Object disappearing when trying to move

[Impatientelephant]

Hi,

 

I keep trying to cut and paste an object to a different part of the canvas but when I move the object, a blue square appears. When I try to move the object outside that blue square, the object disappears. It's like there is an active frame I did not (intentionally) create that is limiting the paste area. How do I fix this?

 

thanks

[MEB]

Hi Impatientelephant,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

Seems you have paste the object insde a blue square and not on its own independent layer, so the blue square is now acting as a clipping object making the content you pasted dissapear when you move it beyond the square boundaries. Do the following: select the blue square/content you pasted on canvas so it gets highlighted in the Layers panel. The pasted content should appear as a child of the blue square in the Layers panel. Click on its thumbnail (the pasted content) and drag it outside the blue square in the Layers panel. It should now be in its own layer and appear above the blue square. Let me know if you still have trouble.

[Impatientelephant]

Thanks for the fast response! It's good to know I can use this forum in the future for solutions. I have had very delayed or no replies from forums for other apps...

 

In the end, the "mask" went away but I still can't figure out how they keep getting created.

[MEB]

How are you pasting the items? Which menu command or toolbar button are you using? Are you using Paste Inside instead of the regular Paste command?

[Impatientelephant]

I used the copy and paste functions from the pasteboard in the command menu. I tried to fix it by using "paste inside" function but of course that didn't work. But I managed to complete the project so hopefully I will not have this issue again. 

[MEB]

Paste Inside will place the copied object (to clipboard) inside another one (it will appear as a child of the selected object when you paste it) behaving like you are describing in your first post (it disappears when moved to outside the parent object boundaries). You should use the regular paste if you don't want this happening.