affinity designer Wheels

[Kasper-V]

I've been photographing wheels on traction engines, vintage trucks, and railway engines for more years than I can remember. I find it's very useful practice, not to mention good fun, to recreate them in Affinity Designer. I'm sure I posted City of Truro recently, but I can't find it here (I know I posted it on some of the Affinity FaceBook pages). Anyway, this is mainly made in vectors with a limited palette of flat colours and limited use of gradients.. The rivets are symbols, which is a handy way of making lots of identical things that might require later editing, and the lettering is text-on-a-path, with a lot of fiddling with tracking and baselines, and pure luck in finding close matches for fonts.

 

These two wheels are from a showman's engine -- a steam traction engine highly decorated and adapted to provide electric power for a fairground ride. I think this particular one is The Iron Maiden, but I can't lay my hands on the original photos to be sure. (She was originally named Kitchener, but was renamed when she starred in the movie of the same name.) In the first one, the right-hand front wheel, I used gradients for shading and highlights, but in the second, the right-hand driving wheel, I used flat black or white shapes at 50% opacity clipped to the relevant areas.

 

The egg-shaped structure behind the wheel is the cover for the drive train and differential gears. I used multiple outlines for the coloured lining. The rivets -- symbols again (although they needn't have been in this instance) -- are flat colour, and the highlights are separate symbols. each set of four is a Group, with the centre moved to the wheel's centre; this allowed me to use Power Duplicate to space them around the rim at precise intervals. (I did the same with the spokes.)

[Solly]

Lovely work--thanks for sharing!