Different strokes in Affinity Photo

Get to grips with the Brush Tool’s vast array of scatter, stroke and brush tip settings

If you’ve never explored the Affinity Photo Brush Tool controls before, you’re in for a treat. While the Brush Tool does everything you’d expect it to, look a little closer and you’ll see it can also do an awful lot more. For starters, there’s the vast library of brush tips. These go beyond the standard circular brushes we use day to day, to include all manner of shapes, textures, painterly strokes and other fun effects. Here we’ve made use of the excellent scatter and texture brushes to create our portrait effect.

Whether you want to create digital art, replicate traditional painting styles, make advanced composites or simply open a blank document and start painting, you’ll find plenty of useful settings within the Brush Tool. Not only can these give you a range of effects, they can also speed up your brush work.

An image like this might look complicated, but by utilising these brushes in combination with powerful scattering and sizing jitters, it’s surprisingly easy to come up with an effect like this in a matter of minutes. We’ll look at the key Brush Tool settings here, and you’ll find a full walkthrough in the accompanying video. Find out more at affinity.serif.com/photo

Essential brush shortcuts

Tool options at the top let you resize your brush tip, but keyboard shortcuts are quicker. Press the ] and [ keys to change the size, Ctrl+Alt-click (macOS) or Alt-left-click+rightclick (Windows) and drag left/ right to change brush size or up/ down to alter brush hardness. Altclick to sample colours from your image, and change the opacity with the number keys.

Scatter settings and more

Click the More button for a host of wonderful brush settings. The Dynamics tab is particularly useful for our scattered effect: its sliders let you randomise your brush tip by increasing scattering, size and angle jitters. You can even adjust the ramp chart next to each slider to determine how the effect builds up, and set controls for things like brush pressure and angle (when using a pen and tablet).

Brush stroke features

Stabiliser helps to smooth out your brush strokes, which is useful for making smooth curved lines while painting with a mouse. (Adjust Window to control the strength of smoothing.) Wet Edges affects the edges of your brush tip, allowing colours to blend with one another. Turn Symmetry on and set a number of segments, then start painting to create wonderful symmetrical patterns.

Paint on Layer Masks

Brushes aren’t just for painting pixel layers: they can work wonders on Layer Masks, too. Here we cut out our subject and filled the area behind here (with the Inpainting command) then added a mask to the cut-out layer. We can paint black onto the mask with scatter brush tips to hide parts of the subject. Opacity sets how see-through the brush is, while Flow controls how quickly it lays down paint.

The Brushes Panel

As well as the standard round brushes, you’ll find a huge array of different brush tips, accessed via the dropdown at the top. We used the Textures and Sprays And Scatters sets to create our effect. You can also import sets and make your own using the flyout menu. It’s worth investing in a pen and tablet so you can make use of pressure and angle sensitivity for more control over your painting.

Paint on pixel layers

For a scatter effect, it’s best to add an empty layer above your image layer, then paint with various brushes while sampling colours from the image. You can also experiment with Blending Modes for interesting effects. Here we’ve used the Linear Light Blending Mode to mix our colours. Blending Modes can also be applied to your brush tip – the brush tip preview shows how the effect will work.