5.1 Pixel Persona and Pixel Brushes

Hi, welcome back to affinity design, and quick stunt. One of the things that makes affinity design a so powerful, and kind of sets it apart from some other applications, is the fact that you can work with both victims. And with pixels in the same document. And what you're looking at here is a beautiful example of how vectors, and rest based drawing have been combined in one place. So we have for example, the shape here, is a vector base shape. But then, all of the fine details, the creases, and lines and some of the shading, and lighting. Are all produced with pixel-based drawing tools and this is done through something called personas. And when you first open up Affinity Designer, and start a new document, you'll be in the vector persona by default. And that is signified by this little icon up here. But you also have a pixel persona. So if you switch into pixel persona, you'll see that all the tools that you have down the left side here have changed. And what you've done, by switching personas is you've basically, turned your editing program from a vector-based design program into a pixel-based design program. And you can switch back, and forth between these two at any time during your design, and switch between using vector-based drawing in editing, and pixel-based drawing in editing. Now, a lot of the tools that you see in the pixel persona area. Will be familiar to you if you've worked with other raster based applications. So you've got things that you'll recognize like the eraser, fill tool, you have burn, dodge and blurring tools. So over the next few videos we're going to focus on the tools that are a little different in Affinity Designer, and also have a look at things that change when you switch from Vector persona into pixel persona. And we're going to start with pixel brushes. So in an earlier video, when we were in vector persona, we looked at Tte brush tool, and we talked about the brushes that are available to you, that you can use to paint out brush strokes that are editable as vectors. Now, if you watch here, these are the groups of brushes that you have when you are in vector mode. But if we switch to pixel mode, now we'll grab our paint brush, and have a look at the brushes panel. And you can see that there is a completely different range of brushes that you have to choose from, and categories you have to choose from is also different. And this is because when you're using pixel by specialists. There's a whole range of different effects that you can achieve that aren't really going to work quite as well with vector brush to. For example in the painting sub menu. We have all kinds of simulations of different types of traditional media, so just give one of those a test run, and you can see that the type of painting stroke that you get is quite different. And when you're using the pixel brush tool, you also have different settings that are available to you, in particular, settings that allow you to work with pen pressure. And we'll go through those more closely in a later video that we're using to talk about pen pressur, and working with velocity settings. So, the brushes that you have in the pixel persona are more suitable to you, if you want to do quite a lot of brush strokes, if you're wanting to do you say digital painting, or use any digital painting techniques. Because while the vector brush tool is excellent. If you're building up a great huge number of vector brush strokes, it can get a little bit unwieldy in your document. Whereas pixel brushstrokes on the other hand, once they're joining, you don't need to have any factors maintaining the program. So, it's more efficient for Affinity Designer to process. In the next video, we're gonna have a look at another one of the Affinity Designer pixel editing tools, and that is the pixels tool. And this is a great tool for anything we need to make sure that every single piece of color in your document snaps exactly to the pixel. You'll see how that works in the next video.