gdenby

Hi HenrikP!
 
Even in the 1.5.5 version of Affinity Designer there are several ways to create hour/minute ticks for a circular clock dial. A variation on what has already been mentioned in this topic you might find useful uses (the AD only feature) symbols. Try this:
 
1. Turn on snapping, with all the 'snap to object' options checked.
2. Draw a reference circle of convenient size to represent the dial & lock its layer.
3. Draw a filled rectangle at the 12 o'clock position on the circle. Use snapping to center it so half the rectangle is on either side of the 12 o'clock centerline & its top edge aligns with the top edge of the circle.
4. With the Pen tool in Line mode, draw a line from the bottom center of the rectangle to the center of the circle. Snapping should make this easy to do.
5. Select the rectangle & the line & in the Symbols panel, click the Create button.
6. Select the symbol in the Layers panel & duplicate it with CMD-J.
7. In the Transform panel, click on the bottom center anchor point & in the R (rotation) field enter 30°. This should result in a second symbol at the 11 o'clock position.
8. Power duplicate with CMD-J to create the remaining hour ticks.
9. Now the interesting part: expand any symbol in the Layers panel so you can see its two parts (the line with the (Curve) label & the rectangle). Click the visible checkbox on the line to hide it. The line on all 12 symbols should now be hidden.
10. Because the rectangle is part of the symbol, you can edit any one instance of it & all the others will get the same edit automatically. So for example you could change the fill color, add a stroke, convert to curves & change the shape, & so on.
 
Use a similar procedure for the minute ticks, changing the rotation angle in step 7 appropriately. You can either delete the minute ticks that occur on hour ticks or group all the hour ticks & move them above the minute ticks, etc.
 
Attached is an AD file showing the hour ticks as symbols using this technique.
Clock ticks.afdesign

"So in reality, you do not have only a straight line, but also the dot you because you had to create a "last clicked point" in order to create a straigth line. That is useless, because it is not clean and accurate for drawing or painting - especially when your drawings are mainly (perspective) sketching. Look at Krita, and see their Line-tool. You will know what I and many other drawing/painting/sketching users mean by that."
 
Ah, I see. Yes, upon close inspection I see that Affinity Photo (and Photoshop elements, which I have) does make an initial dot, and then starts a stroke over that, and the initial dot can sometimes be seen. The Krita line tool appears to record a path, and then lays the brush on that. I think I recall Photoshop, or perhaps Corel having a feature which was stroke to path, which back when I used them was a 2 step operation. At this point Affinity doesn't, tho' there have been a few requests.
 
The closest approximation I know about it Designer's vector brush, which stretches a bitmap along a path. But w/o subsequent adjustment, doesn't make straight paths, being a freehand tool.

In the screen shot, it shows you are using node tool. Ermm, that doesn't work on layers. Switch to the select tool at the top of the tools icon column, key "v". Then command "a" all. Then, command "g" group. Done.
 

... can be joined and closed with the not NODE tool,...
 
gdenby: sorry to step in but Cukierek might not understand that typo with the language difference. :)

Hey, Silverdust,
 
Bunch of ways to do this. Here's a quick illustration of what I came up w.:
 

 
Couple of vector objects, and a couple of copies of a pixel object nested in them, with blend set to erase.
 
May not be quite what you need, but perhaps work in that direction. 
 
 

I haven't found any way to do a batch transform like what you want. I.E. Select 20 circles and make each have a radius 10% larger. Best I've been able to do is make 1 larger, and copy with snapping to where the others are, and delete the originals. 
 
However, if you want to go back to the start, remake the shape(s) and convert them to a symbol. Arrange copies as you like, and the scale any one, and all will update. Check out the help on symbols. Not quite intuitive, but very powerful for doing mass conversions.

Good demonstration. I did my example just before I went to bed, and a bunch of fals starts. Have been messing around w. the problem more this morning. 
 
Here's a still of "pie donuts" before being run thru various booleans. Included, some output.
 

And $20 a month being tethered to their cloud ;)  If you happen to live in an "underserved" area, and the cloud connection goes out at random, 5 seconds doesn't save anything.

I can answer the 1st question. Draw the rectangle. You will see next to the fill and stroke options on the top bar, a box that is checked called single radius. Un-check that, and each corner of the rectangle can have different corners.
 
For the 2nd part, I'm unsure what you want to do. If you just want to fill the shape with an image, select the shape, then use the fill tool, and select fill type "bitmap." Navigate to the image you want, and open it. It can then be sized to fill the shape in different ways.

Not a tutorial, but it's very simple as shown in this video...
 
https://youtu.be/g8UadPuThpk
 

Don't know about any specific books. But do a search on "Ansel Adams zones." It will lead you to many articles related to classic analog photography, but the introduction to how and why to get the greatest range of contrast is a great starting point. It is relevant to any graphic art.
 
Also, search on "white balance." It is less of an issue in over all image making, but is crucial to realistic photography.

Yeah, but my level of skill made it a fairly tedious job. Shapes cut out based on shapes not shown. Hard to tell what was trimming what, and what the radii were.
 

 
What 'ware did you use to make what you showed?

Also, after doing what Alfred said, also look at the brush settings menu for the new brush under the general and dynamics tabs to change size, rotation, x&y variation, etc.

In the Pixel Persona, go to the Brushes panel and click on the 'hamburger' menu icon. Choose 'New Image Brush' or 'New Intensity Brush' (depending on whether you want a coloured 'nozzle' or a greyscale opacity map as in your example) and browse to the nozzle image/s that you want to use. To change the nozzles later on, double-click the brush in the Brushes panel, go to the Texture tab in the 'Brush - Editing' dialog and press 'Add' or 'Remove' as appropriate.

Hi, all,
 
Some time ago there was a question about tutorials that were not vids, for people that liked to take some time reading.  I decided to make up an introduction to the shape tools in AD. 
 
Nothing to fancy, but I hope it outlines what the shapes can do, and how to manipulate them in basic fashions. The file is a bit over 4 Mb. I put it on DropBox, and this is the 1st time I've used the service. Hope it works out OK.
 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/asdn7jkkx8b8wbx/All.pdf?dl=0
 
 

What you are looking for is called auto-trace. Designer doesn't do this at present. There are free online services that will do this, very inexpensive purpose made apps that do only that, and it can be done for free if you set up Inkscape. It is important to have very clean images, smooth lines, flat areas of tone. Even then, there is usually some manual work thats needed to finish. In some cases, its as easy and fast to just trace over the image manually from the start.

i guess the only way to do this in designer is to copy current fill to palette, this can be the fill or the stroke fill.
 
This way you can save the color with alpha, the color thumbnail shows rgba

Hi, all,
 
Some time ago there was a question about tutorials that were not vids, for people that liked to take some time reading.  I decided to make up an introduction to the shape tools in AD. 
 
Nothing to fancy, but I hope it outlines what the shapes can do, and how to manipulate them in basic fashions. The file is a bit over 4 Mb. I put it on DropBox, and this is the 1st time I've used the service. Hope it works out OK.
 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/asdn7jkkx8b8wbx/All.pdf?dl=0
 
 

Hi, all,
 
Some time ago there was a question about tutorials that were not vids, for people that liked to take some time reading.  I decided to make up an introduction to the shape tools in AD. 
 
Nothing to fancy, but I hope it outlines what the shapes can do, and how to manipulate them in basic fashions. The file is a bit over 4 Mb. I put it on DropBox, and this is the 1st time I've used the service. Hope it works out OK.
 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/asdn7jkkx8b8wbx/All.pdf?dl=0
 
 

Hi, all,
 
Some time ago there was a question about tutorials that were not vids, for people that liked to take some time reading.  I decided to make up an introduction to the shape tools in AD. 
 
Nothing to fancy, but I hope it outlines what the shapes can do, and how to manipulate them in basic fashions. The file is a bit over 4 Mb. I put it on DropBox, and this is the 1st time I've used the service. Hope it works out OK.
 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/asdn7jkkx8b8wbx/All.pdf?dl=0
 
 

The work around is found in the pressure setting of the stroke dialogue. 
 

 
On a Mac, you can also insert arrow symbols from the character map utility, and convert those to vectors for further manipulation.
 
And, yeah, its one of those things that should get built in.

As dutchshader mentioned, the night sky is one of the chapters in the Designer workbook. It comes in after the sections on interface description, and core skills. So be prepared for at least some getting used to where everything in the program is, and basic skills like level layering and grouping.

Just being chatty, 'cause I'm curious. Seems ordinals are poorly defined. Sometimes they are part of a font set, other times they are formed by the app into a superscript notation. Fraction characters don't exist in all fonts. I can't find any unicode for number ordinals, but fractions are available. Evidently different apps handle the formation in different ways. I found one example of ordinals that were from old bit mapped fonts. So what you are getting can be a real mixed bag.
 
A suggestion. Considering that text editor can read and translate them, perhaps pages can retain the formatting. Copy the clients' info, and paste it into a new document. Perhaps Pages will sort out the variables, and create a new document with all the characters of 1 sort. 

Hi, mwean.
 
I notice that almost all the objects have white fills. When those are exported, I see that both the fill and the stroke are defining an enclosed area, thus the blue shapes. When I set some of the rectangles to fill = none, the resulting code for them produces a single set of set of co-ordinates with fill = none, and stroke set to rgb 0,0,255. Perhaps that will work.

Hi Applegirl1 & welcome to the forums!
 
I am guessing from your forum name that you might be using a Mac. If so, you can create a "smart folder" that will show all your Affinity Designer files, wherever they might be on your Mac. (A smart folder is just a saved search, not a real folder.) To do this:
 
1. Open any Finder window & press CMD+F to enter Finder's search mode.
2. Don't type anything in the search box at the top of the window. Instead, in the first popup that says "Kind" select the last item ("Other...") & then locate & select "File Extension" from the list.
3. In the Find window, in the text box following "File extension is" type "afdesign" without the quotes or a leading period.
4. You should now see a list of all your Affinity Designer documents. Yay!  :)
5. To make this really useful, click the Save button at the top of the window, name the smart folder something descriptive like "All my AD files," choose a location to save it to (the default is fine), & -- most importantly, make sure the "Add to Sidebar" option is checked.
6. Now, whenever you want to see all your Affinity Designer documents in one Finder window, just click on the Finder sidebar item with the name you gave to this smart folder.