Paint Brush Tool in Affinity Designer does nothing

[KingOfDenial]

Hi All,

I am a relatively new user for Affinity and have tried but cannot find a good answer for this on-line.

In Affinity Designer (Mac), when using the Paintbrush Tool in the pixel persona, it doesn't draw anything on the screen. I can access the controls, change brushes, etc... but no joy for any actual pixels on the screen. I don't know if this is a bug, or if there is some not-so-obvious setting preventing it or what... I've tried setting the layer to rasterized, I've tried drawing inside of an object... I just can't figure out what's going on here.

Any help is appreciated.

[firstdefence]

Welcome to the forum.

[MEB]

Hi @KingOfDenial,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
Check if the Flow and Opacity are set to 0% - increase the value if that's the case and that Protect Alpha is unchecked (all in the context toolbar).

[KingOfDenial]

Wow, such quick responses, you guys rock!

I had already checked the Opacity, Flow, Hardness, and Blend Mode to no avail.  After I initially submitted this post, I was able to get it working on the rasterized layer when I drew a selection box, but it would only paint within the selection box. I deleted all the other objects and layers in my test document, recreated a layer, rasterized it, and now it works as expected.

I think this was a bug, thanks for the help. 

 

Edited December 7, 2020 by KingOfDenial

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, KingOfDenial said:

I was able to get it working on the rasterized layer when I drew a selection box, but it would only paint within the selection box.

That is correct behavior. When you have a pixel selection active all painting is restricted to that selection.

[KingOfDenial]

28 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

That is correct behavior. When you have a pixel selection active all painting is restricted to that selection.

Hi Walt, thanks for the response. I don't agree that it is the correct behaviour though. When the selection box is active yes, it will only draw within the active selection area, but if there is no selection box it should still draw on the canvas of the raster layer. This was not happening.

After I created a selection box and drew inside of it, I was then able to draw on the raster canvas after I had removed the selection box. Until I had created (and subsequently deleted) the selection box, the paintbrush tool was "stuck" for lack of a better word. All of the above parameters (Opacity, Flow, Hardness, and Blend Mode) were considered, as well as brush style, thickness, stabilizer, etc... No changes on any of these had any effect. I did have the rasterized layer selected and all other layers locked in my testing.

This behaviour persisted between documents meaning that it first occurred in the document I was trying to draw on, and then it also occurred in the document I opened to specifically test this and attempt to figure out what was going on. It appears to have been an issue with the application rather than the documents.

Now it is working correctly though as I can create new layer, rasterize it, and draw away with my pen. Happy days.

[walt.farrell]

37 minutes ago, KingOfDenial said:

but if there is no selection box it should still draw on the canvas of the raster layer. This was not happening.

Sorry. That wasn't (and still isn't) clear to me from your description. But perhaps I'm being dense this morning

If you can recreate this, and you do think it's a bug, then you might Save the .afdesign document while it's in the state of not allowing you to paint and upload it here so we (users & Serif) can examine it.