2.7 Painting With Vectors

Hi, welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this lesson, we're gonna go through probably one of the coolest features of Affinity Designer, and that is the ability to paint using vectors. Now if you've ever used the brush tool in Photoshop or any other similar application, you've had the experience of what happens when you paint a brush stroke that's not exactly how you want it. There's nothing you can do about it. You simply have to undo and go back and do that strike again. But with Affinity Designer, things are a little bit different because you can actually paint using vectors. In the toolbar here, this is your vector brush tool. Now you can pick any one of these brushes just as you would in a rest based painting program. And you could see that there's various degrees of texture and different types of style. So just pick one which is a brush and now we can paint just like we would with a pixel brush. But the huge, huge difference is that if we choose our node tool, now we can adjust this brushstroke just like we would with a shape or a line. I'll just quickly show you a couple of other brushes. So there's a whole different variety of different types of styles that you can create. And because of the ability to edit those vectors, you've got the kind of fine grained control that is very, very hard to achieve with pixel base brushes. For example, if you want to create a 100% straight brush line, let's get rid of these, then you can draw your straight line. And then you can delete all of your nodes except the first and last. And now you've got the ability to make this a completely straight line, perfect brush stroke. You have the ability to curve it exactly how you want. And this just opens up new possibilities for design that aren't available without this type of vector painting tool. And you can also paint with pressure control if you have a pen. And we're gonna go through how you can use pressure control in a little bit more detail in a later video. So in your Brushes panel, you have a few different groups of brushes. So if you go into assorted, you'll get the full range of brushes. You can also choose textured brushes. So these are great for simulating realistic styles of mediums. So that's a watercolor brush. You have pastel brushes, all different types of textured brushes. You have basic brushes, which are just as though you have a great big marker. And then one of the most interesting ones is image brushes. So, let me just clear a space to show you these. With image brushes you can paint out a continuous stream of a particular image. So you can just imagine the possibilities that a tool like this gives you. And you can actually create your own custom image brushes as well. In the next section of the course we're gonna move into learning about working with Affinity Designer's interface and we're going to start out by learning how you can transform objects. I'll see you there.