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Drop shadow / Design challenge


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Hello!
I'm creating a business card in Designer and have a question about drop shadows.

I've attached both a screenshot and the Affinity Designer file. There is a clip art image of a figure standing in a circle. What would be the best way to create a shadow that creates a bit of realism?
Particularly, I want the figure to appear to be standing on the circle. The outer shadow effect just seems to double image, I think the shadow should be laying down so that the shoes/legs appear to be standing on a surface.

Thank you for any suggestions.

Chris

NEW business card-horizontal-rightside.afdesign

Screen Shot 2019-11-28 at 4.10.55 PM.png

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Hmm, maybe somehow like this?

shadowman.jpg.12874c7cda8eb5c32fa1fc10869c845a.jpg

Steps taken above are ...

  1. Make a duplicate of the image (copy/paste), let's name that the shadow copy
  2. On the shadow copy apply just an FX color overlay of desired gray level
  3. Slim/condense the shadow copy and perform a desired rotation and move replacement
  4. Add a mask as sublayer to the shadow copy layer and mask out unwanted overlaying portions
  5. Place the shadow copy with it's mask below the main man image layer

Though it might be probably optical more fun, if the shadow would flow from the front to back side. So instead 1/3 to the right on the front artboard and then 2/3 to the right on the back artboard. Somehow like this etc. ...

front_back.jpg.da56b5984a3a0d7747031bba8a1c74b5.jpg

 

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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There's one problem though, I've forgotten to remove the white shirt sleeve arm area from the shadows. 9_9 Of course shadows don't have those shirt parts and are instead without sleeve gaps, so you have to remove the sleeve gaps and paint them over.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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You are welcome. - Note however that there are also other ways possible to add shadows, also as pure vectors etc., thus you best try what works best for you and gives also best results.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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Hi again.

I followed your tutorial, which was really GREAT, and then I got stuck on how you got the top of the body to flow to the other side in perfect alignment.

Attached is how far I got. 

Thanks so much for your help.

Ps. If you have any ideas on what I could do to maybe liven the text up, please let me know. Right now it's just a basic impact font. Which maybe is okay?

 

 

business card shadow-1.afdesign

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Here are both of my quick play arounds of your card ...

For fonts which are quite often used for such purposes look here:

fonts.jpg.f330fb7ada879765bf94267cd5ef6134.jpg

However, there are thousends of fonts available, also a bunch of very good free ones from the common font sites. - Finally it's always also a matter of style and taste!

Then with a font of your choice you can try some outlining, or engraving, decent 3D look etc. etc.

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2 hours ago, GarryP said:

How about this for a bit of fun?
(Please excuse my less-than-optimal artistic skills, but I think you can get the idea. And I haven’t bothered doing the cuffs either.)

Annotation 2019-11-29 094954.png

And the shadow overlaying the red would be a shade of red

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And:
* the shadow should be much more diffuse as it recedes, and;
* it should be a lot smaller when it hits the wall (if it could be seen at that distance), and;
* depending on where the light sources are, you might not be able to see as much of his arm.
 And there are probably all kinds of other problems with it.
It would need a lot of tidying up for any real use.
It wasn’t meant to be photo-realistic; just a bit of a quick experiment as an idea, no more than that.

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I actually prefer the hard lines of the shadow, reminds me of a TV series I used to watch called Land Of The Giants with the opening themes use of shadow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMIe5utv4n4

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I know I've just watched an episode of LOTG! I've book marked it on youtube and yes I remember Time Tunnel, looks like I'll be having an evening of retro tv later lol!

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59 minutes ago, chriscaldwell said:

Now, to create those wavy black lines would be great, too

You could do the bendy text in Affinity Photo but Affinity Designer doesn't yet have a warp or envelope tool, I've time tunnelled into the future and it's definitely in Affinity Designer v3 :D

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The wavy lines aren’t much of a problem, as long as you don’t want to reproduce them exactly.
The process is quite simple:
* Create a white ellipse that covers the page;
* Duplicate it;
* Change its colour to black;
* Resize it about the centre a bit;
* Rotate it a little bit;
* Keep using power duplicate changing each successive ellipse to the opposite colour;
* Nudge some ellipses to make it look a bit less uniform overall;
* Group them all;
* Rotate the group as required.
Worth experimenting with to get something nice.
This should be doable in all Affinity apps.

time-tunnel-wavy-lines.afdesign

Annotation 2019-11-30 094737.png

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8 hours ago, GarryP said:

The wavy lines aren’t much of a problem, as long as you don’t want to reproduce them exactly.
The process is quite simple:
* Create a white ellipse that covers the page;
* Duplicate it;
* Change its colour to black;
* Resize it about the centre a bit;
* Rotate it a little bit;
* Keep using power duplicate changing each successive ellipse to the opposite colour;
* Nudge some ellipses to make it look a bit less uniform overall;
* Group them all;
* Rotate the group as required.
Worth experimenting with to get something nice.
This should be doable in all Affinity apps.

time-tunnel-wavy-lines.afdesign

Annotation 2019-11-30 094737.png

looking good, apparently the text is not a particular font but you can get an approximate using Franklin Gothic heavy the black was a outer shadow and also Outline

404030983_ScreenShot2019-11-30at18_23_19.png.a5b28e21982769cf4fd6714ef01fb302.png

 

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Put together with garrys trippy ellipses.

Time tunnel - because it's epic.afphoto

901961255_ScreenShot2019-11-30at19_13_13.thumb.png.6c4e34b7117bca1f3d1ea6480d6bb8f2.png

 

 

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40 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

...you can get an approximate using Franklin Gothic heavy the black...

Here only the N and M don't fit that good, since the orig shown logo has more condensed chars and is especially slimmed in those chars (M and N) middle parts. - But that can be modified for the chars via nodes tweaking.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
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Hello,

I'm still experimenting with this Time Tunnel effect. How do I get the wavy text effect in Designer?

(Also, I have lost a bit of the blindfold man, and his shadow seems wrong color with the black and whit tunnel effect. Thinking maybe the tunnel should be a different color? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. )

Thank you.

 

 

Screen Shot 2019-11-30 at 11.44.57 PM.png

business card shadow-1.afdesign

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Morning Chris, the warped text can only be done in Photo using the Mesh warp tool, Affinity Designer doesn't have a warp/envelope tool yet.

 

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