jer

Love isometrics and your is spectacular! So much content in one design! My favorite: the bunny looking over the green chalkboard! Makes me smile.
:)  :)

Enjoyed perusing your site very much, seeing how you have put AD to work. I would say you excel with women subjects - those are all beautiful and I could see the feeling and beauty in the homage to Audrey Hepburn. Love the brown eye/blue eye on the model portrait, by the way!
 
The shading/shadowing/fading and tech lines on the yellow Fiat bring great interest to that image. I am by no means an authority but I will admit to a hesitation on the bird. While overall well done, the white under the eye kept drawing my attention as it looked slapped on rather than inherent to the bird. The other features blend in so maybe a little feathering* at the bottom of the white? Or maybe that species of bird actually looks like that and I'm not only unfamiliar with that bird, but don't know anything about art too!
 
*Feathering: almost a pun there since we are talking about a bird, but I'm referring to AD feathering.  :D

Well, guess what! You're a drawer now! That is an impressive jump from stick figuring! AD is a great tool, right?
:)

Good character pig with a lot of annoyance shown on his/her face. And lots of personality in the eyes despite being such simple shapes. Maybe that is a scarf or maybe it is a T-shirt that is too small after some piggie dinners! Your texture brushes are effective as the overall image shows a bit of pig-sty-ish-ness. This is a keeper character!

About an hour and a half. Daub brushes, shows how good Affinity is.

Hi All, 
 
I used Affinity Designer, from start to finish to make this huge illustration for the upcoming event of a Belgian union (ACV), the text reads "equality makes the difference". Designer worked great on this one (Isometric grids! Infinite zoom! Global Colors!) and I plan on using it way more often for client work. Keep up the good work!
 

Such a great redesign of the package. I do have a couple of little nitpicks to watch out for in future presentations though.
 
At first, I was questioning why a rough, wooden surface was reflecting the packages. Then I thought, maybe it is meant to be a glass surface appearance on the table top. But the back wall isn't reflecting at all as one would expect. I also noticed that the reflection was actually a rotation of the three packages and not a true "reflection."
 
Overall, amazing job with your design, just be aware of the small details in the future.

Been working on this stuff right here and its almost there. Custom layers styles coming soon.

Heres the latest flyer I have made this day for their restaurant. I am really satisfied with the performance of AD. Designing is actually breeze and fast. A little where to find and look for those shortcut keys and some fiddling around with tools and combination tricks to achieved whats the leading you know the Illy can offer. And you know what it really amazed me.

Hey guys!
 
Just wanted to share a little character I made for fun with Designer using some of my texture brushes. Any comment will be more than welcome as always! 
 
Cheers!
 

Here is an image I did of Orion back in Janurary.
I've been playing with different editing methods and so far I like this process:
1. Stacking & Stretching done initally in a trial of PixInsight. (in this case, 89 -30s exposures)
2. Export a 32bit tiff & import into AP
3. Use AP to do some more levels, vibrance, selective noise reduction, defringing, and I also use blend ranges to blend one of the source images with the stacked image to save some of the highlight data in the centre. (AP is brilliant with this BTW! Blend ranges, seriously the best function ever. Some refer to the function, confusingly, as Blend options, my version calls it Blend Ranges)
4. Export a 16bit Tiff and import into LR for some final small adjustments.
5. Final export to whatever file type/size needed for sharing/printing/viewing.
 
Orion by Greg Murray, on Flickr

The attached pictures should explain what I did. 
 
If there is anything you do not understand please post back

Hi jer,
You can add an additional export format for that slice (clicking on the plus sign on the bottom left of the slice layer when expanded) set it to PNG-8, then from the Palette dropdown select Black & White or Greyscale as you prefer.

I know it is a hybrid app. My point is if someone is not aware of the differences between vector & raster based items, then a lot of how it works will seem illogical & be very difficult to understand. Good examples of that are the difference between pixel & vector brushes, & why some tools are available only in one Persona but not the other.

Why does it seem that the folks with 1 or 2 posts (brand new users, I presume) are more likely to be the ones telling Serif (and all of us) that their products are crap? Why is it that the same users don't seem to want to read a Help file, ask a civilized question in the Forum, or simply accept that this program is not Photoshop? Why do newbies seem to be more likely to rant in ALL CAPS?
 
It gets old, doesn't it?
 
Also - a shout-out to R-C-R for his consistent mild temperament and reasoned responses. We should all be so calm...

Hi jer,
 
I have a different technique to fix this problem. Please see the file attached.
This approach lets you adjust colour/tonality and the amount of texture, despite that in this image you can't see very well the full impact it can have because of the lack of resolution and texture in the all image. I hope this could give you another solution.
 
I also addressed a bit of the colour cast but this is a tricky one since I believe we are going to see colours differently.
 
Pedro
 
reflection01-PS.afphoto.zip

Based in a topic here at the forum I made this tutorial to cover how to create a glow effect in letters.  ;)
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejB93TiS4mU
 
The language in the video is portuguese with english subtitles.
 
Hope you enjoy the video,
Pedro

Did a quick tutorial showing how to set up and mask a pixel persona layer over your vector object. 
 
https://youtu.be/PQkr7J12mbQ

Hello,
I wanted to create something quite simple for the community, so I thought I'd go back to my realistic icon design days and apply some of my methods in AD.
For this I digged out the Battlefield 3 "Accuracy ribbon" design. This was originaly made with 3D software but it's not too hard to replicate in 2D.
 
http://battlefield.wikia.com/wiki/Ribbons/Battlefield_3?file=Accuracy_Ribbon.png
 
The basics are:
 
Import the ribbon image into AD and create a new artboard below it
Add guidelines for the sizes of objects and where the background color bands meet Start by recreating the shapes over the original image - the background colors, then the golden circle and the rounded, long squares of the aim Try to select colors similar to what you see on the top image Play around with Outer Shadows, Inner Shadows, Bevel and layering different effects until you have the same feeling of volume
Add shadows and other lighting details to the illustrationRemember that 100% black shadows on most objects feel unreal. Try to base the color of the shadows off of the object itself or off where the shadow "lands"
 

 

Finally use images in Color Burn and Multiply mode inside masks to add the gritty feel to the metals and the fabric texture to the background Play around with the saturation of the colors you chose to find the right spot for added realism. Metals that have been "through war" are not polished therefore they shouldn't shine, they should be dull.
 
 
Please find the final file attached. The texture images in it are for demonstration purposes only and I do not have rights over them.
BF Ribbon.afdesign

Great looking! With this starter, I can see a lot of options for variation of result. For example, the choice of bkgd image will matter, the width/number of your (primary & secondary) rectangles will matter, and the choice of filters applied to (I'm guessing) the rectangles will affect the outcome. Possibly, the rectangles can be slanted off perpendicular also.

+1 (agreed!)

"Graphic designers quote "Vector File" Is it sales jargon or is it of some benefit to me?" 
 
Yes, it is of benefit. Vectors can be cleanly represented at any scale, and as precisely as the output device allows. The same tiny bit of vector code that defines a period at the end of a sentence can be scaled up to a black circle that fits on a billboard. It allows the computer to generate the list of individual dots, from maybe 30 for a period, or 30 million for a billboard.
 
Affinity Designer is mostly what is called a "draw" program. It makes vector objects within a vector frame. But it also blends bitmap "paint" technique with the vectors. For instance, one can make a complex geometrical form, and attach a mass of essentially random dots like a photo to that shape.
 
The resulting work can be saved in file formats, such as .eps, that will accommodate both types of data.
 
Time for me to sleep. Read up about vector and bitmap formats. Quote
MultiQuote   "

Basically when we say "vector", as @gdenby explained, we're talking about graphics that can be scaled to any size without affecting the quality of the artwork because evey time you move, scale or rotate it, the software will re-calculate that shape and draw it again on the screen.
So unlike "Bitmap" (or, "Raster") software, instead of drawing a shape by filling pixels with colors, a vector software creates a mathematical equation to represent that object through points with X and Y coordinates.
 
In raster software, if you try to scale that object, it will have to scale the pixel data which will cause the object to loose sharpness, becoming blurry and distorted.
In vector software, if you try to scale that object, it will "move" the points around according to the scale command and then connect them back so you have the same shape at a larger size. Only then it will create a pixel representation of the object.
It pretty much "re-draws" the shapes instead of "zooming in", which is what a raster software would do, in very basic terms.
 
This is easy to understand by, in AD, in the Pixel Persona, using the Elliptical Marquee tool to draw a circle. Let's say, 40x40 pixels. Now fill it with color, if you select it and use the transform handles to scale it to say 800x800, you will see it is not perfectly round, there are jagged edges. These edges are the original pixels that now you have scaled.
 
However if you do the same in the Vector Persona using the Elliptic Tool, no matter how much you stretch the circle it will not show jagged edges because you are not scaling pixels, you're scaling the points that make up the instructions to build that circle.
 
Makes sense?

On a side note... can I just say thank you for a great question. I suspect a lot of people have no clue and are too shy to ask. This is a basic fundamental to all graphic software and unless you grasp this, you will always be confused between the different applications and personas.
 
The distinctions are very clear in Affinity Designer through the "Draw" and "Pixel" personas. Watch the tools change. In draw, the tools are node, object and creation tools. In pixel, the tools are mostly pixel selections, modifiers, erasers etc.
 

Hello Anna,
 
Just to let you know that this is one of the topics I'm gonna cover in an upcoming tutorial, the mirror and prism effect.
I'll post here at the forum as soon as it goes online.
 
Pedro