penwiper

Wow that made me dizzy. Still, it's super cool to know how to do this! I wish I'd known when I was taking my digital photo class, that would have been a FUN final project. :-) Of course for the critiques I would have had to supply everyone with 3D glasses.

Okay, that is clever. I'd figured out clipping but hadn't been able to get masking yet. It'll take a bit of practice but I imagine one could create some pretty complex shapes using just those two tools. :-) Thank you very much for the help! I think I know how I will impliment masking in my next Affinity experiment.

NICE! I like that image a lot. It has a mad scientist feel about it. I still haven't figured out the mask feature yet. :-/

This looks very good! One problem, though, and this may have been deliberate given the lack of caps letters, but "its" should be "it's" because it is a contraction-- or just break it up into "it is" which might look better. I like the simplicity of this, however. :-) (Sorry, I am the eternal editor thanks to my Mom's English teaching. It was sad, walking down the hallway of the art building and seeing graphic posters from fellow students posted on the wall and mentally correcting things... at least this is not printed yet [i hope?] so it is easy to fix.) Feel free to work on whatever makes you happy, but please share more of your designs! For instance, I am working on a set of compass roses, hopefully 30 of them, that are nontraditional. My icon is an early compass rose as an example. Cheers!

So here's a little dude I drew during a lecture at school maybe last year? When I was moving I took photos of all the doodles in my school notes I wanted to keep because I had to throw the rest of the papers away due to space constraints. So I found the photo again and wanted to do something with it and thought of Affinity. I played around with a lot of the new things I've been learning with Affinity. All vector except for the textures which I found online copyright free. Not sure about the swirls in the sky, but it needed something.... Anyway he's what I was working on just before bringing in the new year. :-)

These guys remind me a little of the beans in the card game Bohnanza . . . Awesome stuff! :-) http://perlkonig.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/cards.jpg So do you have a plan for all these guys or are they just for fun?

Out of the three I'd have to say that your portrait looks the most complete. It has a very nice quality about it in its simplicity. Only thing it seems to be missing are the eyes. :-)

Yet another attempt at a sketch from my notebook, this one from a doodle I made for a print class. (I never did turn him into an etching which was my original plan.) At least I'm using him for something! This time I'm experimenting with "clipping" my vector sections to make cleaner lines along the edges. It works much better than my previous tries, although my layer panel is a *mess.* Critiques welcome.

Well, I think I am slowly getting better at this program. I discovered transparency mode which really helped my blue girl. (3rd try drawing from a sketch) I also slapped on a couple of texture images that I photographed from my monoprint works. As for the girl in pink, well, she still needs a lot more work. More contrast mostly, and I'm sure I am making her much more complex than she needs to be. (2nd sketch attempt) . . . . You /don't/ want to see my first attempt at drawing something from my sketchbook in Affinity . . . . *right?* --Would masks help retain the original edges of base shapes? I have a lot of overlapping edges with layers shifting on me when I reshape them to make shadows. I think I'm about ready to get back to compass roses and spaceships, which just incorporate simple shape patterns and are super fun. :-) It's interesting to discover how easy it is to make geometric forms digitally with the right program. Love love love the shape tools and convert to curves tool. Command J is growing on me too. If you guys have any tips or criitiques, lay on, McDuff! design.tiff

Ok, thanks, that definitly worked through Affinity now for resizing-- but I'm still having trouble resizing through Preview. This wouldn't be an issue for me, but I want to be sure if I send a file to someone else they won't have problems either in Preview. :-) Here's the image in JPEG format. Much appreciated!

I am not sure if this is just a problem only I am having, but I wanted to resize some exported JPEGS from Affinity Design. Unfortunately, when I opened the jpeg in Preview it wouldn't play nice and I got this error message: "The document “medallion.jpg” could not be saved." When I messed with exporting jpegs in Affinity, there was a lock beside the pixel count, so I also tried clicking that off to bring it down from 1300 px to 400 px but no joy. It still saved as 1300. So what am I doing wrong, and what should I be doing so I can save some of these images for other things? I should say also that I have my files set to US Web coating SWOP settings (mostly at random, I have no idea what it means)-- is that messing me up now? Is there a way to change it to whatever I SHOULD be using, such as perhaps CYMK?

Very nice! That is a lot of very detailed work that is quite excellent! I think maybe it would be a stronger image if you messed with the lighting a little bit more for a future work. From the tree/bush in front it looks like the sun is coming from the top right corner, so maybe play with the gradients and shading on the left bit of the castle? I think it would make it even more imposing (and I like the angle you have for it also.) Speaking of composition, maybe move everything up so that the castle does not sit in the middle of the page? I realize digital art probably has some different rules for composition, but at least in painting and photography having an object in the middle of the page is not usually a good idea. Then again rules are made to be broken... When I am painting I find it extremely helpful to take an image of my work with my cellphone and change it to black and white. The smaller image shows where I need more contrast or light and what is lost, and the same thing applies for digital art, too. :-) Anyway, I love this and I think you did a really good job. You should be very happy with it! The pond (the reflections!) and the front tree to the right and the castle in particular are well rendered.

Hello, I just want to say that I love Affinity Designer and learning vector design with it seems quite easy. (While at college I opened up Illustrator several times and ended up hopelessly lost despite a fairly solid knowlege of Photoshop itself, but then I never took a Graphics Design course either and that probably would have helped...) I especially enjoy working with your shapes and making interesting patterns! The reason I am asking for dxf file exporting is because my sister has a paper cutting machine (similar to the Silhouette Cameo) which uses those files to automatically cut shapes. So theoretically it would be super quick to transfer said file to her and then cut a bunch of designs into cardstock or other materials to make easy stencils. I realize this is a bit of a niche request. :-) She told me it would be a bit of a hassle trying to export an svg file into dxf. Since I've never done it before I have no idea. . . Another feature request while I'm at it: maybe a spiral shape, tweakable in multiple amazing ways? Thank you guys for all your work, you rock! Also I have been studying your zine from corner to corner and it's been a lot of help for an image I'm working on from my sketchbook which may be hopelessly advanced for me but oh well, it's worth a try.

Thank you so much! This post explains some of the difficulties I had making a brush in Affinity earlier. I'll have to try it out and see what I can manage. (I've got to say that pixel based drawing doesn't make too much sense in a vector program, but it IS nice that it is there. Maybe someday we'll be able make/import our own vector brushes, too.) *Fingers crossed*. I'm loving this program though. It is so powerful.