5.2 Pixel Tool

Hi and welcome back to Affinity Designer Quick Start. In this video we're going to be checking out the pixel tool, which is this little one here. Now because Affinity Designer is primarily a vector-based drawing app, you might not think that it would be the go-to place for pixel drawing. And yet a couple days ago somebody asked me for a recommendation on a simple program that they could use to start producing pixel art for games, and I recommended Affinity Designer. Because when you combine all of the other features that Affinity Designer has, its color management tools, its grid system. Its exporting process which will cover a little bit later. And all of the rest of the things that you have in the bundle. When you turn on this pixel editing tool, you really do have a simple and accessible pixel during application that stacks up very well against any of the other options that you have available to you. Using it is very intuitive, as you might expect. You just select your tool. You choose a color that you want to draw with. And then you just start drawing away. However what makes this tool special is that when you zoom in. I have a grid turned on that's showing exactly one pixel by one pixel. And now you can see that when you use the pixel tool, it's snapping to this grid perfectly. So you can draw out exactly perfect pixel by pixel lines for any type of art where you need this precision. Now I have this set to one pixel in width, the pixel tool, but I can set that size to anything that I need. So if I want to start putting down much larger swathes of color, then I can do that too. And it's still Going to have snapped exactly to the pixel when we zoom in. So this is perfect for things like game design, as I mentioned where you might need to do pixel art. But it's also perfect if you need to make sure that you have very, very crisp lines. Because as long as you're using this pixel based tool, you're not going to get any lines that are halfway in between one pixel and the next, they're always going to be perfect. There's also some really great shortcuts that you can use with this pixel tool. Sorry, let me just clear out of this space. If I draw out one line, and then I hold down Shift. I can instantly connect one line to the next. And you can also hold down the Command key, and then the tool acts as an eraser. Making it very easy to draw out shapes and then erase what you need to get rid of. So if you do need to do any pixel based drawing. Definitely take a moment to try out the pixel tool and have a play around with all these extra settings that you get to work with. And you might just find that you end up doing of your raster-based drawing inside a primarily vector-based drawing app. In the next section of the course we're gonna learn about the interactions between shapes that you can use with Affinity Designer and we're going to start by how to use boolean functions. I'll see you there.