2.1 Creating Curves

Welcome back to Affinity Designer quick start. In this lesson we're gonna go through how you can create curves in Affinity Designer. So a curve is anything that has nodes that you can edit. So here we have nodes. This is a node, this is a node. And these nodes link up to create either shapes or lines. And we can select any one of these nodes and move it around to edit our shape. Now there are two main ways that you can create curves in Affinity Designer. So just get rid of that shape to start with. You need to start with a stock shape. From one of the tools here on the left, or you can draw a curve yourself from scratch, using either the pen, pencil, or brush tool. So, with the pen tool, you can just jot out your shape however you like. And then link it up at the end with the Pencil tool. You can draw your shape out fluidly, With the Brush tool. You can brush with different types of textures. But you'll still be creating a curve in the process. So we've still got nodes that we can work with. Or if you don't want to do any of those things, if you want to start with something a bit more pre-defined, you can draw out a preset shape. And then you can hit Convert to Curves. So right now if you wanted to try to edit any of the nodes, you wouldn't be able to access them because this is just a stock shape. But if you hit Convert to Curves now you can edit any of these nodes that you want. You also have circles, Rounded corners, and you've got quite a large selection here of all different types of shapes that you can use to start building out your designs. And then once you've drawn these shapes out, if you want to edit this from its stock beginning point, just hit that Convert to Curves button. And then you are free to turn it into anything you want. In the next lesson, we're gonna look more closely at nodes in existing shapes. We're going to look at how you can add more nodes to a shape, how you can delete nodes from a shape, and how you can connect nodes that are disconnected. I'll see you then.