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Hey all, here's a redo experiment of an illustration project I had a few years ago for an article about how "Successful People" manage their thoughts... The goal here was to revisit this illustration and try to only create it using a "pixel painting inside vector shapes" workflow in Designer for a new look. I'm really happy with the process and the outcome and plan to adopt it to a few more ideas I have on the drawing board. Trying to keep the process as simple as possible, I used only one brush for consistency and didn't employ any effects or multiply/screen layers for shading or highlighting. It's all painting. It was a lot of fun and surprisingly pretty quick. I like the background, but I also like it without.... Hope you like. Cheers, Kevin

Self portrait done in Affinity Photo, with default drawing brushes, a bit of Daub's gouache brushes, and a smattering of fine texture on top. Currently using AP for a big client illustration project—it's been a joy to use.

To be honest, I've never tried Affinity Photo for digital painting. I usually work in PS or Manga Studio. But today I was testing some brush settings of Photo and came up with this quick portrait. I've always tried to emulate the traditional mediums when painting digital, so I tend to work my digital paintings with that natural a la prima feel... working in one layer and mixing pencils and 'gouache'. Here's the result: I think I'll use Photo for more digital painting. It runs pretty smooth and fluid. It is pretty fun to create brushes too, very fewer settings compared with other painting software, but at the same time those boundaries makes you create some nice brushes more quickly. Hope you all dig it!

Not 100% done, but this is a portion of a new art piece done by commission for an upcoming card game. All painting done in Affinity Photo Beta. So far it's been fantastic with few hiccups. The new beta does seem a bit friendlier to my Wacom as well. :) More updates will pop up at SteamCourt.com soon!

Here is my latest concept art for a client's top-down game. I was also using the DAUB brushes. They work great! All work done with Affinity Photo. You can see more of these and some of my process on my Artstation profile.

Hey there! My name is Benjamin, and I just started to use the marvelous piece of software by Serif today (even though AD is a world for itself). Never did serious stuff in Photoshop, so it's kind of a double debut. I started arts 2 years ago and I still suck, so I'd love some critique. I will also use this thread to keep on publishing my work. Cheers!

This is my try in Affinity Photo I must write here that this is made by me in Ipad Pro with Apple Pencil

Portrait, oil painting, photographed, edited with Affinity Photo. http://b-bertuleit.de/portrait/

I tried to use as many of the brushes as I could. Starting with a black background saved me a lot of work. Keeping foreground, mid ground, and background in separate layers also helped a lot. The texture brushes are a blast to use.

I started with an all-brown drawing and used very low transparency brushes to overlay color

I tried to keep the total time below 2 hours and 1 Brush. This is based on a photo of the waterfall that run through the center of Camden Maine. I am liking the speed and responsiveness of the brushes, and the program in general. Fast and so far no crashes or problems. Very good.

Messing around a bit with watercolours and some blenders. I recently repainted this picture from scratch using the new Watercolour Set, using much more refined tools. Now textures are subtle but perceivable and the final result is more credible. Affinity's engine has been growing a lot since 2015!

Hi all, just some doodling here trying out painting inside of shapes in Designer. Started playing with Paolo's blender brushes he so graciously created. When using them in conjunction with the smudge tool you get some really nice mixing abilities. In the call out shape for instance I painted a mixture of the 2 main colours then applied some "blending" using one of Paolo's spatter blend brushes. It just spatters using the underlying colour and doesn't put any new colour down. Changing the size of the brush changes the size of the texture it paints. For the eyeball, (I didn't start out to do an eye it just ended up that way) I used a mix of painting and blending especially in the white of the eye with the blood vessels and texturing... then in the iris I painted inside the circle shape laying in the colour in the general areas and using Paolo's blenders to really gave it a nice complex feel. I usually add a .01 gaussian blur to take the hard edge off the shapes. it tends to soften the paint work a bit but it's a reasonable trade off. On the donut-pie shape I was just playing with a nice painterly play of light and shadow. The blenders are great for adding that "painterly" feel with tons of control. Again by reducing the blender brush size the blend effect gets smaller and more precise. This is all in Designer, which for me is probably where I will spend most of my time. The fact that I can get these type of results in a "vector" app is incredible. The hardest part of all of this is knowing when to stop! :D

So... I wanted to see how Affinity Designer's pixel painting feature set stacked up to Photoshop's with a little experiment. I had created this Bunny illustration in Photoshop CS4 (yes I know I'm a little behind the curve) and decided to take a crack at it in AD. I was excited with some earlier attempts at painting in AD so I thought a back to back comparison would really reveal it's strengths and/or weaknesses. The original image on the left is PS the recreated AD image is on the right. The other two images are from AD with a background added. Years ago I used to be an airbrush artist and I worked out a workflow in PS where I used the paths as "frisket" to created selections to "airbrush" inside of. The AD piece at right is done in a similar fashion. I created paths of the various objects, arranged them on layers and painted inside them using the great selection of brushes available. But with AD I was finding I could work a little more flexible and more "un-destructive" allowing for more freedom to experiment and play with ideas... for instance the whiskers are strokes that I can continue to tweak if needed, the high lights on the ears are also strokes that could be further refined and a lot of the "painting" are actually effects and not painted at all, so those would be adjustable after the fact as well... ...all in all I was very pleased with the outcome and more importantly the "workflow" exceeded my expectations. For me, truly this is the perfect workflow that I have been wanting for years, a real balance of vector and pixel that delivers on what it promises - finally! Now I'm not dis'ing Photoshop, and I don't want to start an Adobe bashing thread... I just thought a comparison of what I discovered in my working method might benefit others and also I wanted to thank the Serif team for offering all of us a solid choice!