How to illustrate using Affinity Designer - Complete Workflow!

hey friends i'm riskit over the last several weeks i've been uploading videos that show how i go about illustrating using affinity designer on the ipad pro and on the desktop version i've gotten a lot of really great feedback and responses from people and it's really made me happy to see that it's out there and actually helping you with your artwork however i have had a few people reach out to me on reddit and on facebook asking for a little bit more of a clearer demonstration about what this process actually involves so in today's video i thought i would take a break from uploading time lapses and show you the full process of how i illustrate using affinity designer from start to finish in a clear and easy to follow way i did say in my previous video that that would be the final video that covered affinity designer for a little while but i figured that since people were asking for help with this i'd upload one more that clearly demonstrated everything and then the next couple of videos will probably focus on procreate so let's get started okay so here we are in affinity designer and i'm in the pixel persona mode when i usually do my rough drawings i pick a red color with a soft brush and a light opacity and then just start blocking in the general shape of what i'm after i'm not too worried about the sketch being perfect i am using a wacom intuos bro graphics tablet to do this but i'm not using any of the pressure sensitivity settings or anything like that i pretty much keep the brush at the same size and i kind of do it zoomed out like you can see on the screen here this is sort of restricts me from going in and adding a bunch of nonsense details that i'm really not going to be caring about that much when i'm working on the overall composition of whatever i'm drawing so you can see by now that i've picked a tentacle to use as an example today i did this purposely so that when we're in the highlighting stage i can show you how to highlight normal objects but i usually try to do tentacles kind of shiny so um it's sort of the best of both worlds so i'll be able to show off both methods of adding in highlights so i'm going to duplicate that layer and move it over to the side um just so that we can look back on our work as we go along now i'm going to drop the opacity of that so that it's sort of sitting in the background and now i'm switching to the designer persona for brushes you can use any brush that you want there are no hard and fast rules about what brushes you should and shouldn't use i have grown really attached to using brushes made by frankentune i bought a bunch of them off of his website and from the affinity store i really can't recommend them enough they're super versatile i'll leave a link down in the description if you want to go and check out his website and he's also got a great number of learning resources for affinity designer and procreate as well so highly recommend it but again you can use whatever brush you want um i will just point out though that when picking brushes um always go into the settings and just double check the opacity value some brushes they might be set so that the opacity varies maybe even varies depending on your pressure sensitivity on your pen so i always like to turn that off so that my lines are solid so i'm coming in with a vector brush and i'm drawing around the general outline of my shape or at least the main bulky form of it i'm not worried about any details at this stage i do this on purpose because i like my outlines to be nice and thick so that when you stand back from the picture everything's still quite easy to make out and you can tell where everything is just because i like to do a lot of busy artwork and then i come in and make my detailed outlines quite thin just so that they don't clutter up the general composition of the image so yeah take away from that bulky shape thick and details thin when i'm drawing in an outline i never use black or at least i never used true black so the color i usually go for is an extremely dark shade of purple this just looks a little less jarring on the eyes when you start throwing in color next to it so i'll duplicate that once more and move it over to the side i'm going to keep the brush the same but i'm just going to change the width of it now i'm just picking out some of those details that i drew in my sketch and i'm going to be adding in a bunch of others that weren't there originally just giving the tentacles a little bit more depth and look like they're actually attached to it somehow sometimes they'll even just put random lines and cross hatching and squiggles and triangles and stuff even circles all over the place it's honestly just dots and lines but it can really help sort of give a little bit more character to whatever you're drawing so let's duplicate that again and we'll move on to clipping masks so i'm not going to explain too much about what a clipping mask is just yet because you'll see how it behaves in the next section but basically i'm just drawing a shape with the pencil tool and that's going to act as a base color so let's just think about that for now it can be any color you want there are no hard and fast rules you can even change it later because keep in mind this is a vector shape and being vectors we can go in and pull and push things around if the shape is kind of large or complex then i'll draw several shapes and then i'll add them together so that they merge into one layer cool now i'll just do that for the tentacles as well just picking a random color here and then merging them all into one layer as well great so let's duplicate that again and i'll show you how these work so now that we have these clipping masks i'm going to switch to the pixel persona so again i'm using frankenton's brushes to do this but affinity does come with a bunch of really great texture brushes as well and you can get other texture brushes from anywhere else i just really like frankenton's textures there's a lot to choose from they're all really versatile but honestly it doesn't even matter which one you pick often when i'm painting i'll just pick ones at random and see what i can make with it i'm not really thinking about oh that's a good texture that'll look really cool for this piece um at least not most of the time so yeah i'm picking one of his brushes and then i'm just choosing a slightly darker color than this base color layer that we have down sometimes i'll move it to make it a little warmer or a little cooler but usually the idea is paint in some darkness just muddy the whole thing up and make it really dirty then i'll gradually add some of that base color back in um by lightening it a little bit more each time and basically just move from shadow to highlight when i'm doing this i'm not really thinking about any light source like generally i'm trying to have the light source from one direction if i can but most of the time i'm just adding in shadows in recessed areas and putting highlights on edges i have no doubt in my mind that thinking about light sources constantly could make this artwork a lot more realistic but realism isn't really what i'm going for here um i just like putting down color and not really thinking about it and just seeing how i can make an image pop in a really unique and interesting way cool let's duplicate this one more time and move on to the next step which is essentially the same thing i just wanted to show you that you can make several layers inside of these clipping masks so that you don't have to paint all on the same layer and usually when i'm doing this i like like we've got a green color here so rather than just go to lighter and lighter shades of green i'm going to throw in a little bit of yellow just to show that things are getting kind of brighter and look a little bit more interesting and then around the edges of things i usually like to put a edge highlight at the moment i'm just slamming down some blue i don't even know if blue's the color i want but it just makes that edge stand out more than the rest of the image cool let's duplicate this again and move on to another step this is where things are really going to start to come to life we're going to be painting in some hard shadows so using the pencil tool the same way that we've created those clipping masks i'm just coming in and drawing in a shape and the color of that shape is going to be the exact same color as our line work this layer should live underneath your outline work and as you draw more and more shapes it's important to put them all into a group because we're going to change the opacity of them so i'm just going to drop the opacity a little bit something that looks nice i don't really have a definitive number that i choose for everything um and now i'll just start painting in some hard shadows so even though we've got those painted shadows in these little hard shadows can give things like a really cool comic book sort of pop to them and really help define certain edges and areas so even all those little lines i drew in in the detail phase i'm just coming in and putting tiny little hard shadows next to them just make them look like they're either recessed or popping out in weird and unusual ways i usually try to set the group of the shadows to multiply in the blending modes just so that they're not really interfering with the colors of everything else too much to kind of just sort of adding in that little bit of darkness that we're after cool i'm going to duplicate this again and we'll move on to the highlighting stage so for highlighting i just use a vector brush i'm going to use the exact same one that we did the outline with and i'm going to start painting in some light strokes over the top i still make sure that this lives underneath my line work but it will be on top of my hard shadow layer i try not to use solid white for this even though the color of it is pretty bright so i'm using a very slightly off yellow for this step and when i'm painting in highlights i basically just followed two simple rules so for this tentacle i want it to appear quite wet and shiny so the highlight is going to live in the sort of middle of the shape i'm not really going around the edges of it too much i'm putting the highlight in the middle and that gives it like a wet shiny almost cling wrap sort of look but as i go around these bottom suction caps i'm just sort of putting that in there to show you if i was painting something else like an arm or a face this is where i'll usually put the highlights sometimes i'll even just throw them around some of the detailed stuff that we did earlier it's kind of wrong because you got highlights on top of or directly next to shadows but again not worried about realism or anything here i'm literally just painting this stuff in to make each element pop out in this weird sort of uh embossed way i just realized too that i didn't add in any of the shadows to the tentacles as well so i'm just going to put in some random shapes with the pencil tool across them just to give them a little bit more character and i'll throw in some highlights around the edges of some of them just for good measure i think that's starting to come out pretty good i'm going to duplicate this one more time and take you through the final steps that i take when i'm finishing off a piece of work an affinity designer or usually most digital artwork and that is adjustment layers so sometimes when i'm working on something i've spent hours and hours on it and i kind of sit back and you know it looks fine but some of the colors look a little off they don't all go together um each thing sort of stands out on its own and and the image looks less and less like a hole and more of a collection of little things sort of slam together and you know that can that can be a problem you might not always find that but i like throwing on these adjustment layers because it usually fixes a lot of those errors and it lets me sort of play around with the image um once i'm sort of past the point of no return if you know what i mean just quickly before we do that though i might just make a few changes to some of the colors in the tentacle i'm not really happy with them so i'm just painting in like a little bit more of a darker area um bringing that blue out a little more and now i'm just switching up brushes and changing them to different things just to see if we can get like a little bit more of an organic sort of pattern going on and less of a smooth brushed look all right i'm pretty happy with that so i'm going to mask out this area so that we don't apply the adjustments to anywhere else in this big image and the first adjustment layer that i usually put on nearly everything is a lens filter uh you can use a warm one or a cool one about 100 of the time though i use one of these yellowy orange lens filters it's the the default lens filter um and then i just play around with the opacity until i come up with something that i'm happy with this can just add a little bit of warmth to your image and tie some of your colors together some of the other adjustments i like to play around with after doing this is uh throwing in a vibrance or like a hue and saturation adjustment over the top just to sort of bring out the colors a little more and make them a little less dull and if even if you're not happy with some of the colors you can mask different areas of your artwork out or go over the whole thing and use curves or a color balance tool to completely change how all of the colors look so at the moment i'm kind of losing that blue but it i don't know i really like it it's sort of just fading to this very white greeny um highlight along that top edge so yeah i'm totally okay with that once you've made all of these adjustments if you're finding them a little bit too strong then just group all of them and dial about the opacity of that layer so that you sort of got a decent mix between your adjustment layers and your original drawing one thing i like to do at the end as well is to just throw in a solid background just to sort of see how the colors and especially the outline looks now that i've made all of these adjustment layers on top i got a lot of my work printed on different stickers and t-shirts and it's just interesting for me to see how some of the colors i've used will interact with other colors if you're finding that you're happy with the way the colors look but the really dark shade of purple is looking significantly different after applying a lens filter and other adjustments then maybe just bring your outline layer above your adjustment layer so that it's not touched by them affinity designer has a lot of similar tools that you see in photoshop and other design software like drop shadows or outer glows some cool embossing effects so just play around with them and see what you can come up with all right and that is pretty much it so let's give this a really quick recap so that you don't have to watch this entire video if you're trying to reference back to it the first step that we take is the rough sketch i usually stay fairly zoomed out for this i'm using a red pen but you can use whatever color you want and i'm not changing the pressure sensitivity of my drawing tool if i can help it the second step is the outline of the main shapes so not picking out any detail just the main shape of whatever your character or creation is the third step is the detail pass where you're just scaling down whatever brush you used and throwing in a bunch of small details to really give your drawing a lot more dimension and character the third step is putting in your base colors and creating clipping masks while doing that with the pencil tool the fourth step is doing your basic shading within those clipping masks using some textured brushes picking darker colors for more recessed areas and lighter colors for edges the fifth step is just some additional shading where i might put an edged highlight and just change a few parameters as i go along the sixth step is adding in hard shadows with the pencil tool so just using the pen tool to pick out little areas of detail that you really want to pop out grouping them all together and in the opacity slightly so that they don't completely take over your artwork the seventh step is painting in some hard highlights uh if it's a really greasy wet or very reflective surface then i'll usually throw these in the center of an object but for everything else i usually just put these harder highlights around the edges of things and then the final step is doing some basic cleanup with your shading and throwing on some adjustment layers and the ones that i most commonly use are a lens filter just to make things tie together a little nicer and make the image a little bit warmer and i might use a vibrancy adjustment layer just to sort of make those colors pop out a little bit more and they have it that's basically how i do most of my illustrations in affinity designer these skills again can be transferred to any other piece of design software just because affinity uses these clipping masks and has a vector and a pixel persona doesn't mean that you can't repeat the same steps between adobe illustrator and photoshop uh although in that scenario i'd probably just cut out the middle man scrap the vector work do all the line work and everything in photoshop and then just set up some basic masks to do all of my shading and stuff in uh totally achievable in apps like procreate or concepts and just keep in mind that there are no hard and fast rules here anyways i hope that's been really helpful to all of you the next few videos are probably going to focus predominantly on procreate for a little while as i actually get around to finishing some videos for this cartoon drawing course that i've been working on for so long i keep refilming it i keep rewriting it i keep changing my mind the whole way and i'm really hoping that we will get there in the end um for now just be patient and uh enjoy this i hope it's useful to all of you and i'll see you on the next one

Channel: RSKT - The Capable Artist

Views: 40,641

Keywords: RSKT, The, Capable, Artist, Musician, affinity designer, affinity designer illustration process, affinity designer tutorials, illustration tutorial affinity, video recommendation for artists, video reccomendation for illustrators, illustration tips, artist tips, illustration process, illustration workflow, digital drawing, learn to draw, texture in affinity designer, drawing, art, 2d, design, vector, alternative, affinity, designer, photoshop, illustrator, shading, colour, cartoon, how to, persona

Id: H8nCbTELKgQ

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/GoingMock5]

I recently got into digital art and I find these videos super helpful. Thanks so much for the tutorial!