The Brushes panel – Designer and Pixel Personas

Brushes are a great way to add character or an organic feel to your work. There are two types of brushes in Affinity Designer, Designer Persona brushes and Pixel Persona brushes. As you might expect, the Designer Persona brushes are vector-based and the Pixel Persona brushes are pixel-based and the two setups, while similar in appearance, have slightly different working methods.

The Designer Persona brushes rely on vector strokes, curves, and paths. The brushes are applied to the vector curves along the paths. You can draw with a chosen brush from the Brushes panel using the vector brush tool, which allows immediate feedback. Or, you can create curves or shapes with the pen, pencil, or shape tools found in the Tool panel, then choose a brush in the vector brushes panel to apply that brush to the selected curve or shape. The advantage of the vector workflow is that it is a little more of an indestructible workflow than the Pixel...