tool, and click close path.
3 There is no vector eraser at this time, only manually breaking the vector at node points, dividing the curves, and discarding the unwanted portions.
4 Use the eye dropper tool, available from either tool bar or within the color studio.
5 Use the navigator studio
6 Edit menu, select insert inside
7 Objects/ groups, etc. can be flipped from within the transform studio.
8 Open the brush studio, and move thru the categories till you find the one you want.
If you have other problems, try posting to the questions section of the forum.