The results of people following my flat illustration tutorial on Smashing Magazine!

Isabel Aracama
3 min readJul 23, 2018

Last July 11th, I published my first article for Smashing Magazine on how to do an illustration, coinciding with the first Affinity Live that took place in Nottingham and I had the pleasure to attend.

Some days have past, and I have some results of some of the people that followed it. I am quite happy and, yes, also proud to know this helped them get these nice results.

I am also quite happy with the feedback I got from some of the susbcribers on my channel and in the article itself.

The best of this is that, despite some differences in the workflows between the desktop version and the iPad version, these are minimum, and some of these artists have used the iPad, despite the fact that the article is written following the workflow in a computer.

I do not have and iPad myself, but talking to them, the differences seem to be little, so they managed to get the job done. Good news!!

User Alfred, from the Affinity forums, a guy that knows a lot and is well informed about all things Affinity, left this note for all of us to know:

“The tutorial is very well laid out and easy to follow, but one difference I encountered straight away is that I couldn’t find a ‘Create Palette from Document’ option in the iPad version, which meant that I had to add the fifteen colours one at a time. There is also no hexadecimal mode for colour values, so if you want to use exactly the same colours as Isabel used in her tutorial you have to convert the values FE8876 and E1C372 to their decimal equivalents (254, 136, 118) and (225, 195, 114): it isn’t difficult, but the conversion is an extra step and you have to enter the R, G and B components separately instead of being able to put them in as a single block.”

Now, enough writing, here some of the works I recevided. I will post more if/as I get more results!

:DDD Yeah!!

Back to www.isabelaracama.com

Student’s Hall of Fame!

Kirstin Plotz used the iPad version and got things done so well! Congrats Kirstin!
Christian Hides created this beautiful tandem bike. I love both, subject matter and his choice of colours.
Another one by Christian Hides. Lovely retro van.
And yet another one by Christian Hides! Too good to see variations on the original… This is great!
Michel Bozgunov went as far as he could in the car. He even discovered the “easter egg”:the little kitten tool :)
Frank Meier added some extras to the car and got perfect control of the lines. He’s a total newbie!!
Vincenet went his own way, based on the tut and created this cool van version in his iPad. Gotta love it!
Beth Underwood — A very original pattern for this cute car. She says it’s a polka dot pattern, but I see a flamenco dress haha. Nice!!
Alex Edwards -“Enjoyed following @Isabel_Aracama‘s Beetle tutorial over Easter — can’t wait to start my own car next!”
Malcolm Catmur-Neame -“This has given me a different view of Affinity Designer so will use it more in future.”
Malcolm Catmur-Neame -… and so he did!
Allison Sheridan - “I’m a novice at Affinity Designer, but look what I was able to create by following Isabel Aracama’s fantastic tutorial” -…Happy to read so, Allison!!:))))
Lesli Gutierrez - “my very first design in AD or in life basically (…) and wanted to thank you for sharing this and changing my very first experience :)”
Ralph van Doorn - ”I followed your tutorial using Designer on iPad. Almost all functions are similar.”
Charles E Thibaut de Maisières told me he’s a newbie… I think he’s car is better than mine :O!!! He also told me this : “Great tutorial! It neatly goes through nearly all the main tools and techniques of Affinity Designer. I enjoyed following it, tweaking things here and there to my liking, and discovering many tools and techniques that truly makes Designer a lot quicker (than AI) to achieve the result I wanted.”
Ben: “I love this tutorial!! I was looking for something to help me learn how to create my first image in AD and this one was the perfect fit!” — Well done Ben!

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