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Today, we gonna start a series of practical tutorials focused on discovering how to use our Affinity brush packs,
And not only Affinity, but Procreate too. This first tutorial will give you an overview of the brand-new brushes from the Texturizer Pro pack (Texturizer E). This way, you’ll know how to get the most out of each brush.
We introduced Combi Brushes, back in 2018, with the release of our Concept Master Vol.1 Nature pack for Affinity and later on, Nature Master for Procreate. Simply put, Combi Brushes are two or more brushes from a set that were designed to work together.
In these videos about painting fire, we showed a little bit about what these Combi Brushes can do:
For the second major update of Texturizer Pro, we released some useful combos that will easily recreate fur and different skin types, such as human and reptile.
We’ve been developing a series of fur brushes lately and we wanted to include some of them with Texturizer Pro 2, so you can have a taste of what we’ve been up to lately. Does this mean that we’ll be releasing a hair/fur pack soon? Well, maybe…
For now, let’s have a glance at of some of the fur brushes included within Group E of Texturizer Pro. This set has a total of five synthetic fur brushes, being two of them, combi ones: FT Faux Fur – Base and FT Faux Fur – Highlights.
On the image above, we’re using FT Faux Fur – Base, to create a fur ball, using circular strokes (Fig.1). With this brush you can paint both the base color and, also add shadows. For a more tridimensional effect, you can use FT Faux Fur – Highlights to emphasize details, lights and highlights on your subject (Fig.2).
We recommend using no more than four colors to paint with these brushes. You’ll get cleaner results this way. One base color, one shadow color, one or two for highlights and specular highlights (Fig.3).
If the borders of your fur ball, creature or whatever you’re painting with these brushes look too fuzzy, you can use any of the other fur brushes to fine-tune edges. In this case, we’ve added a mask to our fur ball (Fig.1) and with the help of another fur brush, like FT Faux Fur – Profiler (Fig.2), we’ve reshaped it to make it look more realistic.
TIP: If you want to learn more about masks in Affinity, you can read THIS COURSE.
By using a mask instead of painting directly on your subject matter, you’ll have more room to experiment with different shapes. We’ve came up with a little funny monster in no time (Fig.3), using this method and some help from our Monsters Lab Pack.
Group E also includes a few procedural skin brushes that would work for several purposes, mainly to give you a foundation to paint realistic human skin. These combi brushes are FT Procedural Skin, FT Skin Highlights, and FT Skin Specular. Let’s find out how these work together.
On the image above, we’ve added a regular circle with a base skin tone. Use FT Procedural Skin, with a darker tone, to paint shadows and mid-tones by varying the pressure on your stylus (Fig.1). To add more volume to this shape, we’ll be using FT Skin Highlights, selecting a tone lighter than our base color (Fig. 2). Finally, we’ll be adding some extra spots of light using the brush FT Skin Specular. This brush can also be used to accent bouncing light (Fig.3).
Let’s see a quick practical use of combi skin brushes. We’ll use the lovely lady above (Fig.1) to show how a flat vector drawing can become a hundred times more appealing within minutes.
Following the rules we mentioned before, use FT Procedural Skin to set the basic shading (Fig.2). Then, let’s emphasize our light source with the help of FT Skin Highlights (Fig.3).
Finally, let’s add some extra realism and volume by adding specular highlights using FT Skin Specular (Fig.4).
Depending on your document’s size and resolution, textures might appear too large or too tiny on your subject matter (Fig.5). To adjust the scale of your brush’s texture to your needs, double-click on it and move the Scale slider to the right to decrease its size.
TIP: Before modifying any brush, make sure to duplicate it first to avoid overwriting the original settings.
This set of Reptile Skin Combi brushes work almost exactly as the human-like skin brushes we have seen before. These can be used to paint dinosaurs, aliens, monsters, etc.
Use FT Reptile Skin (Shadows) to set the basic shading (Fig.1), and FT Reptile Skin (Highlights) to intensify your light source (Fig.2). Finally, use FT Reptile Skin (Crevices) to enhance both highlights and shadows (Fig.3).
The little illustration above shows that these Reptile Skin brushes can be used in a non-realistic manner too. Although our character has a cartoony look, we can give it more depth and life just by combining this set. Other Texturizer Pro brushes we used here are:
If you’re interested in this illustration’s full process, we’ll be uploading a video to our Frankentoon TV channel soon.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this quick introduction to our Texturizer Pro pack for Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. We’ll be expanding this kind of content, not only for this but other Affinity brush packs and Procreate, including design kits, templates, and graphics.
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