Creating a vector character in Affinity Designer with Ellsphee

Hi my name is Sphelele Gumede aka Ellsphee and I'm a multidisciplinary designer and art director currently based in Durban, South Africa I'm super excited to have partnered with Affinity for these creative sessions please feel free to leave a comment or ask any questions and I'll try to get to as many as possible. Before we get into it though I just want to quickly take you through what my setup looks like as you'll see it's a very simple setup a lot of my work begins its life on my sketch pad I then scan that onto Affinity Designer and then using my Wacom Intuos Pro I finish off the artwork So here we are we're going to be working in Affinity Designer today and I'll be taking you through how I create some of my uh vector characters and for the purpose of the session I've already gone ahead and quickly sketched out a rough illustration of what our character is going to look like this is primarily going to be just a guideline of main features what I want to keep and what I want to have. Again you'll notice that because the character is symmetrical I have primarily just focused on the one side and not so much on the right hand side because my plan is to kind of like work and get the detail working on the left hand side before I copy it over to the right hand side I'll be taking you through some of the tools that I use to create some of my artworks as well as some of my favourite features about Affinity Designer as well so let's get right into it and try to have some fun whilst we create this new artwork as you'll see I'll mostly be working under the designer persona utilising the pen tool to draw most of our characters features and I'll begin with the point right there on the chin and extend that all the way to become our face and just as a heads up I will be speeding through some portions of this video in an effort to fit as much as possible without going too overboard with our time Let's go and what I want to do at this point is I just want to quickly increase the size of my stroke I think something like like a 2 should be this would be fine for now might change this later on but we'll see how it goes and I just want to quickly show you as well one of my favourite features found under the stroke function and that is the scale with object checkbox and this is a feature that I almost always click on what essentially does is it enables you to proportionately scale your object without really affecting the look and feel too much. Say for example should you wish to take this onto a bigger artboard or bigger canvas you know you almost do that without any trouble at all and I just want to make an adjustment on my curve um you'll see that I'm consistently making these minor tweaks as I go rather than leaving them for last I become a little bit fussy when it comes to these curves and I just want to turn my attention to her eye at this point and utilising our lips tool I want to draw a shape to use as our pupil and I then want to go into the fill because essentially I don't need that right now I just want to go into our fill I just turned it off for the moment I do wanna then go into our stroke and maybe increase the width a little bit just to make emphasis on that curve and I then want to go into our stroke colour and change that to white. What I want to do next is I want to grab our pupil and essentially clip it to our i curve such that it sits inside and you do that by just like dragging and dropping it into the groove you want to clip it with I then want to go into the actual eye curve and just turn the colour and use a black fill and I want to use a black fill for our nostril as well as our eyebrow you'll notice that for the most part, at this stage anyway, I'll primarily work with either black or shades of gray and I just wanna at this point just focus on building the artwork without thinking too much about what colours I want to use and so forth I just want to make a quick selection of my eyelashes just to make a few tweaks on the actual curves and how the stroke behaves and I'll just utilise my stroke pressure settings and I'll pull on the the right hand side how I like to think of this is the left hand point as the start of your curve and the right hand point the end of your curve and so I like to drag the second point which is on the right hand side and as soon as I do that you'll see how it immediately affects how my stroke behaves giving them an almost natural look in my opinion and what I want to do with it is that I want to almost save this as a profile and almost creating a preset because I'll be using this more often during the creation of this artwork so what I want to do is just save it as a profile that I can always go back to for other curves that I want to make adjustments to I see I've missed a couple of them which isn't a train smash I'll just select those and because I've already got a preset or profile saved I can just click on it and immediately apply that look onto them and the one below the eye I just want to treat that a little bit different what I essentially want to do with it is I wanted to start off thin and continuously get larger towards the middle and get thinner towards the end as well and you'll see that I just want to insert a point on my curve like right in the middle and raise it up and then grab the start point of my curve and drag that all the way to the bottom and I just want to make a tweak to our curve a little bit just raise it up just to make that middle area a little bit thicker and I want to save this as a profile as well because I'll be using it quite often in this process and I want to continue applying some of these settings on our other curves and just continuously defining what our look and feel is going to be like So here we are. I've gone ahead and duplicated our left hand side over to our right you'll notice I didn't duplicate all of our shapes over from the left hand side because I just want to make the face more interesting. I do have some other ideas for what I want to do on the right hand side which you'll see as I go at this point I do want to add some more detail on her hair just to make that a bit more interesting and I do that by drawing a few more curves on and around her hair and I think these help with the overall artwork at the end So I've gone on to add a few more detail to our character's face and at this point I'm still working with our shades of grey the big thing is just to get a feeling from our artwork and I do that through using our contrast and trying to see what works and what doesn't work and that'll naturally carry itself over when I eventually start applying colours to this artwork but what I'm about to get on now is my absolute favourite features within Affinity Designer and that is the pixel persona which can be found right up here next to our Designer Persona and what this lets you do is it enables kind of like an ability to work in both vector and pixel workflows which is an absolute dream for me I want to get in to this persona and utilise our pixel tool to just draw a bit more detail just to add some grunge and additional other features to our character So i've duplicated my artboard at this point and I've renamed the first to something like monochromatic and uh the second which is where I'll start applying the fun parts where we get a little bit more colourful with it and I just want to lock the first artboard so we don't interfere with that at all and to be honest with you I like to keep the monochromatic art board just as a reference point that we can always go back to once we start coloring and figuring out what colours to use for our artwork With me you'll see it's a lot of going back and forth particularly when we get to this stage of our artwork it's a lot of trying out things and it's also a lot of being okay with stuff not working out and I just want to try out a little bit of a different route altogether I'm just doing this as I go to be honest with you guys I haven't really predetermined what the final look will be for me it's all about the feeling when it comes to these it's honestly just always all about the feeling and I just want to change some colours around just to see what else we can do to make it pop a little bit just to bring the face out a bit more and just changing some of these I think that's kind of working and it's a lot of this you'll see as we go that it's honestly is just a lot of this trying stuff out. And I just want to experiment with some abstract shapes on the sweater I'm trying to figure out what else we could do to make it a bit more visually interesting so I'm just going to draw these. I'm hoping it kind of works out you know just again just trying things out I'm going to do something interesting with those colours we'll see what we eventually end up with it's just a lot of experimentation and trying to make each of these as unique as possible so here we are. You'll see that I've gone on and added some additional details to this artwork I've added my signature look and feel. I've brought in the eyes for that just to make the artwork a bit more visually intriguing I've gone in on the face and added some warm areas and just try to to make the face as well a bit more detailed even though the look of this is meant to be flat there's still room to add those tiny details just to bring the face out a little bit more and the big thing for me is always just to try and make an artwork that is visually interesting to look at and that's always important to me. I've drawn two shapes as placeholders for button badges I'm a little bit obsessed with those so I think there's something interesting that we can do in terms of accessorising her sweater a little bit more and I'm just going to get into drawing that. And there it is. A smiley face button badge it came out pretty cool i think and the only thing now is that I just want to add a bit more detail to it you know which might not be really necessary for a lot of people but I'll go into my effects and this is one of those features that I always go to and I just want to select my gradient overlay and the upside to this is that I don't have to almost like duplicate the shape or layer that I want to apply it on I can just select it and apply the gradient overlay on it. What I really want is the radial type of gradient and the next thing is that I want to reverse so that the highlight kind of sits somewhere in the middle and then I want to just offset it along both the x and the y axis and just kind of like refocus it so that it sits and almost emulates and follows our shadow that is currently on her sweater and what I want to do is apply a multiply as well and then go into our gradient and in the black part of it i just want to change that colour something a little bit more interesting and you see we start to get some very cool colours that orange just bounces really nicely on there and just offsets that yellow a little bit just to make it a bit more interesting and it gives it a bit more depth in my opinion which is always a nice thing and I just want to drop the opacity a little bit because 100 percent just feels a bit too harsh at least for me so what you kind of want to do is almost feel it and not necessarily see it if that makes sense but yeah that's what I've done to just give it some detail subtle but effective and I just want to rotate the eyes a little bit as well at this moment I want to turn my attention over to our one love down here and I just want to cheat it a little bit different I want to go more of a designed route on this I see the wonderful people at Affinity have already created a heart for us on there so I'll just grab that thanks guys and I just want to drag that as such I think right there is cool and I do want to change the fill to one of our darker colours and I'll just go into the rectangle tool and use those to create the rest of our letters And I realise I've neglected my second button badge long enough so at this point I'll just turn my attention over to it I've been thinking of something interesting to put on there and I think I've figured it out and there we are. i'm very excited about how this artwork turned out. I must be honest I was extremely nervous right at the start when I began this but I'm super excited about the final look of what we have and at this point I'll just continue to add a few minor details here and there maybe work on the overall colour and how that works all together in the final piece but yeah hopefully you enjoyed this session and again if you have any questions please feel free to reach out and I'll try to get to as many as possible and thank you so much for watching. Special shout out to you and the team at Affinity it's been a pleasure to share my process with you.

Channel: Affinity

Views: 21,289

Keywords: Creating a vector character, Affinity Designer tutorial, Affinity Designer, illustrator tips, designer tips, digital illustration, illustration tutorial, mixing vector and raster, Sphelele Gumede, Ellsphee

Id: EMnm7eBlp9o

Length: 31min 29sec (1889 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020