This week, I chose to work on a simple landscape with a limited palette of colors – blue for the sky, golden yellow for the desert sand, and white for the moon.
Here’s the process:
Step 1: Creating the terrain outline.
In order to create these shapes (or curves as they are called in Affinity), I first select the Pen tool and make some basic sharp curves. Once this is done, I use the Node tool to drag points to create curves to my liking.
Step 2: Add detail to the terrain.
After these curves have been closed (converted into closed shapes), I arrange the layers accordingly and then start adding fills using the Fill tool. I don’t decide the color palette beforehand, instead I just keep playing with the color wheel till I get the right color. These colors below are different variations on the golden yellow color.
Step 3: Adding the sky
Before I add the sky, I actually increase the Noise value on the fill color of the terrain shapes in order to get some graininess. Then I make a rectangle layer and push it to the last position in the layer order. I choose a fill color and then switch to the gradient tool to start playing around with the sky color. I generally choose 3 or more gradient stops because this gives much better control over obtaining the precise colors that I want.
Step 4: Adding the moon.
Okay, time to add the titular element to the canvas. I create a circle shape in the ellipse tool and then start playing with the effects layer in Affinity. To create this faded effect, I reduce the opacity of the moon after tweaking effect parameters like Gaussian blur, linear gradient, and outer glow.
Step 4: Post-processing with Snapseed.
The piece is done but it still needs some post-processing and tiny adjustments. I export the image to my Dropbox. I take my mobile phone and then open up Google’s Snapseed photo editor and start using their tools to tweak the image till it starts looking right to me. Once done tweaking, I export the image back to my Dropbox.
Thanks for checking this post out. Hope you found it helpful.