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Illustration in Affinity Designer


leifm

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Hi there everyone :)

 

I am very happy to have completed a winter illustration entirely in Affinity Designer using a Wacom Cintiq Pro 13. I have been experimenting with Designer in my spare time in order to try out a few ideas combining vectors with texture brushes. This one was done in designer 1.5 and I have to say it has treated me very well as I progressed towards making the piece work as a whole.

 

I do quite like clean shapes with a painterly/texured feel to them, and so with this one I feel that I am moving in the right direction at last. The project was sketched out from scratch and colour completed in Designer with a resolution of 5500x5500px.

 

My main takeaway I belive was to be patient util I could start getting a good feel for the paint performance in relation to zoom level. Also, being able to customise and set up custom brushes for my liking and to match previous experience for a more traditional illustrative approach. For brushes I started out with the Daub concept brushes pack but ended up picking them appart and to set up my own in the end :)

 

It would be great to hear about your experiences and feedback in general towards using affinity designer in illustration based workflow :)

 

 

post-452-0-30225200-1484430406_thumb.jpg

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Nice stuff Leif. Welcome to the Affinity fold. :-)

 

I have been using Designer off and on for about 2 years now for illustration work specifically and loving the experience so far.  I am getting into the painting aspect more and more and really enjoy the ease of the vector to pixel to vector workflow.

 

Checkout my behance link below for a bunch of illo work done in Designer.

 

I look forward to seeing more of your work. Cheers!

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@Zinc @retrograde Thank you very much for positive comments. I had a look at kevincreative portfolio at Behance and had to add this to my follow list :) Looking great!! :) I have been trying to mix/match illustrator and photoshop in the past for more painterly look with the clean edges from paths, but find with Designer this process feels much better. My main concern with other vector programs had been how very different the feel was to placing nodes and connecting the shapes, but for this I believe Designer has got it spot on. We are still missing a few things like a good cut tool and being able to select nodes to rotate/scale directly, but all in all very happy and sure these functionalities will come before too long. I am not even mentioning price... I will gladly update every year at this rate and I have AD and AP on both Mac and PC which is currently 4 licenses in total for me :) It is also great to see that Affinity is able to deliver for both Mac and PC platform and more as they appear in the future.

 

 

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I will gladly update every year at this rate

 

It doesn't look like we'll be asked to do that in the near future! The Mac apps have been out for more than two years, and we're still only at version 1.5, with (at least) version 1.6 still to come before a paid-for version 2.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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If the Mac and Windows products are to remain in sync (version wise) it makes sense that there is no version 2 for the Mac apps as yet 

 

Once the Windows apps are at least a year old, it is then I would expect to see version 2 products/upgrades being on the market.

To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time.

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There's still version 1 of Affinity Publisher to come, of course, and by the time that's available in a retail version the other Windows apps will already be about a year old.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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@Zinc @retrograde Thank you very much for positive comments. I had a look at kevincreative portfolio at Behance and had to add this to my follow list :) Looking great!! :) I have been trying to mix/match illustrator and photoshop in the past for more painterly look with the clean edges from paths, but find with Designer this process feels much better. My main concern with other vector programs had been how very different the feel was to placing nodes and connecting the shapes, but for this I believe Designer has got it spot on. We are still missing a few things like a good cut tool and being able to select nodes to rotate/scale directly, but all in all very happy and sure these functionalities will come before too long. I am not even mentioning price... I will gladly update every year at this rate and I have AD and AP on both Mac and PC which is currently 4 licenses in total for me :) It is also great to see that Affinity is able to deliver for both Mac and PC platform and more as they appear in the future.

Thanks Leif for your compliments. Designer has been a lot of fun to work in and it's only going to get better from here. I know what you mean about some of the other vector apps. Really great for some uses and not for others. Mixing both personas in Designer really speeds up the workflow and allows you to explore and create vs getting mired in an overly technical process. I'm just glad to have found out about Affinity when I did! 

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Neat looking pic, love the soft paintery feel you've got going here. Great quirky looking character too. Spot on. :)

 

Yeah, I used to use Paint Shop Pro and mix vectors with raster layers (but Paint Shop Pro didn't really do vectors properly), so happy that I jumped on board the early days of Designer and learned as the program developed. It's gone above and beyond my expectations and has really enhanced my work flow, and I like to think, my creature creations.

 

Look forward to seeing more from you leifm.

 

George

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I love this kind of illustration.

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