Creating New Brushes in AD from an Image

[DavidSilverSteel]

I have been using Serif Draw Plus for years and I bought a set of decorative brushes from Serif which I have found to be incredibly useful when creating cards and posters. Many of these brushes are multi coloured, eg flowers etc and I often use them by creating a rectangle, choosing - brush - as the stroke, and this gives me a border with the design. With flowers it is often nice to be able to paint a scattering of flowers by just selecting that brush.

 

I have been trying to convert a few of my Serif brushes to use in Affinity Designer with only partial success.

 

The attached photo shows a Christmas Border in the form of a ribbon bow. I drew one instance of the bow in DP (which was red) and exported that as a PNG with a transparent background. In AD I went into - brushes - New Textured Intensity Brush and picked up the PNG of the ribbon bow. This came into the list of brushes, and was shown in the list as red - as the PNG file. However, when I use the brush, it is in greyscale. I can however then choose the stroke colour and make a stroke or border of ribbons of any colour of my choosing. Yellow in this case. In this instance that is useful.

 

With other decorative brushes in Draw Plus however, they are multi-coloured and I cannot find any way of pulling the colour of the PNG file into my new brush. Does anyone know of a way of doing this - or even better - is there any way of importing Draw Plus brushes into AD? I am not an artist, just a hobby / craft user and therefore I would like to import the brushes that I already have if possible.

 

David 

[gdenby]

I think what you want is not textured intensity brush but textured image brush.

[DavidSilverSteel]

Thanks Gdenby

You are quite correct -  textured image brush - works fine.

I had been fooled because of the following :-

 

If no stroke colour is applied, then the brush (flags) comes out in the original colours. If however a stroke colour is applied, then it mixes with the original colour. Corners not perfect yet but OK. See attached images 

1. No stroke colour applied

2. Yellow colour applied

 

This should prove to be MOST useful.

Thanks

David

[ambiroa]

If I'm not mistaken, it comes out in grey because that's the value for red. So I believe you need to make it full black first, before creating a brush from it, then the value (for whatever color you pick) should be correct.

[Alfred]

If no stroke colour is applied, then the brush (flags) comes out in the original colours. If however a stroke colour is applied, then it mixes with the original colour.

 

For what it's worth, Photo brushes in DrawPlus behave in exactly the same way. :)

 

What I believe you're actually getting in both programs is an opacity map based on the greyscale levels in the brush image, so black corresponds to completely opaque and white corresponds to completely transparent.