affinity designer Artwork for greetings cards

[William Overington]

I was looking at some YouTube videos recently and I saw this one offered, and I watched it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiDj731yXgw

I have been wondering how to do a vase with shade and light using an Affinity Designer watercolour brush.

I am thinking of drawing the vase using the pen tool, and flood filling it with a light grey colour.

Then adding a new layer and, using a watercolour brush, drawing a grey vertical on the left side of the vase and a white vertical on the right side of the vase.

Then adding a new layer and, using a watercolour brush, paint the whole vase in a pale blue colour.

Is that the way to produce an image of a vase with shade and light please?

William

[William Overington]

This morning, 21 April 2021, I opened the package that contained the printed card of Software Unicorns reflected in a Lake, the artwork that I sent to Papier being in my post of 12 April 2021. I have framed the print.

The print is, as expected, mainly slightly darker all over, as expected. However, the blue at the edges of the lake is more so, and the brown trunk and branches in the foreground is significantly a much richer brown.

Close up, the jaggedness of the image is not too noticeable except at the blue edge at around 6 o'clock on the picture.

However, when viewed from a distance of about 2 to 3 feet, the sort of distance from which it might be from a viewer when displayed on a wall, that jaggedness is not noticeable, at least to me.

At a distance the printed image does seem to have the lake more obviously horizontal, maybe the darker brown of the tree in the foreground causing that effect.

Something that I did notice on the print that I had not noticed on the artwork is that in relation to the software unicorn whose tail is hidden behind a tree, the end of the tail is just visible below the foliage of the tree.

William

 

[William Overington]

In view of the availability to me of the Papier facility to produce high quality prints, I am looking through various illustrations that I have produced over the years with the idea of producing such a hardcopy print of some of them.

For example, those on this web page, and linked from it.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/library.htm

In particular I am looking at this image.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/hedgehog.png

I am thinking of blanking the lettering from the top and enlarging the remaining image, perhaps by a factor of 200% horizontally and 200% vertically to produce a landscape card.

A sort of incunabula-style woodcut-style hedgehog.

I remember that DrawPlus 7 had some rather nice woodcuts in it. Alas, as far as I know they have never been incuded in later editions, though I have not used every subsequent version, so I am not absolutely sure of that.

William

[William Overington]

Recently I learned of the following web page.

https://papier.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/articles/212102305-What-languages-can-I-print-on-my-order-

Here are links to some of my own PDF documents from some years ago.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/typecase_welsh_accented_characters.pdf

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/typecase_esperanto.pdf

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/typecase_accented_characters_for_Latvian.pdf

Some of the fonts that the Papier system allows for use in greetings cards appear to support accents well. For example, Garamond.

I am reminded of my ideas for The Café Äpfel.

https://community.serif.com/discussion/78555/the-cafe-apfel

I suppose I could build that into one of my novels.

Some years ago I learned of the following website that some readers may find interesting.

https://www.panlex.org/

William

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

I remember that DrawPlus 7 had some rather nice woodcuts in it. Alas, as far as I know they have never been incuded in later editions, though I have not used every subsequent version, so I am not absolutely sure of that.

You’re quite correct, sadly: Zodiac symbols, woodcuts, and four other categories were last seen in DrawPlus 7. DrawPlus 8 introduced a nifty feature whereby you could switch to a different QuickShape via the Context toolbar, and although you probably wouldn’t use the facility to switch from Quick Petals to Quick Woodcuts it would have been nice to be able to switch, for example, from Quick Stars to Quick Flashes.

[William Overington]

If I remember correctly there was an incunabula style woodcut of a space capsule!

William

 

[Alfred]

46 minutes ago, William Overington said:

If I remember correctly there was an incunabula style woodcut of a space capsule!

That sounds familiar, although the particular example you mention sounds as though it belongs in the ‘Quick Transport’ category.

[William Overington]

By the way, I have been using the word incunabula, so here is a link.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incunable

Some readers may also like the following.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colophon_(publishing)

Maybe that link might be a catalyst to people producing books, both as hardcopy books and as electronic books, using Affinity products to include a traditional colophon in their publications.

I included a colophon in my first novel, after the text of the novel.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_colophon.pdf

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/novel.htm

William

 

 

 

[William Overington]

As there have been posts about languages in this thread, some readers might enjoy the following link.

 https://community.serif.com/discussion/116116/celebrating-the-letter-n

Actually, the thread has the title

Celebrating the letter Ñ

but the asciionlyization of the letter Ñ loses the meaning of the title in the web address!

And yes, asciionlyization does get a wavy red line under it when editing the post - but well, languages evolve! 😀

William

 

[Alfred]

32 minutes ago, William Overington said:

asciionlyization of the letter Ñ

Ñ is Extended ASCII, so it doesn’t really fall outside the bounds of “ASCII only”. I think the transformation of Ñ to N needs to be called something like “de-diacritication”. 

[William Overington]

16 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Ñ is Extended ASCII, so it doesn’t really fall outside the bounds of “ASCII only”. I think the transformation of Ñ to N needs to be called something like “de-diacritication”. 

Well, is extended ascii actually ascii?

William

 

[Alfred]

20 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Well, is extended ascii actually ascii?

Is vegan soup actually soup?

[William Overington]

7 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Is vegan soup actually soup?

Yes, because vegan soup is a subset of soup.

Yet extended ascii is not a subset of ascii.

William

 

[William Overington]

15 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Is vegan soup actually soup?

That gives me an idea for some artwork of a pop art nature!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans

An image of a can of gluten-free, vegan soup with no lumps in it.

It will need to be a fantasy image because I have searched and cannot find any at all!

William

 

[Alfred]

15 minutes ago, William Overington said:

extended ascii is not a subset of ascii

I agree that Extended ASCII is a superset rather than a subset of ASCII, since it came later than the basic set. However, the characters in Extended ASCII are (by definition) ASCII as thereby extended.

[William Overington]

40 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I agree that Extended ASCII is a superset rather than a subset of ASCII, since it came later than the basic set. However, the characters in Extended ASCII are (by definition) ASCII as thereby extended.

Well, vegan soup came later than soup, but that does not make vegan soup a superset of soup.

For example ASCII lowercase letters are a subset of ASCII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_diagram

William

 

 

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

That gives me an idea for some artwork of a pop art nature!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans

An image of a can of gluten-free, vegan soup with no lumps in it.

It will need to be a fantasy image because I have searched and cannot find any at all!

William

 

Thinking about how to approach that, I am wondering if an equation could be developed and then put in the suggestions forum for extra facilites for Affinity Designer for the following.

Given a rectangular vector image, which may include text from a TrueType or OpenType font, what mathematical equation describes what must be applied to the x coordinate of each node point in the image such that the resulting image is a view of the original image as if it has been wrapped around half of a can of food. The diameter of the can being calculated from half the width of the label divided by pi. Thus the width of the resulting image being less than before the transform was applied.

So if implemented one could just select an image and then apply the transform by just clicking one tool button. That could be good.

William

 

 

[Alfred]

48 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Well, vegan soup came later than soup, but that does not make vegan soup a superset of soup.

Ah, yes, I misinterpreted the phrase ‘Extended ASCII’! Contrary to my earlier assertion that it refers to ASCII as extended, it refers only to the additional characters; it would perhaps have been better to call it ‘ASCII Extensions’.

Incidentally, are you absolutely sure that vegan soup came later than soup? I can well imagine that the first soup was a meat, fish or poultry broth, but I don’t know if there’s any evidence for this.

[William Overington]

1 minute ago, Alfred said:

Incidentally, are you absolutely sure that vegan soup came later than soup? I can well imagine that the first soup was a meat, fish or poultry broth, but I don’t know if there’s any evidence for this.

No I am not. I have no evidence. I am not congruently sure that the word vegan was not coined before 1944 (1944 being when The Vegan Society was founded) but that is the word vegan, I suppose some foods, and indeed beliefs, from earlier times could now be regarded as having been vegan even if the word vegan as such did not exist at the time.

I suppose that it gets into the question of what is soup.

I remember once reading something about it being originally of serving as a course in an inn of the water in which vegetables had been cooked rather than pouring it away, though whether that was a true observation or some comment about the soup served in some particular inn I do not know!

William

 

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I am not congruently sure

From a related discussion elsewhere, I understand this to mean that you are not absolutely sure. (I thought it worth mentioning that here for the benefit of other forum users who may be unfamiliar with the term ‘congruently’.)

5 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I suppose some foods, and indeed beliefs, from earlier times could now be regarded as having been vegan even if the word vegan as such did not exist at the time

Of course they could, in much the same way as the colour now known as magenta was the same colour before it was renamed from the earlier name ‘fuchsine’.

[Alfred]

I’ve only just noticed the post at the top of this page!

On 4/19/2021 at 8:01 AM, William Overington said:

I have been wondering how to do a vase with shade and light using an Affinity Designer watercolour brush.

Draw a black brush stroke for the shaded side and a white brush stroke for the tinted side. In the Layers panel, change the blend mode for the two brush stroke layers to ‘Overlay’. Reduce the opacity of either or both of the brush stroke layers for a more subtle effect.

[William Overington]

On 4/23/2021 at 12:10 PM, William Overington said:

In view of the availability to me of the Papier facility to produce high quality prints, I am looking through various illustrations that I have produced over the years with the idea of producing such a hardcopy print of some of them.

For example, those on this web page, and linked from it.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/library.htm

In particular I am looking at this image.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/hedgehog.png

I am thinking of blanking the lettering from the top and enlarging the remaining image, perhaps by a factor of 200% horizontally and 200% vertically to produce a landscape card.

A sort of incunabula-style woodcut-style hedgehog.

I remember that DrawPlus 7 had some rather nice woodcuts in it. Alas, as far as I know they have never been incuded in later editions, though I have not used every subsequent version, so I am not absolutely sure of that.

William

I have now produced the 300 dots per inch jpg file of the hedgehog graphic.

Here is the original, a png file, recovered from the web. I went onto the web as webspace owner and found the file dated as 4 August 2015.

Here is the png.

Here is the jpg.

I started with a copy of artwork of the fourth card (the software unicorns) and then deleted the original image and placed the png file.

The image was 794 pixels by 794 pixels.

I changed the size to 1588 pixels by 1588 pixels.

I then drew a rectangle over the lettering, made the fill colour and the line colour both white and then as best I could determine that the fill of the rectangle and the colour of the background were the same, though I am not absolutely sure of that, though they seem to be.

I then grouped the two items together and horizontally centred the resulting image. I made sure that the rectangle overlaying the text was not outside the horizontal limits of the image of the hedgehog because that would have affected the horizontal centreing of the grouped image.

I then adjusted the vertical position of the image. I know that it is often better to have more space below the image than above, but I was mindful of the fact that I might want to frame the image in a frame that is sold as for a 7 inch by 5 inch photograph with a mount included, so i made the image more central to allow for the width of the mount.

I uploaded the image to the Papier website and set up a card, including adding some text in what is notionally the greetings section of the card, though I included the title, the provenance information of 4 August 2015, my name, and April 2021.

I then placed an order for the card, £4.35, being £3.50 for the card and 85p for postage.

William

 

[William Overington]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

...

I then adjusted the vertical position of the image. I know that it is often better to have more space below the image than above, but I was mindful of the fact that I might want to frame the image in a frame that is sold as for a 7 inch by 5 inch photograph with a mount included, so i made the image more central to allow for the width of the mount.

...

 

 

Here is a link to the type of frame that I am hoping to use for this card of a graphic of a hedgehog.

It is the same type of frame that I used for the card that displays the glyphs of the Gallery font. That framed print is now displayed on a wall in my home.

The frame can be used either portrait format as shown in the image on the Tesco website or landscape mode, there are support fittings for both, and also a fitting so that the frame can be displayed freestanding in either portrait format or landscape format. There is also a fifth possible use, not mentioned by Tesco, namely to store something, like say an invitation to a wedding, something that one wishes to conserve long term without displaying it continuously.

There is a clear transparent layer in front of the mount and the image when it has been framed..

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/303403803

Tesco had removed these frames from its product range some time ago, but recently brought them back.

I ordered some for delivery with the grocery delivery recently but they were not available locally on the day, so I have ordered some this week. Two A4 frames did arrive though, not as substitutes, I had ordered them separately. I have been using that type of A4 frames for some of the cards that I have produced. It can use that type of frame permanently, but if I can get some more of the 10 inch by 8 inch oak effect frames I may possibly reframed them in those frames.

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/251929289

I am hoping that they bring back the similar 10 inch by 8 inch frames soon, I had four of those before but I have used them now. They are good for farming an A5 card. The result looks very good and indeed looks very expensive.

One point though, these oak effect frames have a very good result but the fitting is awkward. Fortunately I had some pointed nose pliers handy - they were in another Tesco product hat I bought some time ago, just in case I needed it.

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/293099221

William

 

 

[William Overington]

The package containing the print of the hedgehog image has now arrived and is in the quarantine box for one week.

I already have a frame for the card.

William

 

[William Overington]

Chloe and Phil are two characters, they are like peas in a pod!

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/cw000000.htm

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/de000000.htm

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/cpjs0001.htm

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/song1008.htm

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/song1011.htm

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/ast02400.htm

I am now thinking that together the Papier facility, the availability of frames with the grocery, and Affinity Designer provide me with an opportunity to produce a high quality Chloe and Phil board game prototype.

The theme is as follows.

Chloe and Phil are helping their friend, Polka the pantomime horse, to travel from the theatre to the village fête, where she's a star of course.

Chloe can move either one square to the right or one square to the left on a segment (0 .. (say 6) )of the horizontal axis. Chloe must move, not pass the move.

Phil can move either one square up or down on a segment (0 .. (say 4) ) of the vertical axis. Phil must move, not pass the move.

Polka moves automatically after each move by Chloe and after each move by Phil, such that Polka is on a grid of squares (for this example, 0  .. 6 on the horizontal axis and 0 .. 4 on the vertical axis.

Polka starts at (0, 0). The theatre is at (0, 0). The village fête is at (for this example, at (6, 4).

Either Chloe of Phil may be moved first. After that, Chloe and Phil move alternately.

The purpose is to get Polka to the village fête.

That is the basic game.

However, for most actual games, there is a tree in each of one or more squares and Polka cannot go into a square that has a tree in it.

So some games are more of a puzzle to solve than others.

For example, what if there is a tree in the square (2, 2)?

William