hey what's going on guys today we are inside of affinity designer and i'm going to show
you how to put together this kind of artistic abstract text effect that we got in front of us
so something like this looks really creative with all these different colors in the backgrounds and
these drop shadows as well as this outline going around the entire text it's almost like a graffiti
kind of look but i've used the standard font for this and you can use any font that you like
as well as any different shapes and colors that you may want to add inside of this
so if this is something that you would like to learn then let's get started so the first thing
that you want to do is open up a brand new canvas and i've done that just up here on the right hand
side then from here we are going to grab our artistic text tool over on the left hand toolbar
i'm just going to type out any text that you would like to use it's entirely up to you
i'm going to stick with the original design that i just showed you and recreate that one so i'll
just go ahead and write unique then i'm going to hit command or control a on my keyboard to select
all of that text just so i can change the font of this and we're going to do that in the top left
hand corner where we have our font menu and i'm just going to go in and choose something a little
bit better i'm going to go to my recent list and just go for the same one i've already used
if you guys want to use the same font as this one then it is called ding condensed
however like i said you can use any kind of font that you would like so what i'm going to do now
is just go and grab my move tool just so i can resize this text by grabbing it from the corner
and make another little bit bigger and then i'm going to center this in the middle of the
canvas by coming up to the top menu bar choose the alignment option and i'm going to align
horizontally in the middle as well as vertically in the middle and just hit apply then from here
we are going to go back over to the left hand side and we're going to grab our pencil tool
then at this point it's just a case of getting a little bit messy and creative and just start
drawing in our lines all the way through the text you can use any kinds of shapes or lines that you
like it's entirely up to you just make sure you fill that text up so there is our first straight
created and what we need to do now is make this thicker and give it a color so if we come over
to the right hand side and we're going to choose this stroke color right here and we'll change that
from black to being something else so the first color i'm going to go for maybe a light blue
somewhere around there will be fine then i'm going to head down to the bottom of this panel and i'm
going to go to the stroke section if you guys aren't seeing the stroke section here on your
right hand side panel then just make your way up to the top left hand menu bar go to view go
down to where it says studio and just make sure that you have that stroke section checked and
you'll have access to that also alternatively if you don't want to use that down here you still
have the same options up here on the left hand side with the straight color as well as a width
but i generally like to work in the panel down here as we have a few more options available to us
so the first thing we want to do now is change the width of this to be a lot bigger and i don't think
100 is going to be big enough for what i'm going for if you want this to be a little bit bigger but
you've reached your maximum there it's just a case of double tapping in here and just changing that
number to be something else so i'll go for 150 and make that a little bit bigger then i just want
to change the ends which is a cap right here from being this kind of rounded edge that we got there
just to be in flat so i'm going to select that one right there on the left hand side
this really isn't important because you're not going to see it it's just my personal preference
and if you find this is too thick for you honestly don't worry about it we can always come back in
and change this later on everything we're going to create now is going to remain editable all
the way throughout the project so with that one now complete we're going to go ahead and draw
another one so we'll just start at the top here and just get messy once again all the way through
the text just like that we're going to give that one a different color just up here i'm going to go
for a light green perhaps something like that and at the moment this does look really messy
but honestly don't worry about it then we'll do the same again we're going to grab another shape
and just start drawing through this text and we'll give this one a different color
perhaps maybe a light red and then finally we'll just draw one more which is going to
come from the bottom here and just kind of cover some of this text in that area
and that'll do fine and give that another lighter color always looks better with pastel colors in my
opinion but it's entirely up to you what you'd like to do so at this point you're probably
looking at this i'm thinking what is going on here this really does not look good and i completely
agree with you but this is where things are about to change so first of all i'm going to go ahead
and grab my move tool because we no longer need the pencil tool and just as a quick note if you're
not entirely happy with any of these shapes that you've created here and you want to go ahead and
tweak any of those then we can do that by coming back over to the left hand side and just selecting
our no tool once we select the node tool we're going to have access to all these little white
circles which we are free to grab and just move them around to reshape this however you would like
and we've got these handles here as well which gives it some extra options but now i'm just gonna
undo this with command or control z and just keep it quick and simple for the tutorial so moving on
with my move tool selected i'm going to go over now to the layers on the right hand side and what
we need to do is we're going to select all four of these layers together so if we select the top one
and we hold down shift and select the bottom one that's gonna grab everything else is in between
then what we're gonna do next is insert all these shapes inside of the text which is gonna act as a
mask so anything outside of this text in terms of all these colors we're not going to see and the
way we're going to do that is simply by selecting and dragging down you see we've got this big blue
bar up here once you see this big blue bar just slightly pull that over to your right hand side
till it shrinks then it'll indent then just drop it and now all of these shapes are inside of that
text so straight away you can see this is looking a little bit more neater than what we just had
so the first thing i want to address is the fact we got this black in the background that that
is our original text color i don't want that there so if you want to change your original
text color we're going to go up to the text layer which is that unique one right there
and just up here we're going to switch back to our black and i'm going to find something that looks
just a little bit better maybe a darker green somewhere around that color we'll be fine and
now this is where we're going to start getting a little bit creative so what we want to do now is
we want to start putting some drop shadows onto these shapes so if we go down now to our effects
once you've selected one of your layers and inside of the effects we're going to choose outer shadow
and all we need to change inside of here is going to be the radius and the offset possibly the
opacity depending if you want it darker or lighter but for now i'm going to give this a radius of
maybe 10 and the offset of 10 hit enter on my keyboard i think that's looking just a little bit
too big so i'm going to come back in and half that so i'm going to change that to 5. this is always
trial and error it's just a case of you changing numbers and finding something that you like
so once again i'm going to hit enter and that is looking a lot better to me for now like i said you
can change its opacity if you want it to be darker or lighter i'm going to leave that maybe around 60
and for now i'm happy with that so what i want to do at this point is copy this effect to every
single one of these and the quick shortcut to do this is to just select the layer itself and
hit command or control c for copy then we need to select the remaining three layers all together so
once again if you select the top one hold down shift and select the bottom one that will grab
the one that's in between as well with all three of these selected and that one's been copied
we're gonna go up to the top left hand side to where it says edit we're gonna go down and
we're gonna paste effect then that is going to copy that same effect across all of these
then we can just simply deselect this with command or control d and we can see kind of what we've got
going on here so it's already starting to look pretty good in my opinion if you want to start
moving around any of these colors on top of each other you can do that it's going to simply select
and drag and drop on top and it'll start moving things around to whatever it is you're trying to
achieve but me personally i think i prefer the green underneath the red then just to make it a
little bit more creative you don't have to do this if you don't want to but i'm going to i'm going
to come inside each one of these colors and i'm going to give them a gradient just to make it look
a little bit better so in order to do that we're going to select our layer that we want to do first
we're going to come up to the top left hand corner where it says straight we're going to select that
color we're going to change from color to gradient then all we've got to do is leave the color as it
is on the right hand side as that's our original yellow that we chose and we're just going to
change the one on the left and we're going to come down to where it says color select that box
and we'll go and give that a darker yellow just so it kind of blends from light to dark
somewhere around there will be perfectly fine and it's just a case of doing the same thing across
each one of these just go ahead and change that to gradient and go back to your left hand side and
give that a darker color than you originally had somewhere there looks pretty good and like i said
same thing throughout each one of these and you may have more shapes than i've got you can have
as many as you like you can change the sizes it really is entirely up to you what you want to do
with yours maybe that's a little bit too dark so i'm going to bring that lighter slightly and then
finally i'm going to do that blue and then we can continue to the next step so i'm gonna make that
just a little bit darker on that blue so with that now finished we can move on and honestly don't
worry about anything you've got inside of this in terms of whether you don't like the shape the size
or the colors we can edit this all the way to the end even when you come to save it and finalize it
it's always going to remain editable and i'll show that just as we approach the end of this
okay so the next thing that we need to do is just start bringing all of these different
letters closer together and mixing them up and the way that we would do that is we need to take
this from being a font and converting that to a curve and what that means is it's going to
take this font it's going to create into its own shape meaning the text itself will no longer be
editable so make sure that you have chosen your words that you want at this point as we can't
change that later on but we can of course change all the colors and the shapes inside of that
so in order to convert this to curves we select this text and we hit the right click button on
our mouse and we're going to go down to where it says convert to curves so once we select that we
can now see that we have an individual layer for each one of our letters and they are all inside
of this group so at this point it's a case now or just moving some of these letters around to
where you want them i'm going to start with this e and kind of work backwards i'm just going to
rotate that just a little bit maybe like that i'm just going to drag this slightly over the u
i'm going to do the same thing with that q and just rotate that a little bit in that direction
just so we can kind of blend all these together and the same again with the eye in the opposite
direction and just blend that one in with that one same with the end bring that over and we'll just
swing that round the other way just bring it up a little bit to separate it and finally with the u
we're going to bring that over and we just rotate that slightly to the right hand side and mix that
in there with the n so if you are happy with what you've got here now in terms of joining all these
together what we need to do is combined all of this into one shape and the way we do that is
going back over to the right hand side to our layers and we're going to select all of these
layers like we've done previously so we're going to start with the e we're going to hold down shift
and we're going to select the u at the bottom and that will select everything in between then we are
going to make our way up to the top menu bar where we have this little menu box right up here and we
are going to select the add option once we select that it's going to combine all of these into one
shape and i'll just deselect that so we can see it a bit more clearly and at this point i'm going to
make this a lot bigger now so you guys can see it on your screen so i'm going to come over to
the group option i'm going to select that and i'm just going to drag this from the corner just to
start making this text a lot bigger and then once again i'll just come up to the alignment options
and i'll center that horizontally and vertically so the next step is now to put the outline on this
and we'll just do that by selecting once again either the curves itself or the group in fact
we're going to go ahead and choose the curves as we'll delete the group eventually because we're
not going to need it so with the curve selected it's now a case coming back up to the top and
we're going to switch from the fill over to our stroke and we're going to give that a different
color maybe a darker green and we'll come back down once again to our stroke section and change
that width to be a bit bigger and this can be any size that you like i'm probably going to
leave that around 15 points now we can see this all coming together so what we need to do next is
just put some effects on this and the way we'll do that once again is select the curves layer itself
come down to the effects menu and this time round we're going to go for a 3d so we'll select that
one we need to then come up to the radius and just change this number from three to maybe
around 10 just to give it that kind of more 3d beveled effect right there around the edges
and after we've done that we're going to come down to the bevel and emboss and we're going to choose
that option and as default i think that is on five pixels which looks pretty good the way it is so
i'm not going to change that number so once you've got what you're happy with go ahead and hit close
and then we can just deselect that and just see what we've got so far and i think what we need
to do now is just put a gradient on the stroke itself so it kind of blends in with the rest of it
so if we come back over to the curves layer and we come over and we make sure that we've got this
selected on the color that we are happy with which i'm quite happy with the dark green there's a case
of coming back over to the left hand side onto our stroke color menu and we're going to change
the color to a gradient and let's go ahead and change this white to be a darker green or maybe
a black so i'm going to select that green go for something a bit darker maybe around there
in fact that's probably a bit too close to be in too dark so i'm gonna go roughly around that
color so right now this is generally complete and we could leave it like this if you want to
but what i want to do first of all before i finish this video is just show you how we can change
and move things around so first off i'm going to come back over to the right hand side the layers
and i'm going to take these curves out of this group so we can delete the grid because it's
no longer needed so i'm going to grab that and just drag that outside of the group then
we'll just go ahead and delete that group layer then you are free to rename this if you like if
you don't want to keep that as curves you just double tap and name that anything you want to
so inside of this curves now we have all of our colors that we originally had to start with
and just as i originally stated we are free to just move these around inside at all times
throughout the creation process we can also come back down to the width and we can change the
thickness of that just like i stated and that is the same across any of these it's just a case of
selecting any other color and changing your width we could also come down and change the pressure
to give it a little bit more of an effect so if we open up the pressure and we just create maybe
a middle point here by tapping and we just drag down these end points we can see kind of what's
going on here it gets a little bit thinner on one end and gets thicker as it goes along
and you are free to create the same effect across any one of these different shapes
also we can change all the colors inside of these if you're not happy with any of them if i change
this color now it's going to change the entire stroke color rather than have the gradient it's
going to replace the gradient if you just want to go ahead and change the gradient colors then come
back up to your stroke menu on the top left hand corner make sure you are back inside your gradient
and then just select any of the colors that you would like to change and then just go back in
and just simply make that dark or change the color all together it's entirely up to you what you want
to do with that i'm just going to command or ctrl z just to undo and go back to my original color
you are also free to come back into the entire curves and change that background straight color
here from green to something else if you like as well like i said that all remains
editable apart from the words themselves because we've now converted those to curves
and if you're not happy with the thickness of the stroke around the text we can come back down
to the width and we can make that bigger just like that if you prefer that kind of look and
inside of here what also might look better if we come down to where we have the align option
and right now we're on this option right here on the left hand side which is a stroke to the
center if we come over to the right hand side and choose the outside that's going to possibly look
a little bit better than what we had maybe that's a little bit too big bring that down to around 25
and that might be more for what you're kind of going for like i said all this is trial and error
which is a case of trying different things and seeing what you like we can also make this 3d
a lot bigger if you want to go back into your effects and just simply change the radius from
10 to maybe something a little bit bigger around 20 and the same with your bevel and emboss if you
want to change that as well then all we got to really do to finalize this is just put an image
in the background let's go back to the original one that i got and just copy this brick background
right there so command or control c we'll come back to the one we've just created and command
ctrl v to paste just gonna drop that in all the way at the bottom so the text sits on top of that
and then that is finished so i hope you found this video useful and you like this effect if
you do then please give me a thumbs up and give me a comment as it really helps out with a youtube
algorithm and helps other people find my content and of course if you haven't already then go ahead
and hit the subscribe button and check out all of my other tutorials i have available as well as any
future releases i have coming if you are brand new to affinity designer then i do have an affinity
designer crash course available on my youtube that will teach you all the basics from getting started
to creating your very first project and will give you a great understanding how the software works
and i will go ahead and link that in the top right hand corner now if you wish to check that
out i've also created crash courses on affinity photo and affinity publisher if you want to check
those out also but for now i hope you have a great day and i will see you in my next video