Category: Vectors
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Habitat lamp light
I have a lovely old lamp from Habitat back in the 1990s that emits a wonderful orange light. I decided to have a go at reproducing the feel of it at night when only lamps are lighting the room. Panel door The door was constructed from a single rectangle and trapezia straight on; a perspective…
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Analysis of soap bubble images
The more I learn, the more I realise success is about getting the analysis right. What I mean is, the wrong approach will fail because it rapidly becomes too hard to do, whereas the right approach can succeed only through structure and a disciplined deployment of the right tools. As a beginner, one does not…
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Footprints in sand
Been trying to make a passably-realistic design of footprints in sand. Can a decent image be made using standard effects (fx) without having to resort to custom vectors and blends. I think the answer is ‘yes’ and here’s how. Most of the techniques in this article I have learned over the last year or so…
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Kaleidoscope like 1973!
We recently had a challenge to use symbols to make something using rotational symmetry. This is how I simulated the view inside a kaleidoscope like we used to have as kids in the 1970s. Overview More detail on each step is provided below. Clipping mask We want the resulting image to be a hexagon made…
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Credible neon lights
We were recently set a challenge in a Facebook group to make designs looking like neon lights. This article documents how I went about it using Affinity Designer (v1). Set a background I wanted the lights to be mounted on a brick wall, so I chose a stock image of bricks: But I wanted the…
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Using XOR compounds for Op Art
Continuing the series of Op Art designs inspired by Bridget Riley and made using Affinity Designer, here is an article about how some of these are best approached using Compounds and the XOR Boolean function. Here is the image we are trying to create: The quick analysis of the image goes as follows: Right, the…
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Optical Art in minutes
I have a book published by the Hayward Gallery for a retrospetive exhibition of Bridget Riley in 1971. The book cost £2 from a charity shop and was well worth it. It contains plates of a lot of her Op Art from the early 1960s. I thought it would be fun to try to reproduce…
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Learning is tricky
It’s around 10 months that I have been trying to learn about digital design using Affinity Designer. I’ve not used any other softwares for design, so I cannot comment on whether AD is better or worse, but it has been fun. I’ve benefitted a lot from being a member of certain Facebook groups and the…
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Backgrounds in minutes
I’ve been making lots of Animal illustrations recently and noticed that I spend a lot of time on the animals themselves and yet manage to enhance the final image considerably by throwing together some background components in literally a few minutes. My approach is to make sure that the background components are less detailed than…
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Divide and conquer
This was inspired by the Edinburgh Book Festival 2022 programme which uses this idea on their cover and for a lot of their social media. I really like the way that the circles sort change the appearance of things below them, but in a controlled way so that the image remains coherant and the text…
John Elliott Designs 