Invert (create a negative) of a vector

[lorenzo_lewis]

I have been trying to find the way to invert a vector in Affinity Designer and have had no luck. From what I understand you can do this in Adobe Illustrator. This is a tutorial that I found for illustrator that does this but I can find no way to apply it to Designer: 

 

If anyone knows how to do this or if it is even possible in Designer I would really appreciate your help :)

[JFisher]

Hi lorenzo_lewis, welcome to the forum :)

You can invert a selection by going to Select>Invert Pixel Selection, I hope this is what you're looking for. I'm not able to see the tutorial you provided for some reason so please let me know if this helps.

[Alfred]

I'm not able to see the tutorial you provided for some reason

 

YouTube videos don't seem to embed correctly here, but if you quote a post containing a failed YT embed you can see the URL. In this case, the URL you want is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYAdfUsMK8Y. As you will see, it's about inverting colours, not selections.

 

@lorenzo_lewis: If you put a black rectangle on top of a group of black shapes and set the blend mode of the rectangle layer to 'Contrast Negate' you should get the effect that you want, but this will only work for complementary colours (e.g. a black rectangle to give white shapes, or a red rectangle to give cyan shapes).

[Fixx]

I don't think AD has vector tools for it, you have to adjust colors/elements one by one. There are adjustment layers which do this but they rasterize elements in export. 

[gdenby]

As far as I can tell from the vid, the B&W starting image is a mix of pure vector work, and AI's implementation of placing a brush texture along a vector. AD uses different methods at present for vectors and textures following a vector path, so that complicates matters,

 

The black and nearly black shapes in the vid appear to be sitting on a white square.

 

In AD, the effect can be replicated using an invert adjustment layer,

 

Create some thing similar in AD. For practice, maybe just a white filled rounded rectangle, with a black cog above it. Then maybe a circle larger than the cog, with fill set to none, but having a broad stroke using a brush texture.

 

Then, at the bottom of the layer panel, select the layer adjustment button, and select invert option. You will then see another layer over the previous three, and the previous ones will all be color flipped.

 

A quick illustration: