Cealcrest

Had fun allowing the background to double as a color with this one.
Although I have never done it myself, one of my favorite illustration production methods is screen printing. With each color applied separately, there are happy accidents like the plates not lining up exactly right that make every copy unique. Because I went even simpler by omitting overlapping colors, this piece had to be planned and executed differently than previous pieces I’ve done. I had to allow for contrast, details, and a light source within a very limited color palette of 3 colors (near black, orange, and grey) on a more vintage off-white base.
This is true vector with one subtle texture raster layer over the top that can easily be replicated for any size.
Happy Sunday, all!

 
 

Here are a few examples of book covers I created in Affinity Designer (and used in books created in Publisher). They were all for educational purposes in the advanced composites industry, mainly the aviation and space departments. I also DTP-ed the books in Publisher that contain between 100 and 300 pages, in which hundreds of 2D and 3D drawings, schematics, tables, graphs and formulas, that were made from scratch, were placed. A few examples of the tech art created for these books can be seen in my portfolio blog: https://communicats.blogspot.com/2022/04/book-cover-pages-flyers-and-educational.html  Designer and Publisher (apart from the 3D programs I used) are a perfect combination  even when the Betas are not recommended for commercial use 😁. The books are all proprietary material. One thing that was something of an issue though, the pdf's generated were really large...
 

Structural Repair training cover for a book about commercial aviation practices
 

Bonded repair curriculum and training cover book
 

Structural repair training cover for a book about the space industry
 

One off cover design for Lufthansa Technical Training department
 

Cover for a (rather dull) SAE report
 
 

The current Gradient Map feature is quite basic like the one in Photoshop, but in many ways, it could be a much more useful tool with the following additions:
 
HSL Mode: Instead of going based only on Luminance, this would use the input hue or saturation as the lookup index. In combination with HSL blend modes, this would allow for some fantastic workflows like basically warping the color wheel to taste, similar to the "HSL Wheels" feature in Magic Bullet Colorista (Note: don't be fooled by the name of the feature, this is NOT referring to the three-way color corrector). Just use a gradient of the HSL spectrum and drag or re-define stops, set the result to "Hue" blend mode, and you have an extremely powerful color correction tool that gives you results that would be difficult to achieve in any other way.  
Circular Editor Option: Like the Colorama filter built-into in After Effects, this makes it easy to work on maps that are supposed to start and end with the same color. In combination with an input for a number of revolutions (cycles) to use, this would also make it easy to create gradient effects where a few stops are repeated multiple times across the spectrum (like, say, alternating black-white-black-white). This would also massively improve usability in conjunction with the HSL mode option suggested above.  
Access to swatches: This would make it easy to re-use gradients by defining them or recalling them from swatches as an alternative to using Adjustment Presets.  
Interpolation control: Sometimes the transition from one color to the next needs fine-tuning – this is something that Affinity's gradient editor already supports, but not in the Gradient Map dialog. A Constant Interpolation setting where the color would just be constant up until the next stop would also be useful since it would eliminate the need for duplicate stops in the same position, which are really hard to select. Possibly, the curve editor could also be re-used to define falloff using a Bézier or Catmull-Rom-Spline.  
Duplicate Stop option: Often, it is necessary to use the same color multiple times in a gradient. Adding a button for this and/or enabling Option+Drag to duplicate would be useful. Photoshop aggravatingly always inserts new stops with the same color instead of the color that is already there at that position in the gradient, but the (better) implementation of this in Affinity had the side effect that duplicating stops became harder.  
On-image sampling: While the dialog box is open, it would be useful to highlight the value under the mouse pointer in the gradient display to be able to place a stop exactly at the desired position. Clicking in the image would insert a stop.  
On-image highlighting: Conversely, when editing/dragging a stop in the gradient editor, an option to highlight the affected pixels in the image would be helpful. The options could be: off (nothing) all pixels that have exactly the value represented by the position of the stop (similar to focus peaking) the zone that will be affected in the image. The overlay would start at 100% intensity at the value represented by the stop and fall off to 0% on each side until the position of the next stop respectively, taking the falloff into account (see "Interpolation Control" above). Optionally, two different colors could be used to represent each side of the stop.  
Resizable dialog box for more precision: When editing 16-bit images or editing falloff from one stop to the next or when placing stops very close to each other, it would be useful to have more room to work with. Making gradient editor dialog boxes in the application resizable would alleviate this problem.  
Snap to Luminosity button: Sometimes, it is useful to place stops exactly at the point in the gradient that corresponds to their luminosity, especially when they are defined by selecting swatches from a color palette. Adding a button that moves all selected stops to that position would make this really quick. For instance, tinting an image with two tones while keeping black and white intact could be achieved very quickly by selecting a black-to-white preset, then adding two stop, selecting a color from the document color palette for each, and clicking that "Snap Selected Stops to Luminosity" button.  
Ability to move start and end stops. The values before the first stop and after the last one would simply use constant extrapolation. This would eliminate the need for duplicate stops, which take longer to create and are harder to edit since all operations need to be performed twice.

Palette functionality seems to be a huge weakness in the iPad version of AD. Import/export, reorder swatches, create palette from document/image, etc. are all missing. Hopefully the next update/version rectifies many of these issues.

it IS reminiscent of a screen print! Love it, and the title is brilliant.

Had fun allowing the background to double as a color with this one.
Although I have never done it myself, one of my favorite illustration production methods is screen printing. With each color applied separately, there are happy accidents like the plates not lining up exactly right that make every copy unique. Because I went even simpler by omitting overlapping colors, this piece had to be planned and executed differently than previous pieces I’ve done. I had to allow for contrast, details, and a light source within a very limited color palette of 3 colors (near black, orange, and grey) on a more vintage off-white base.
This is true vector with one subtle texture raster layer over the top that can easily be replicated for any size.
Happy Sunday, all!

 
 

Had fun allowing the background to double as a color with this one.
Although I have never done it myself, one of my favorite illustration production methods is screen printing. With each color applied separately, there are happy accidents like the plates not lining up exactly right that make every copy unique. Because I went even simpler by omitting overlapping colors, this piece had to be planned and executed differently than previous pieces I’ve done. I had to allow for contrast, details, and a light source within a very limited color palette of 3 colors (near black, orange, and grey) on a more vintage off-white base.
This is true vector with one subtle texture raster layer over the top that can easily be replicated for any size.
Happy Sunday, all!

 
 

Had fun allowing the background to double as a color with this one.
Although I have never done it myself, one of my favorite illustration production methods is screen printing. With each color applied separately, there are happy accidents like the plates not lining up exactly right that make every copy unique. Because I went even simpler by omitting overlapping colors, this piece had to be planned and executed differently than previous pieces I’ve done. I had to allow for contrast, details, and a light source within a very limited color palette of 3 colors (near black, orange, and grey) on a more vintage off-white base.
This is true vector with one subtle texture raster layer over the top that can easily be replicated for any size.
Happy Sunday, all!

 
 

Had fun allowing the background to double as a color with this one.
Although I have never done it myself, one of my favorite illustration production methods is screen printing. With each color applied separately, there are happy accidents like the plates not lining up exactly right that make every copy unique. Because I went even simpler by omitting overlapping colors, this piece had to be planned and executed differently than previous pieces I’ve done. I had to allow for contrast, details, and a light source within a very limited color palette of 3 colors (near black, orange, and grey) on a more vintage off-white base.
This is true vector with one subtle texture raster layer over the top that can easily be replicated for any size.
Happy Sunday, all!

 
 

Had fun allowing the background to double as a color with this one.
Although I have never done it myself, one of my favorite illustration production methods is screen printing. With each color applied separately, there are happy accidents like the plates not lining up exactly right that make every copy unique. Because I went even simpler by omitting overlapping colors, this piece had to be planned and executed differently than previous pieces I’ve done. I had to allow for contrast, details, and a light source within a very limited color palette of 3 colors (near black, orange, and grey) on a more vintage off-white base.
This is true vector with one subtle texture raster layer over the top that can easily be replicated for any size.
Happy Sunday, all!

 
 

Had fun allowing the background to double as a color with this one.
Although I have never done it myself, one of my favorite illustration production methods is screen printing. With each color applied separately, there are happy accidents like the plates not lining up exactly right that make every copy unique. Because I went even simpler by omitting overlapping colors, this piece had to be planned and executed differently than previous pieces I’ve done. I had to allow for contrast, details, and a light source within a very limited color palette of 3 colors (near black, orange, and grey) on a more vintage off-white base.
This is true vector with one subtle texture raster layer over the top that can easily be replicated for any size.
Happy Sunday, all!

 
 

Had fun allowing the background to double as a color with this one.
Although I have never done it myself, one of my favorite illustration production methods is screen printing. With each color applied separately, there are happy accidents like the plates not lining up exactly right that make every copy unique. Because I went even simpler by omitting overlapping colors, this piece had to be planned and executed differently than previous pieces I’ve done. I had to allow for contrast, details, and a light source within a very limited color palette of 3 colors (near black, orange, and grey) on a more vintage off-white base.
This is true vector with one subtle texture raster layer over the top that can easily be replicated for any size.
Happy Sunday, all!

 
 

Had fun allowing the background to double as a color with this one.
Although I have never done it myself, one of my favorite illustration production methods is screen printing. With each color applied separately, there are happy accidents like the plates not lining up exactly right that make every copy unique. Because I went even simpler by omitting overlapping colors, this piece had to be planned and executed differently than previous pieces I’ve done. I had to allow for contrast, details, and a light source within a very limited color palette of 3 colors (near black, orange, and grey) on a more vintage off-white base.
This is true vector with one subtle texture raster layer over the top that can easily be replicated for any size.
Happy Sunday, all!

 
 

@Cealcrest This looks fantastic, love the line weights you've achieved here! 
I'm sorry I didn't see this before, haven't had much time to browse the forum lately. 
 
Cheers

Untamed
Untamed: 'When Animals Ruled the world' Challenge contribution
Could not participate directly in this challenge as it directly conflicted with Inktober but done one anyway....
Original size:1000mm x 500mm Raster 300dpi (not submission size)
upload 2362 x 1181 px

Should do a bit more to the flesh but it will do for now.

Did a bit more to it afterwards.

Another village council board with a map.

Another map.

Illustrated maps for village promotion and tourist places. Created in Affinity Designer using vector technique combined with bitmap using Concept Master Vol.1: Nature Brush Pack brushes and those created by myself. So far, for several maps, I have drawn about 200 objects with varying degrees of accuracy.

We've had a query about what is viewed as 'acceptable' content, and what our stance on it is.
 
This topic is one which is typically fairly volatile because everyone is so different and what is acceptable for one person, can be shocking or inflammatory to another. We don't want everyone to feel cautious about what they click, just in case they are faced with something they'd rather not see, but we also don't want to discourage people from sharing the amazing work they've been creating, so... We think the simplest, clearest thing to do is:
 
If you think your image could in any way be described as controversial...
 
- Start a new topic with an appropriate title
- Upload your image to a sharing site (Flickr, Behance, Instagram, etc) - you can even use the 'Share' link in the app's File menu
- Write a proper description of your work in the body of your post and add a text link to the image you have shared
 
 
Now, if people think they'd be offended, they just don't have to click the link and they won't see it at all.
 
Thanks,
Matt

Would love to see ability to import colour palettes.

It’s a minor thing, but I’d like to be able to create/sample a color then slide it around to put it next to other colors. Right now, colors remain in the order they were created/sampled, and there shall they stay. The only workaround is to sample and re-add the colors to the palatte and delete the previous ones. Add/delete is not quite as efficient as drag-and-drop would be for this procedure.

Today i finished my first vector portrait in Affinity Designer

It has NOT
I'm all ears where you heard THAT, as our future timelines are very rarely made public. Is that when the new iPads are due?
Apple have had an early look at our development version, seems they are excited enough to have a sneaky screenshot. This software is not available anywhere outside of our company.