Affinity Designer has a new ***PRO*** feature!

[Egg Bramhill]

It would be possibly nice to have but in no way a ground breaker as it's fairly limiting in the brush type you can make in my opinion. I prefer the Xara brush which is far more flexible.

[handrawn]

not really sure how brushes crept into this thread - sure you can use the tool to make a profiled line and make a brush from that, but it is the making of a profiled line that it is for; design it on the fly, change it on the fly...

[Egg Bramhill]

Which seems to be the same exercise as using a Xara brush. I'm changing over to a new PC & haven't got AD installed at present. I'll give it a try when I have.

[handrawn]

egg:

take a short line, of fixed weight which it has to be in xara, made with the line tool - then imagine just a quick drag on the end with the mouse/pen to bring it immediately to needle point - hey presto, an eyelash

imagine what you could do with such a tool when say, changing the expression on someone's face in a cartoon, or any such drawing situation, quickly, easily, expressively; no need to redraw it, no need to make a new brush, just change it

no need to use a brush at all

[Acorn]

egg:
take a short line, of fixed weight which it has to be in xara, made with the line tool - then imagine just a quick drag on the end with the mouse/pen to bring it immediately to needle point - hey presto, an eyelash
imagine what you could do with such a tool when say, changing the expression on someone's face in a cartoon, or any such drawing situation, quickly, easily, expressively; no need to redraw it, no need to make a new brush, just change it
no need to use a brush at all

@handrawn, methinks you are splitting hairs here.

Take your same line. Apply something line a Raindrop profile.
Now, switch to the Eraser tool and click-drag through the line in several places. You get lots of little eyelashes.
Each one with its own control points that can be adjusted anyway you like.
Now, change the Softness to a small value 0.1px and when erasing you are instead working with an Opacity Mask so that you can actually split hairs.

Most of these operations are just a click away as well.
Definitely harder to achieve, more so with Lines around Shapes (where Brushes can come into play) but there is an untapped richness here.

Acorn

[handrawn]

that was a simplistic example, and besides what if you do not want a raindrop profiled eyelash...

either you get it or you don't, no problem to me if it is the latter; the very fact that Gare thinks it's a good idea might carry some weight [pun intentional] I would have thought, but no matter

[Acorn]

that was a simplistic example, and besides what if you do not want a raindrop profiled eyelash...
either you get it or you don't, no problem to me if it is the latter; the very fact that Gare thinks it's a good idea might carry some weight [pun intentional] I would have thought, but no matter

@handrawn, I too was describing simplistic and I do understand what you would see as a useful approach for how you draw.
Others are like @ernie-f and I've seen near photoreal art using fading ellipses with no lines anywhere.

It has to boil down to pick a tool that works for you and use that.

Acorn

[handrawn]

I have great admiration for ernie-f, I have neither his skill,nor, his patience

xara's shape tool is way better than afinity designer in the way that it enables you to drag out line segments and move the nodes as you draw and if you could profile the line too, that would be so much better; but I'll grant that if what you are aiming for is a closed shape rather than an open one, then this might seem of limited use

[Marco D]

My request were about tools that could be integratedbin Xara like the image in the following attachment.
https://www.talkgraphics.com/attachm...hmentid=129195

[handrawn]

and a great suggestion it is too, but I fear the chances are slim