Affinity Designer: Easter Card - Tutorial

Key Takeaways

hello my friends and welcome to my first tutorial for affinity designer as you can see now my tutorials do have a webcam and we're gonna create a fun and easy easier design my name is Olivia I'm a professional designer from beyond Austria and I want to thank my patrons who support me and make these videos possible let's get started so first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to delete everything here so we have a clean start and if you wonder if you're not that good with selecting colors combining colors all those kind of thing I'm gonna let you in on a little secret designers are borrowing collars from other designers it's a really everyday kind of thing to do so what you gonna do is for example you go on Pinterest and you enter Easter color palette and immediately you can see a lot of different like these palettes here combined with the source picture are popping up so this is really useful and for example we can take this here which has very nice colors in that so I will right click and then copy the picture and then go to affinity designer right click and then paste the picture in here and I will resize that to the document there we go so we have I'm not using the palette by the way I'm using the photo because I want to have some more shades in here that's important so what I'm gonna do is right up here where it says swatches click on these lines and select create palette from document and the difference between application palette and document palette is that the application palette can be used in all documents while the document palette is just for this document so I'm clicking on document palette and you can see it has created a selection of colors from the photo and even named it after the file that I have saved here so Eastern design life there we go I can now delete my picture and start creating the Easter eggs and that's super easy because like I said we're gonna use easy tools this time so we're gonna select our ellipse tool and just draw out a nice ellipse that is kind of act like it's not completely act like so we wanted to have it a bit more of the act characteristic so right-click on that convert to curves and then this should automatically switch to your note tool which is indicated by having this white arrow instead of the black arrow for the move tool if not you can go up here to the left side and select the note tool by hand you can see the white arrow that's the note tool so select one of the notes here and then hold shift and select the other note and then still hold shift and move this down so you move both sides just a little bit and then we're gonna go up here and again hold shift and move this in a little bit and on the other side click hold shift move this in and when this snaps this means it's the equal distance from the other side so we have created our egg shape that was super easy so I want to rename this to egg because in affinity designer you're gonna work with a lot of layers because shapes each shape is a layer on its own so next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna duplicate that layer and we are going to go up here to fill and select gradient that's important and the type should be elliptical and you can see already that looks pretty nice and what we want to do is on the left side select white as a color on the right side select white as a color and select on the white side 0% as the opacity so now that we have that we can use the fill tool and you can see now I have here points to adjust my gradient and I can move it around to select where I want to have the highlight on my egg and I can make the highlight bigger or smaller and also I have the ability to use the opacity over here in the layers to make it stronger or weaker for now I'm gonna leave it at 100% so let's call this highlight real quick there we go next thing we're gonna do is right click and duplicate this again because we also need a shadow so with this selected first of all I'm gonna shadow name it there we go so now it's called shadow and we're gonna go again to our ellipse tool because then we can select our fill so let's click on fill and switch these over both of them to the color black and you might think now okay this is a black point I need a black outline or not loud but I need it the other way around just click your gradient reverse BAM it's on the other side of course this shadow is a lot too strong so again we're gonna click our fill tool and now you can make this for example bigger there we go like that so you can basically create any kind of shape and you can make the how can say the flow of the gradient or the the range of the gradient can change that you can really influence how you want to have the shadow on your egg and you can also of course reduce your pass 'ti to have a less strong of a shadow there we go okay so now that we have created that as you can see that was super easy we are gonna paint our egg it already has a color but what we want to do is put some stripes on that so again we're gonna use our rectangle tool like that it still has the gradient on that it's not a problem we're just going over here and going to click on a color which is changing its into a solid and this is why we need our swatches because this allows us in a very fast way to change our colors so now that we have that let's hold ctrl and drag it down to duplicate it and then I move one of these handles a little bit up to make the other line a little bit thinner and give this for example a pink color and bring this a little bit closer like that that looks pretty cool okay so now you might think but this is sticking over the edge what we are going to do with that you're just going to select both of these and move them onto your egg as sub-layers here and now they are cut off at the edge of the leg at the egg not like okay so select both of these layers again and then ctrl and move them down and then move them down again and we have created our first egg looks pretty cool right okay so the next thing you're gonna do is we're gonna select all of these layers here and via hitting ctrl key on the keyboard look like that and then we are naming this egg all because it has the Hat shadow and the highlight in there and now again I'm holding ctrl moving the egg over because we want to have different egg designs so let's go in here and we are going to delete all these lines we have created before and again we're gonna use our rectangle tool like that there we go and this time we're gonna right-click on that convert curves and with our no tool which is again automatically selected I'm gonna click here and then click here and then click here and then click here and now I'm selecting these two with holding shift and then with holding shift I'm gonna move them up a little bit and you're looking it's kind not bent in a curve we want to have a none curve so to change that I can click up your cone worth to smooth and now you can see it's a very nice curve that I can use in my design like that so let's go over here select these two points again with the shift selected click convert to curves or convert to smooth sorry and move that down okay and so we have created this nice little wave pattern and what we can do now is again we're gonna snap it on to the egg and then ctrl hold ctrl and click and drag and click and drag and click and drag so last one maybe too much no I think it's okay good let's move that up a little bit and we have created our second deck design I was super easy right let's do a third one I don't want to make this tutorial too long so just three acti signs you have seen in the preview that we have more egg designs but you can come up with your own designs not a problem I want to show you another one that's pretty easy to do so we're just gonna use our ellipse ellipse tool let's set the color to let's change the egg color first let's set it to green and then oops where's our there's our ellipse tool there we go let's set this to a white there we go or like not a complete white it's good always have like a little bit of something in the white to make it a little bit soft we're at least on the screen or paper you have to decide what you actually want to do with that so what we're gonna do is we're gonna with control move it along or like copy it and then change the shape of each of them a little bit by the way I want to turn off snapping here real quick let's go in here snapping manager and turn that off so we have a softer flow on the top of the egg there we go move this around and by the way don't be too concerned with like the 3d bending of the shape around the egg stuff like that this is not a 3d graphic it's vector design so it's completely okay if this is not spending around the curve which I don't think affinity for can't even do because there is no kind of 3d integration at the moment at least okay there we have our egg with different dots on there by the way one thing you want to do is you want to lock your shadow and highlight layers because when you lock them now I can double click and I can select these shapes again before that was a bit complicated to do so there we go I think that's good enough maybe may another shape over here rotate that like this maybe resize it a little bit so each shape is a little bit different okay and now what we want to do of course is take all of our ellipses and move it onto the egg as a sub layer and again this is cutting off the edge of the egg alright I want to create one more over here so we have a little bit of balance from one side to the other okay so now that we have created that the next thing that I want to create is actually a background for our pictures you can have seen in the starting off the video so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the rectangle tool just move it over all of the picture and set it as the background so that was rather easy let's maybe I don't know use this color darker color we can play around with the colors in a second I just want to show you how to create the design and what I want to have is a repeating egg pattern in the background so for that I'm going to duplicate whoa okay I'm going to duplicate one of the X and deleting the highlight deleting the shadow deleting all the shapes inside and I'm going to set actually I am just need the egg okay there we go so we have just the egg right now I'm gonna set this to white as a color and I'm going to resize that real quick you can hold shift to keep the ratio of the egg while resizing so let's make this a smaller size and I'm gonna put this up here and then ctrl shift and move it over in a straight line like that and after you've done that you can use ctrl + J on your keyboard to repeat that step so that's super easy to do and now I'm going to select all these new egg layers and I'm holding I'm pressing ctrl key on my keyboard to create a group and the next thing I'm gonna do is control drag to create a second layer of all the eggs maybe here is good ok so now again I'm selecting both of these groups control Chi to combine them and again control and drag to move this down here with the shift key so it's in a straight line and eyeball the distance so it's equal to the other distance before and now that we have this we can again use ctrl + J to repeat our steps and now we have a pattern in the background so let's select again all of these groups and control Chi and now we can call this BG pattern as our background and move it in the back of everything there we go move it around you can reduce the opacity if you want to make naik just a little bit have them just a little bit to look through so now we have a nice wall paper in the background and we can rearrange our X you can of course rotate them if you want in any kind of position let's put them all down here for example there we go I want to bring the green egg to the front one second okay bring the green egg to the front so what I wanna do you and the next thing I'm gonna do is on the green egg effect I'm gonna do an outer shadow so we have a shadow on the other egg on the background in the other direction so this is following my highlight that I've created before let's reduce your pass 'ti a bit okay it looks pretty good and of course now you could go in here for each of the X and reposition the highlight example you go in here and you can say okay because this is a little bit bent to this side the highlight should be a little bit higher and here the highlight should be a little bit more over here maybe so this looks a little bit more realistic okay and the other thing I'm going to do and this is kind of a nice design trick you can do is just group this and then duplicate them control and drag and rotate them and you can just put them as a design element up here in the corner so you have a little bit more cool stuff to look at like that of course you can go always in and move these eggs around okay there we go like I said you can do more designs for the X I'm cutting a little bit short so these tutorials not going to be super long the next thing we're going to create is a heart shape so let's go in here and create a nice heart shape like this let's set the color to a nice pink and what I'm going to do is to make this a little bit more interesting to look at I'm going to duplicate the heart shape and then I'm going to hold I'm going to hold ctrl and shift sorry something fell from the wall behind hope it wasn't too loud in the video and make this a different color and of course you could go in here and now repeat this to add more shapes to the heart but I feel like this is good enough let's put this over here and put another one over here so there we go and the next thing you want to have is a nice font that's working well with your design so you can go for example on a page like 1,001 fonts calm and this has a button let's go here it has a button here that says free for commercial use so that's pretty useful if you want to create designs commercially and don't have to expand a lot because forms can be really expensive what I did for this design I first considered this font but it was a bit too fancy a bit too destructive from the rest of the design so I use this one which is a little bit more subtle and works better with the design so let's write our text here the phone is already selected actually Happy Easter there we go happy Easter I find it's an icon nice like always almost like a comic film kind of spongebob kind of font I found it kind of nice and playful and work well with the design and we should still adjust the background color a little bit it looks a bit strange with the combination you want to have a color that brings out the design of the X and not interfere too much with your text in the front so let's click here and see if there is something that's nice that we could use otherwise we can just go in and select our own color well this is not too bad okay yeah let's take this one okay that's pretty nice one thing I want to change down here you can go in here and you can go to copy and the strange thing about infinity designer is it does not have a paste for effect but what you can do here is you go up here to edit and then paste FX so can do that and you can see now you have the shadow again for this other X so that's pretty nice by the way up here we should maybe turn off either turn off or use the shadow for all the eggs let's use it for all the eggs so they have a little bit more contrast before the background there we go boom fix and we can also do that for the text is the thanks I like shadows I'm sorry it's kind of I really like that kind of look okay so this was the Easter design you can play around a lot more with the different designs that you can paint onto the X with these simple shapes I showed you the basics of how to do that so be playful and join our reddit group where you can post your creations I'm really looking forward to see what you've created see you next tutorial bye