lesterdodds

You're welcome.

Those old 1.6 styles were deleted by Serif in 1.7 for some reason (along with some old 1.6 brushes). One of the Serif staff made them available, here: 1.6 afstyles

This covers a question and a feature or two feature requests.
 
I am looking for a way to identify a stroke.
I am expecting to be able to find and switch to a particular stroke in a collection.
I am not sure if I am missing some simple trick for finding and switching to a stroke - from to tools palette or another (NOT Brushes) palette.
 
This is my situation.
I have at this point, hundreds of custom brushes in several collections. The previews of these are in some cases very similar. I need a fast way to identify a Brush used making art - that may be stored in any of a large number of collections without having to hunt for it thru trial and error.
My present problem: The sheer number of brushes I have makes searching for a specific brush from among many collections an extremely time consuming task.
 
Something that is missing from the Brush palette is a easy way to spot a brush by name.
In fact that would be a big request for a future feature. Where the Brush palette shows a visual preview and a size indication on the left. It would be super helpful to have the brush name included in the preview area.
See example:

 
The Brushes name would be built into the preview - not just a yellow context thing that only shows if hovering over the brush.
Personally - I find the size of the brush less important than its name. The size can change - the name is fixed and as such is a very fast identifier along with the brush image.
 
However...
My real issue is the need to do a fast switch to a Brush from a selection of the stroke that is already in a piece of art.
I may be missing something but what I have found is this: If I click on a stroke applied to the "canvas" I do see an indicator of the brushes identity in the menus top left. See upper portion of this image:

 
This is good. 
However.
This indicator does not tell me what the brushes name is - nor does it give me an option to select the same brush or switch to this brush.
If I click this indicator and then click the Properties button I do get the Brush Editing menu - But again - this menu does not have the brushes name (this is odd because the Brush Edit menu from the Brushes menu does have the name. What shows up in the Properties seems to be context driven) See image:

 
Nor is there an option to switch to this brush from the Edit menu.
 
 
What I would like to see (and this is a super useful feature) would be a way (or tool) to select a Brush stroke already applied to the canvas (where I am drawing) and have the brush both identified and the brush attributes switch to the selected brush - so that I can immediately draw with the selected brush the next time I use the brush tool and draw a stroke.
If this fewture exists already - I need help finding it!!
If this feature doesn't exist - I would dearly love to have it added. Either in the form of a new selection tool addition or as something similar to the functionality of the Freehand tool or arrow tool in the application Expression3/Microsoft Expression Design. In those versions of the application, click (tap) an object with the Freehand Pen or arrow selection tool and the tools attributes switch to the clicked objects attributes. 
 
An example of why this is useful. If I have several Brushes in use in the drawing I am creating and want to use the existing strokes in my drawing as a palette… Just clicking on one of the strokes will switch me to the Brush I want. The drawing doubles as a palette saving tons of time that would be lost hunting up a brush in the Brushes menu and brush collections menus.
 
I hope the user base can either help me find an existing tool or suggest a trick to achieve what I want - or I would like to suggest a new and vital feature/tool be added to make this possible.
 
Thanks
 
Craig

Hello Craig,
I’m with you on this one!
I probably don’t have anywhere near the number of brushes you have but even so, knowing the hassle I’m going to have trying to find the same brush twice, raster or vector, while working makes me think twice before starting an illustration in Affinity.
I really hope they can improve the brush navigation soon.

Happy 2020! If a little late.
I am posting some interesting experiments with Texture Intensity brushes for Affinity Designer:
http://i-toons.com/archive/CD_illustration_brushes2020.afbrushes.zip
These were exported from the 1.8.1 version.
This set has several focuses. 
1.
A fascination with Dave Coopers ink line where a stroke expands and shrinks (pressure) as it is drawn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj3BxL85UUE
2.
In the olden days of Creature House Expression 3 a feature that produced wonderful textured edges on fills was a favorite of mine for adding… wonderful textured edges to fills!
The “edge” was applied to a fill and mapped along the edge of the fill. E3 used a similar technique as ADs textured intensity brushes… The trick to make the edge texture was to have basically a half brush stroke. One edge flat. The rest feathered or textured out as desired. The flat edge mapped directly to the fills edge. There was a little extra voodoo with pixel color at the strokes edge as well…) AD doesn’t have this edge feature - but something like it can be sort of faked. ADs brushes map to fills in a different way - they sort of center the stroke halfway over the edge of a fill. To get a brush to “join” to the fill - I made a brush that mirrors itself - with a 100% dark center. The brush must also meet at its ends so it wraps horizontally as well. The mirrored version seems to blend nicely with a fill - and can wrap in either direction (reverse curves).
Some sample of how this looks are in the attached image. Sadly the stroke and fill don’t share the same “intensity” - if transparency is dropped… But the textured edge done this way can look ok.
Brushes that don’t mirror like this extend out from the fill but often show hard fill edges. 
A future AD feature in the making.
3.
I had been experimenting with hatch and dot pattern edges - looking for an illustration style I admired - and straying into a dot like airbrush look… See attached brushpower image. The hazy moon glow and sand dunes. 
AD has a lot going for it. The textured intensity brushes are the main reason I dig this software. The brush engine has a long way to go as I have mentioned in the past:
Affinity Designer Brush UI enhancement:
Affinity Designer brush-ui enhancement
Identify and switch Brush and Stroke attributes option/tool:
Switch brush
With a little more power in the brush features - this would be such a stellar tool!
Here's to 2020 and maybe making an illustrators wishes come true!
; )
If you happen to use any of these brushes. Post an example. I love to see how the brushes are used! Enjoy!
Craig
 
 

The brush I created creates leaves in different sizes, colors and rotations, which you can of course adjust in the properties. Note: Please keep in mind that after creating a foliage-layer, you duplicate this layer and create a shadow with it that fits into your light position.  
Foliage-Texture.afbrushes

The year is almost over, so let's share some reusable fireworks items for your possible flyers and new year cards. - Note that those firework assets are always groups of vector elements, thus if you want to recolor some of them you best select the whole individual group.

These assets are usable for things like shown in the following examples ...


The corresponding fireworks assets file as a zip-archive:
fireworks.zip  

Vector Assets from [Poison] Inktober#03
Asset List subCategory List
20 Mushroom Outlines
11 Overlay Textures
13 Texture Patterns
19 Plants
10 Cracks
13 Moss Patterns
10 Leaf Shapes
7 Vegetation Components
PDF sample Sheet x3 (not all assets displayed)
Single asset file with 8 subcategories
Asset Sample Sheets



 
Vector Assets Poison 01 01.pdf
Vector Assets Poison 01 02.pdf
Vector Assets Poison 01 03.pdf
VectorAssets-Poison.zip

Personally I find the implementation of UI light and black themes too disparate. The light theme cannot get the UI to go dark enough, the dark theme I cannot get the UI to go light enough. It would be nice if the UI could be somewhere in between. For me.
My eyes get more tired from the light theme (too bright) and the dark theme just seems to have way too much contrast between the UI and art, which makes the art brighter than real life. At least for print work.

Hi gcshep,

You can create symbols and use these for a mirror effect, check out the below post from MEB detailing this:
One interesting (and fun) implementation of this is a customers shared file of an easy mandala maker, you can learn a lot about symbols by going through the file:
 Hope this helps!

Hi yamlCase,

Unfortunately there is no way to set it permanently currently, although it has been previously requested a few times, one of which is here.
I will move this to our feature suggestions thread for our devs to see!

Soon i will update brush set again. If you have some additional ideas or suggestions, you can post it here

Thanks,useful