Artboard management

[Andhedrew]

Hello!

I'm just making the jump from Adobe, and I love working with affinity designer!

 

The art boards are very confusing to me, however. I've been drawing cartoons to accompany blog posts in illustrator with the following process: 

1. Create art boards for each panel

2. Make three layers, "sketch" layer, "ink" layer, and "colors" layer.

 

This way I can easily reduce the opacity of the sketch layer on all of the art boards, and delete it when I'm finished. It also allows me to ink and color all of the panels at once, and export them as separate images when I'm done.

 

I've been trying to figure out how to deal with art boards in Affinity, and I'm stuck. I've made separate art boards for each panel, but I can't just create layers that apply to all of the art boards. I tried making a really big art board on top of the smaller art boards, but that doesn't work with exporting the final small panels. Is there a way to do this without the necessity of going through each art board one-by-one to delete the sketch layers? Is it possible to create "master layers" that can be chopped up with art boards in the final export?

 

Thanks!

[misc33]

As a longtime Illustrator user and now a fairly new AD user who has spent a fair bit of time recently with AD artboards in a similar way to what you're describing, here's my take. I'm pretty sure there is no such thing as master layers that can apply to all artboards, though that would be a super useful feature that you could consider posting in the feature requests section. I'm not sure if AD will ever handle additional artboards the same way Illustrator does, but it's worth asking and hoping for.

 

I'm not sure what you mean about making a really big art board on top of the smaller art boards.

 

My approach to what you're trying to do would be to forget about separate artboards, and simply work with one massive canvas. The 'artboards' you're wanting could simply be defined areas on what is essentially a very large sheet of digital paper. Exporting each panel as a separate piece can be done very easily with AD, but the tradeoff with not using artboards is that you'll have to define each area manually in the export persona. It's as simple as drawing a marquee around the individual areas you're wanting to export as separate pieces. Pain in the neck perhaps, especially when artboards have their dimensions automatically defined for export, but unless there's another way I don't know about it's the only way to have the master layer effect you're looking for. I work this way daily in AD and it's actually a fantastically freeing way to do things, there's so much more control over which parts of a design can be exported, compared to Illustrator.

 

[EDIT]

I just had a play with different artboards and layers in AD, and it looks like there's another approach to what you're trying to do. Have you tried creating a sketch layer for each artboard, then dragging these layers above the Artboards in the Layers panel, then grouping them? It's a bit longwinded, but it works in a similar way to a master layer once it's set up. You can do the same with your ink and colours layers.

[crabtrem]

I am no expert. I only make this suggestion in the effort to assist you.  Assuming I have understood your situation.

 

First, I would agree.  I don't believe you need to use an Artboard at all.

What I believe you want to do is to organize your work into GROUPS (CMD-G)

For example.

You could organize each panel into its own GROUP.

Within each GROUP, you could create another group to store and organize all your ink work, and one to organize all your color work.

You can still create other layers to affect all, or just specific aspects.

If you don't need a layer or group any more, just uncheck it, or delete it.

 

If you need to go to Export Persona, the group organization should carry over to allow you to assign slices to selected groups or layers if you desire.

 

You can move, adjust, modify each group separately or together.  You can also nest groups within their own groups.

 

Hopefully this will help you.  If not, I apologize in advance.  Good luck.