Exploring Affinity Designer 2

Today was 41 degrees over here and definitely a day to just stay inside and keep as cool as possible.

I sat down at the computer with the intention to do some work on various things, but then ended up playing with the Affinity Designer 2 program.

As I have got the program on both the Ipad as well as the desktop there was some confusion for me about the duplicate function as it is executed slightly differently on the desktop. Wanted to explore this a bit more and also make use of the power duplicate function (just press some buttons and it spits you out a motif) and the POint Transform tool that you can use to rotate your shapes around.

Basically played for the entire afternoon starting with some simple shapes

The power duplicate function is awesome...I basically just have to tell the program the rotation I want in degrees and how many times I want to go around. My Point is in the middle on this shape.

Next came the feathers

These are not my drawn feathers but a shape you can use in the program. Personally I would angle my feathers more (there probably is a way to do this, except I don't know it yet)...but I just wanted to see how this worked. So again I made the shape rotate around the middle, however then used the shape tool to erase the centre lines so that the middle was clean.

Next I re-visited a motif that I had previously drawn up painstakingly in the program trying to align each heart shape exactly next to each other. I managed but it was not a 100%. I was sure there was a way for the computer to work this out for me in terms of the hearts just touching...and it did!

The point in this example was still in the centre but outside the actual shape. Very neat! I then played around with the swirls which were added to the program a few updates ago

Very cool

Tried myself at e's and l's which was surprisingly challenging to get the shape right. The power duplicate is also used here except that you tell the program how many times you want to repeat the shape in the horizontal.

A bit of ribbon candy

A drawn motif rotating around the centre

I spare you the grids except for this one which I thought was really cool

So glad I did this...such a powerful program. But like with everything you do have to practice and become familiar with all these different functions and keep practising as it is very easy to forget how to use some of this. Like the pen tool...I think I will have to watch a tutorial again to get that straight in my head...find the pen really difficult to use. 

Hopefully the weather over here will cool down a bit as I got some quilting to do!

Karin