Greeting Cards Day 4

5 Cards in 5 Days

I’m taking, again, Delores Naskrent’s 5 Cards in 5 Days. It’s a fast paced, content filled course that starts with sketches and ends with learning to upload to a greeting card site for sale. This will be my third time– this one includes both Procreate and Affinity Designer sections.

Day 4

Border Brushes for Text Frames

We learned to make border brushes in  Delores Naskrents Affinity Designer MasterClass to learn more about the tools in Affinity Designer. If you draw in a motif in white with a black background, export it was a png. Then go to your vector brushes and choose “New Intensity Texture Brush” and import the png of the motif, changing the settings from “stretch” to “repeat.”

Here are the border brushes I’ve made so far. You can see the heart line in the middle card above. You can see the rainbow and the Three Rays in the text frames in the above cards. Next to the border brush previews is a sample of the heart motif. You just need the one heart to import to create the brush.

Practice Assignment

Today’s practice was to take one template to make three cards: dark mode; change text frame, and add an accent. I substituted my own motifs in the template. On the left is my dark mode card. Using the same template, I created the lighter card in the middle with the same florals– just changing the text frame and the heart line. In the third card, I changed the background color again, added stripes to the background, changed up the lines, and added two dragonflies. Three very different cards created by changing just a few parts. It’s very fun and feels like magic!

Any Questions?

I’m thankful to Delores for both the Affinity Designer MasterClass and the 5 Cards in 5 Days because I am now very confident in my illustrating with Affinity Designer, a vector based application that is also easy to switch to a raster based persona. If you have any questions, just ask.