Wild Guardian (Fantasy)

Day 16 of Thingadailies:

I wanted to try a metallic effect on text — that was the point of today's exercise.

This is the tutorial I was using: https://youtu.be/pdunTh_oyEA?si=Km2HC4BL0VbYxFZa&t=863

In essence:

1. Inner bevel, with a profile set as a slant from lower left to upper right corner. (That makes the letters stand up in the middle.)
2. Grayscale gradient (shifted a bit to blue)
3. Add the 3D effect, with specular cranked up to 100% and shininess down to 60%

I also added a couple of 3-point stars as extra shine, but I'm not sure how successful they were.

Meh. The metallic effect is fine, but the letters look like they're floating in space. I think I needed to add some shadowing behind them or something. I'm also not sold on my font choice for the author name, but the other things I tried looked worse, so... Learning is definitely still in progress. I need to dig up a couple comp titles to see what the professionals do.

I still need to work out the guidelines. The way I have things set up now, it wants to snap things to the center of a rectangle that includes the bleed, so it's off by a bit.

Other things I figured out today:

• The magnet icon on the top toolbar turns snap to grid on/off.
• If you create the text with the text art icon instead of the text frame icon, you can resize the bounding box and the text will resize. (This is been bugging me for a while because it seemed like sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. This is why.)
• If you have effects set up on some text and you want to copy that style, select the object, copy, and then select the other text object and Edit->Paste FX.

My biggest complaint about the Affinity UI is that you have to know where things are in order to use them. The right click menu doesn't offer the same choices.

Font used is Germania One.