affinity designer The Celtic Knot

[Enea]

I drew the Celtic Knot in Affinity Designer. To be honest with you, it was quite complicated to do. I used the 'Erase' blend mode, in order to do it. I want, at some point in the future, record a tutorial on how to draw it.

 

[walt.farrell]

Did you use the Shape Builder?

If not, you might be interested in this post:

 

[Enea]

I didn't, I used the ellipse tool, intersect operator, erase brush from the pixel persona, and the 'erase' blend mode.

Thanks for the link for the thread, I will take a look at it.

[Hangman]

Hi @Enea,

Possibly something along these lines...

Trinity Knot

[Enea]

Thanks for sharing. Not exactely. I will do a quick recording of me drawing it too then.

[Enea]

Hi everyone.

I'm uploading here my recording of how I drew the Celtic Knot in Affinity Designer. I think the main difference between this method and the one posted by Hangman above, is that he used the shape builder tool, and I didn't.

Here is a quick summary of the video:

• I drew 3 circles of 800 px, 10 px stroke size.
• I duplicated them, and created the intersection between each of the circles with the intersect operator.
• I duplicated each of the intersections, and thickened the stroke of the duplicates to 15 px.
• I switched to the pixel personna, and out of the thick strokes, I removed part of it with the erasor brush tool, and kept only the part that is going to be applied as an intersection to the strokes that are not thickened.
• I switched back to the designer persona.
• I broke the strokes that are not thickened with the node tool, so that we can apply the thicker strokes to them where the intersection lies.
• I grouped the thick strokes with the 2 parts of the thin strokes on which it is going to be applied, positioned the thick stroke at the top, and set the blend mode of the thick stroke to "Erase".

If something is not clear, you can let me know.

[lepr]

Easy method using Shape Builder Tool and Contour Tool:

 

[Enea]

Indeed, quite easy and effective. Good job!

[Ash Eldritch]

I think this thread highlights something that's always baffled me. The amount of people who want to create tutorials without knowing how to use the app to its full potential themselves. They're very willing to misdirect others and send them down a convoluted rabbit hole, portraying the app as overly complicated. A 7 minute tutorial to do something that should take less than a minute proves the point.

Not having a go at anyone or intending to be rude. I'm just grouchy because I spent ages again, this morning, wading through copious amounts of tutorials, in Youtube's suggested videos, by people who'd do better spending their time doing some learning themselves.

[NotMyFault]

YouTube is not a place for curated expert knowledge. It is a place living mainly from creating drama and allowing everyone to produce drama on his own, especially drama by failure trying to do difficult or totally easy things.

If you watch the first videos of now acknowledged Affinity experts (Affinity Revolution, Olivio Sarikas etc) you see that all started as amateurs and made lots of mistakes before maturing to professionals.

So everyone deserves his chance to practice.

Never the less, I would prefer having a curated list of good videos in one place. It exists for official videos, but I’m not aware of a list covering other creators.

[Ash Eldritch]

Everyone does indeed deserve their chance to practice and totally should. It's the point where they decide they're qualified to show others how best to do it that baffles me with some of them. 

And believe me, I certainly don't use Youtube for expert knowledge... except that which comes directly from Serif. But it's being subscribed and viewing Serif's video's that then makes Youtube's algorithm think I want an abundance of tutorials.

Personally I don't watch any other creators videos as I have worked out my own style and way of doing things with Designer. And I certainly wouldn't deem myself in a position of tutoring others.

[GarryP]

Although Enea did say, in their first post, that they would record a tutorial showing how they drew the knot, I don’t think they intended the video which was posted to show the best/quickest/easiest method to draw the knot.

I see it as just another way to get the same result, where some of the techniques used may be also used in other situations.
(Also, as far as I can tell, the techniques used are available in V1 and not just V2, so that makes it accessible for people not using the latest version where the Shape Builder Tool is available.)

Not all videos need to be ‘speed runs’ getting the learner from A to B in the quickest possible way; sometimes it’s nice to learn different ways to make similar things as you almost never know which technique(s) will be ‘best’ for any particular new situation.

I’ve seen plenty of “tutorials” where the “tutor”:

• has taken way more time in post production than they have in demonstrating the techniques;
• goes off on various tangents talking about stuff which isn’t relevant;
• has simply taken someone else’s work and made their own ‘fancier-looking’ version of it;
• etc. etc.

… so I can understand your frustration but, in this case, I don’t think Enea intended any kind of ‘show of authority’ or ‘self aggrandisement’ as can often happen.

I saw the video as simply: “Here’s how I did this thing. You might want to try it for yourself, or not, it’s up to you.”

[Ash Eldritch]

If that's the case, Garry, it wouldn't be a "Tutorial". A tutorial, by definition, is a "How to" not a "You might want to try".

[lepr]

8 minutes ago, GarryP said:

I saw the video as simply: “Here’s how I did this thing. You might want to try it for yourself, or not, it’s up to you.”

I agree. This is the 'Share your work' forum, not the 'Tutorials' forum, and the OP was merely showing their work and how they did it, rather than posing as a tutor.

I also agree with Ash, that there are many misleadingly overcomplicated tutorials on the Web, but the OP was not presenting a tutorial and so the comments about poor tutorials would have been less potentially offensive if made elsewhere.

 

[Ash Eldritch]

@lepr @GarryP @NotMyFault

I apologise if you think my post was potentially offensive. Unlike yourselves I mistakenly took the OP’s statement he wants to make a tutorial on this in the future, and his footnote "Author of the Youtube channel Enea Creative Design, for design tutorials.",  to imply he wanted to make a tutorial.

 

I love Designer. I came from Illustrator and found Designer better suits the way I work and allows me to be far more creative than Illustrator ever did.

However had I come to Designer and followed one of the many available convoluted tutorials, professing to impart knowledge, who's to say I wouldn't have mistakenly taken Designer to be overly complicated and left it well alone.

I'd hate to think a future prospective creator would be put off using Designer after following misguided tutorials. And I certainly see demo users, on here, sharing their work stating they're following various Youtube tutorials.

Either way it's not something I'm ever going to change and this gripe wasn't aimed at anyone in particular, just my grouchy opinion of the tutorial culture. 

 

[GarryP]

This is part of the problem with free-to-watch videos made by random people on the internet; sometimes their contents are of good quality, sometimes not so much.

As mentioned above, if you want to try and maximise the benefit that you get from watching tutorials – and minimise wasted time – then you may need to find (and probably pay to watch) a set of curated videos made by a trusted expert who has the intention of teaching, preferably in a constructive manner, rather than just ‘showing off’ what they can do.

And, even then, you may find that they don’t teach you how to do what you want to do because the tutor created the video for their purposes rather than yours.

I’ve lost count of the videos I’ve watched (not necessarily in these forums) where, after about 10 minutes or more, once they’ve done their unnecessarily-long introduction (spinning graphics, ‘shout-outs’ to followers, etc.) and lots of (often pointless) set-up, I’ve figured out that I already know how to do that or know a better way to do it, so I understand where your frustration is coming from. (I once watched a video for about five minutes until I found out that they were eventually only going to tell me how to something which could have been demonstrated without any ‘fanfare’ in about 10 seconds.)

I’ve posted a fair few “tutorials” in the Tutorials section myself which are simply soundless videos of me clicking on things, but I’ve only posted them in the Tutorials section because there isn’t a “Videos you can follow to re-create stuff I did without any explanation” section of the forums.

I don’t think anyone has been offended by what you said, it was maybe just perceived by some as a ‘shot across the bows of the wrong target’.