Affinity Designer 2

Missing out on a week of the To Do Tuesday Linky as I have not done that much. Finished putting together my new pattern but that can wait to next week.

Instead I wanted to talk a bit about my new drawing program...Affinity Designer 2. If you are following my posts you may remember that I bought the App for my Ipad some time back and was somewhat in two minds whether to purchase the program for the desktop as well. I have got a very old drawing program on the computer from the same maker, called Serif Draw Plus. While it did the job for my pattern writing the new App on the Ipad did open a lot more possibilities however the transfer of my drawings from the Ipad onto the computer was somewhat tedious and the program appealed to me as it is able to be purchased with a one-off payment rather than a subscription service.

So I have been playing a bit on the computer with the new program in readiness for writing up my next pattern. I am generally an intuitive learner however I did sit down and watched a number of videos on some of the tools like the pen and the pencil as I was having difficulties controlling that and I wanted to really test this out in terms of drawing directly on the computer. I am thinking of re-drawing my Mini Wholecloth design into the program as I originally had drawn this in the Procreate App on the Ipad.

Started with the Mini Wholecloth and the Heart shape

This took me ages in alignment however got there in the end. Started playing with colours and the various effects that you can apply to your drawings, in this case the beveling effect. The drawing itself will have to be altered as I have not yet worked out all the measurements for sure.

I then watched several videos on using the Pen rather than the Pencil. On the Ipad I draw with the Pencil using the stylus which you can stabilise to give nicely flowing curves but I really wanted to be able to get a grip on how the Pen works once and for all as this allows me to clean up the nodes of the curves as I go along.

I traced this from the original design and tried all the different Pen modes on this to work out which one is the best to use. Came out not too bad, just need to get a grip on some alignment points and how they snap to the grid that normally sits underneath. If you were to blow this up you would see that the feather spray and heart point do not exactly meet at the same point. But this was just a trial and I will re-do this to get that exactly right.

To compare, I then drew with the pencil tool on the computer like I normally would on the Ipad (minus the stylus).

This is traced off a fretwork design, i.e. I traced one quarter, rotated it to 45 degrees and then mirrored and flipped it over. I did a similar design some years ago although I think this one has additional knobs on it. The tracing was done rather roughly as I just wanted to see how that would work with the mouse button. When using the pencil you can switch on the stabiliser (like on the Ipad) which makes it very easy to follow a line. Felt a bit more clumsy as I am not used to doing it with the mouse however absolutely do-able. Was quite impressed with this as this did not take long at all.

Have heaps more work to do in terms of learning but so far I have been quite impressed. Drawing my piecing diagrams for the patterns I do will be so much easier with this new program on the desktop. In terms of the Ipad App...will probably switch between the two depending on the size and purpose of the wholecloth design that I am doing. I did draw my big wholecloth on the Ipad coming out at 38in...no problem. However when I did the Mini Wholecloth trial above I found it very useful to sit in front of the big computer screen. Found that easier in terms of viewing where I was at. 

Interesting few days...

Karin