Painting pixel brush strokes

You can use Pixel Persona to add photo-realistic textures to your vector designs using pixel brushes. Alternatively, you can use basic hard- and soft-edged pixel brushes to add shadows and highlights to your work.

Before
After
Before and after adding brush textures clipped to vector shapes.

Brushes

Affinity Designer provides an impressive selection of pixel brush designs for use with your Paint Brush Tool. Each category contains brushes of varying properties and characteristics.

You can also create your own pixel brushes to assist with your design work. If you want to save a brush, these can be stored in the panel as a custom brush for future use.

Paint Brush Tool To paint pixel brush strokes:
  1. Use the Layers panel to select the pixel layer that you want to work on, or create a new pixel layer.
  2. From the Tools panel, select the Paint Brush Tool.
  3. Do one of the following:
    • On the Brushes panel, select a brush thumbnail of your choice. The tool uses a soft-round brush by default.
    • Recent brushes To continue with a previously used brush (current session only): On the Layers panel, select Recent brushes on the layer entry and select a brush thumbnail from the pop-up menu.
  4. Adjust the context toolbar settings.
  5. Select a stroke colour from the Colour panel.
  6. Drag on the page in the direction that you want the brush stroke to follow.

By default, if you switch away from a brush tool, when you return to it the last used brush will be remembered (even any modified settings), with the Brushes panel automatically scrolling to the brush; switching across brush categories is automatic. You can switch off auto-scrolling/auto-switching in the Brushes panel's preferences if needed.

To smooth brush strokes as you paint:

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