Affinity Photo - Design your own Brushes

Key Takeaways

today I'm going to show you how to design your own brushes hello my friends and let's get started so in the last video I showed you the basic settings of brushes this time we're going to use that knowledge to create our own fancy art brushes the first two of them you can see here and the first one we want to start with is the chain brush chain link brush so I downloaded two files I will link them in the video description the first one is just a chain as you can see the drawn chain and we are going to use our crop tool to just cut out the first two links and we need the starting bit this is why I use the drawn one because the starting bit and the end bit are going to overlap in our finished brush now we are going to erase these parts that we don't need so you can see that this is a locked layer so click on this little symbol here so now the layer is unlocked and now now we're going just to use our eraser tool to remove everything that we don't need so I do this roughly here and then we are going to zoom in a little bit to have better detail go back to our eraser tool whoops no to our eraser tool there we go and erase everything that we don't want to have in our final brush so there we go that looks pretty good just like this and erase this too there we go very nice little bit more maybe there we go okay so now that we have done this let's zoom out a little bit and use the crop tool again so we go really close to the end so this should almost hit the end of the pictures you can see here and now we want to make the the canvas Square so go up here where it says document and then to resize canvas don't click on resize document because this would resize the canvas and the content so it would stretch it with canvas it only resizes the canvas and here you can see you have two numbers click on the little lock in the middle because we just want to change one of the number and then take the bigger number and write it in the field where the smaller number is so 460 in this case and then click on resize and you can see we have a square canvas now click controll a on your keyboard so you select all of the canvas and then use your arrange tool up here to align vertically so now it's in the middle and this is basically the how can I say the stamp that we are going to use for our brush so I'm going to deselect controll D and now I'm going to export this as a PNG this is pretty important important because a PNG can have a transparent background a JP cannot have a transparent background so export it as a PNG there we go I will call this chain brush one there we go okay so now I can close this we don't need this anymore close it I will make a new canvas there we go and up here where it says brushes you have this little three lines here and there you have a lot of things you can do you can do a new category NE rename a category and create different brushes so I will go and create a new category to show you how to do that so new category will called it will be called brushes so you have to go in here again and say rename category and there you can enter the name so let's call this tutorial brushes there we go and now you can see you of your own category tutorial brushes now you have to click up here again and there are four different kind of brushes intensity brushes round brushes Square brushes image brushes round and square self-explanatory image brush means that you have a picture with all the color values in it that will be used as a picture basically as a image and you can't change the color so only use that if you want to use a picture we will use that with the Rope brush now right now we want to have an intensity brush which uses the shape of the element but you can change the color so this is important for us new intensity brush will open the window and let you select the form of your brush in this case it's the chain and there we already have our chain brush but we are not done yet I click down here to make a new layer so I can draw with it and select the paint tool and right now now if I would paint it just would look like this which is kind of strange and we don't really want to have that so let's delete that again and go into our brush settings you can reach them in two ways either you click up here on more or you doubleclick the brush let's double click the brush and you can see here it looks like this we have all the settings I talked about in the last video I will also link that in the video description the first thing we're going to do is to change the spacing you can see how useful this is in this case and this is a good distance but they are still not reacting in the right way so the next thing we're going to do is go into Dynamics and go to rotation chitter and pull this up to 100% still looking strange click over here and click on direction direction is the mouse Direction now you can see that it's pretty nicely lining up we can reduce um the spacing a little bit so the change is looking good one problem we have here you can see is that the lines are coming through and there is not really much you can do about that the problem is that there is a setting missing as far as I know in Affinity photo because you can't tell the program to either put the next stroke on top or below of your brush and it's always set on top so no matter what we do there will always be these kinds of lines so this is a bit crappy um but still if you don't look too close those you still have a very nice chain brush and we can use it right now but there is another problem if I would draw like this you can see it's kind of strange and sometimes parts are sticking out so we don't want to have that and this is why in the last video we learned how to use stabilize so activate stabilize you can even go to this one here to the second mode because we don't want to have any sharp edges and now it's automatically drawing this line and connecting them mostly in the right way so this is pretty nice and you can see we can actually draw a chain that looks like a connector change so this is a pretty pretty nice way to do that let's delete that again I would just make a wave there we go very nice and of course you can change the settings any way you want so this is how to create a chain brush it's very easy and of course you can use any kind of chain element or design that you find so go wild and try this out now we're going to do the second brush which is a bit more complex so let's create our second brush which will be our rope brush there we go let's open the picture and you can see this has a black background I will also link the picture in the video description of course so we will click quickly select the backgrounds with our flat selection tool as it's called an affinity photo so we have two selections here and we going to grow them a little bit so the black is also reduced on the Rope um let's scow it by maybe two pixels apply okay and just delete that and now we have a transparent background so that's pretty nice the next thing we're going to do is to use our crop tool and we can actually set it to one by one so it's Square already and we will just select a part of it where we have um how can I say you can see here is the beginning or the like a valy of this rope and we want to mix it with another valy of the Rope so we always have the same kind of part or distance and then try to center it as good as possible this looks pretty good okay I will hit enter to apply that and we can still um align it so let's contr a to select all the canvas use our vertical align tool there we go it's a little bit lower okay so this is our starting point but it's a little bit more complicated because of the overlaps problem in the brushes and in Affinity photo for some reason you can't really you can set the blend mode but for some reason it's always blending even if you set it to normal so you will always have a brightness difference but we are going to create an image brush and in the image brush it's not a problem so this is good for us the next thing I'm going to do is to create a group of just that pictures a little workaround a little trick that I'm using and with this I'm also going to create a mask and put the mask on top of the other layer because now I can still move around the lower layer and have the mask in place so that's very nice and now we are going to use a paintbrush tool with uh wait we have to set that to a basic brush that is round set the hardness to zero make it a good large size let's see that looks pretty good and I'm going to paint um a mask onto that that is kind of round on the edges and going into trans transparency so we can have an overlap in our um rope and it's blending smoothly with other parts of the Rope so basically it should be look looking somewhat like this very nice okay now the first or the next thing we going to do is to if you have the rulers visible up here if you don't have it visible click on view and there it says show ruler so this has to be TI and we just click and drag out two of those guidelines and when it's getting red this means it's in the center and then we take the other one drag it out to the middle when it's getting green this means it's in the center and we're going to use this kind of like a how can I say um uh centering tool basically now we can use our background move it around oh it's still locked so we have to unlock it and then move it around you can hold your control key to move it around in just the vertical um Direction and not move it into any other direction and now we can just Center it on the part where this is crossing where this line is crossing and I will just export several of these parts again s PNG G so I will call this r01 and then I'm going to move this around a little bit to another part maybe this part here there we go export it again and I will call this r02 so we have different kind of selections oh oh no okay I made a mistake I copied this okay that's not good sorry sorry we have to go back this is some mistakes that happen let's just delete these and um I will export them again I think I click the wrong button nope this is the wrong one too okay let's just move that around and Export that again export PNG I will delete these two real quick so we don't have any confusion R1 this is already the right name move this around a little bit there we go export it again so these are some mistakes that sometimes happen but it's also good to see them so to know what to do when things go wrong and in this case it's just a good idea to delete the stuff you have already created instead of trying to fix it there's some kind of breaking of the Rope which is maybe a nice element we have to try that out so let's export that two call it oh no this was the size field okay export it again so there we go export r03 there we go so now we have three parts that is already enough I would say let's click on new to have our test canvas and then I will go to the brushes that we created before tutorial brushes here and this time I click on New Image brush that's important I will select the first image there we go and there you can see our brush and now we're going to the texture field and we're going to click on ADD and select the second one add and select the third one there we go so we have this is altering between the three textures while we are using the brush so again go to Dynamics set the rotation chitter to 100% And then to Direction so this is lining up already very nicely and then we're going to use the spacing and you can see how good it is that we have a preview and you can put it at a location where you think okay this looks nice and this is lining up you see these kind of di diagonal lines inside of the Rope so this looks pretty okay and now we should be able to paint a rope there we go let's activate the stabilizer again and make a layer that we can draw on and Tada we have our rope and it looks pretty nice very very cool rope really connecting and blending nicely so you can see it is really easy to create your own artistic brushes of course you can use any kind of texture go really wild I'm really looking forward to see what you created if you want to see more of these and how to do even stranger things with brushes please write in the comments or link the brushes that you have created to see how inspiring the things are that you make on your computer thank you than very much for watching if you like my videos maybe subscribe to my channel and if you want to support me even more head over to patreon where you can get my files with all the layers you can post your pictures for feedback and you can even chat with me about problems you have or topics you want to see as a video thank you very much for watching and see you in the next video bye