See what People have created with Gravit Designer #6

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Gravit Designer

10 min readSep 19, 2018

Here we are again to showcase just a small part of the incredible work our users have been sharing with us over the last few weeks. It’s really rewarding to see what is being created with Gravit!

Don’t forget to check the previous articles to see more amazing designs created by our community (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5).

Adir SL

Links: Facebook| Instagram | Website

I work as an UX/UI Designer, that means I get to try lots of different tools for creating lots of different kind of projects.

I usually design in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, I also code in Javascript and CSS (and HTML, XML, HTA and all variants), I also animate lots of it, some with CSS Transitions and Animations, some with JQuery and some with After Effects.

When I try a new tool, it’s usually because my current tools are not efficient enough, sometimes they’re too clunky, sometimes they just annoy me, Dreamweaver, for example felt bloated and clunky, so I migrated to Brackets, and from there I migrated again to Atom, which is now the only way I code big projects.

Adobe Illustrator is an amazing tool, and I got used to it, but it’s also bloated that I noticed it slows down my flow, I wait for it to load, I wait for it to close, I have to close it before rendering in After Effects, it’s horrible.

Lucky for me, I can use any tool I want, entering Gravit Designer.

Project: Watermelon

Step 1

I started with a simple red ellipse (with Shift, of course), which I cut to angles between 0 to 180, that way I can get a perfect half circle.

Step 2

After that, I duplicated my ellipse twice, and changed the size, the color and the position so it will fit perfectly, thanks to snapping to the center of objects.

Step 3

Next I grouped my 3 ellipses so I could easily duplicate it and move it around, this is the watermelon I will slice during the next steps.

Step 4

Next I made a black rectangle, that will be our mask, I needed to select both the watermelon and the rectangle and right click on them and selecting “Mask with Shape”, that did the trick.

Step 5

At this point, I found out that I need to remove my mask’s (the rectangle) fill color, otherwise I’ll see it when I overlay it on any other object.

Step 6

I repeated the last 4 stages again and again until I had my entire watermelon sliced to pieces.

Step 7

Finally, to add depth to the Slices, and of course the seeds.

That’s it for Gravit Designer, next I exported my art as SVG file and converted it to a PDF file using some online converter (I love those) to maintain my art vector for After Effects, than I added the background color and typography in After Effects and quickly animated the whole thing.

Here is the final result:

Craig Forsyth (aka “Soulpimp”)

Links: Twitch| Twitter | Instagram

I have over 20 years experience working in the digital space, with 10 years as a Designer/Art Director and the last 10 as a Sr. Front-end Developer.

Soulpimp

This is my creative identity, I’ve been using the name since highschool, and I guess you could say that the devil head mascot would be my “brand”.

I came up with the name for a very short lived graffiti career, before settling on using it for my more “legal” creative endeavors.

Project: Father time

I’ll walk you through my process of creating not only the above image, but in how I create most of my digital illustrations.

My process is a bit more involved (read: tediuous) than most, but the main reason I work the way I do is that I find the finished product tends to have cleaner lines and lighting.

Step 1 — Crack a sketch book

I start every piece I work on in rough sketch form, drawing with pencil to paper is just such an organic creative process for me — and it allows me to gain a better understanding of how I want the final piece to be coloured etc.

Once I’m happy with the sketch I import it into Gravit (File > Import > Place image), I find it’s best to knock the opacity down to 50% and lock the layer. Now the fun begins!

Step 2 — Outlines

The pen tool is honestly the one thing I could not live without in a vector program, so I was really happy when I discovered that it work almost identically to other more prominent applications.

I do all my illustrations with a mouse (yes you read that correctly). The outlines for my pieces are usually a collection of shapes that I draw with the pen tool, I like to have full control over my outlines and if I need to change something it’s easier to grab a selection of nodes from a path.

Once I have the outlines completed I usually will create a compound shape
(select lines + click “Create Compound Shape” button) out of the larger sections just to keep my layer count down, and to make it easier to select around the piece.

Step 3 — Colors

Doing everything from scratch may make you feel accomplished as an artist, but when you’re on a deadline you need to expedite the process as much as possible.

Colour is no exception. Much like fonts, you can go down the colour rabbit hole and not see daylight for days! I find it’s better to hit google and just search for pre-made palettes. Once I find one I like, I simply just copy the image and paste it directly into my project (not sure if that’s a cloud version feature only).

Now that I have added my palette, it’s time to start colouring! I really love 50’s and 60’s style illustrations that relied more on blocks of vibrant colour to define element boundaries, light and shadows.

Once I start to implement colours it tends to be an intricate layering process, I don’t just rely on colour and shapes but I also utilize fill filters (multiply, overlay) and opacity to achieve a desired look.

If you remove the outlines from the work you can see how I build my colours.

Step 4 — Final Steps

Now that the heavy lifting is done I just add the final design elements free-hand into the piece.

Once everything is finalized, I drop him onto a pre-made background.

Why I love Gravit Designer

I’ve used a lot of different illustration tools over the years, starting with Corel Draw, Macromedia Fireworks, Adobe Illustrator and Sketch.

Over the last year and a bit I have been using Gravit Designer’s cloud offering exclusively and I have to say, the more I use it the more impressed I am with it’s capabilities! From simple font treatments, logo designs to full blown illustrations I’m always impressed at the professional level of tools that are included in a free application.

Are there things that I would like to see fixed? Sure (like auto close point on a path triggering a little too far apart when doing fine detail linework, or compound shapes needing to be expanded to a path to use new colours), but I continue to find new features that I didn’t know I needed, until I find them; and that is a testament to the product designers and developers who are constantly updating the UI and UX to ensure a solid user experience.