12 July 2017

Affinity Designer - practice projects

I have been trying to get more deeply into Affinity Designer lately. I started with a quick project for a friend. he wanted very clean illustrations based on crop circles which presented some challenging elements but also taught me some important new tools in the software.

Drawing and particularly using the pen tool in AD is so much easier than in Illustrator! While Ad still lacks in some areas.. no spiral tool or warping tools - to name a couple examples - the ease of drawing almost made up for their absence in most cases.

Next I decided to re-create a friend's tattoo and my own as I didn't have any drawings of them oddly, just photos with them visible in them. The only image I had of mine was from a 20 year old photo website of mine in .SWF format (Flash)!

The biggest challenge was my friend's tattoo. There are not very clear photos, its complicated (an adaption of a voodoo vévé) and even the actual tattoo has faded and blurred to the extent that many details were lost. I do love vévé drawings, however and it might not be 100% accurate but it has a hand drawn look i did not expect from a vector drawing program. I am actually thinking if incorporating a vévé design into my tattoo at some point now.