Affinity Designer Brushes

Affinity Designer brushes for both sides of the app, vector and raster

Affinity Designer's whole trick is doing two jobs most apps split down the middle: crisp vector drawing and textured raster painting, in one place. Its brushes follow suit. Vector brushes ride curves in the Designer persona and stay editable; raster brushes lay down pixels and grain in the Pixel persona; and you move between them without switching apps. A brush here isn't locked to one way of working, which is most of the appeal.

How these brushes are made

Because the app works two ways, so do the brushes, and many of our sets are built on both roads. The raster brushes come from captured material the same way a good Photoshop brush does: we make marks by hand, scan them, clean them to high-contrast tone, and turn the texture into something the brush paints with. Affinity will even take in Photoshop's .abr format, so a raster texture can cross over intact.

The vector brushes are constructed, drawn as source artwork and set to run along a curve, so a rough or decorative stroke remains editable and scalable. Keeping both in one collection is deliberate, since the same project might want a hand-scanned charcoal for shading and a clean vector liner for the outlines, and there's no reason to leave the app to get both.

Brush types across both personas

• Pencil and sketch brushes: raster tips for natural graphite drawing in the Pixel persona.
• Ink and liner brushes: available as vector brushes on curves or raster brushes for pixel linework, depending on the set.
• Watercolor and gouache brushes: raster wet-media brushes for washes and layered pigment in the Pixel persona.
• Charcoal, oil, and pastel brushes: dry and thick-media raster brushes for expressive, tactile shading.
• Marker brushes: bold strokes for layouts and graphic work, as vector or raster.
• Halftone and stipple brushes: dot-pattern tips for comics, retro print, and tonal shading.
• Shader brushes: soft raster texture for volume, grain, and smooth transitions.
• Spray and grunge brushes: distressed, sprayed marks for posters, merch, and rough backgrounds.
• Linocut and print brushes: carved, handmade print texture for editorial and poster work.
• Texture brushes: paper grain, surface noise, and analog imperfection, including sets imported from Photoshop.

Usage review

The technique that makes Affinity Designer worth it is using both of its modes in one file. Ink your outlines as vector brushes in the Designer persona, where they stay editable and scale without loss — the clean, even line of the ligne claire tradition is a natural fit here. Then switch to the Pixel persona and shade, grain, and texture the same artwork with raster brushes. You get a crisp, resizable line and a hand-worked surface in a single document, which normally means bouncing between two apps.

Keep the two on separate layers so the vector line remains untouched while you build raster texture underneath or above it, and reach for vector on anything that must scale later: logos, outlines, or type. Affinity will also import Photoshop brushes, so a raster texture library you already trust can come straight across. For inspiration, the same wells feed this: comic and BD linework for the vector side, printmaking and risograph texture for the raster side.

What you can build with Affinity brushes

• Illustration mixing clean line and hand texture: vector outlines and raster shading finished in a single file.
• Comics and graphic novels: editable vector lettering and panels over painted raster color.
• Logos and branding with texture: scalable marks plus raster grain without leaving the app.
• Book covers and editorial art: crisp vector type sitting over hand-worked raster artwork.
• Poster and print design: vector line art and raster texture combined at full print size.
• Merch and apparel: scalable vector graphics finished with raster grit.
• Sticker and print-on-demand art: bold, self-contained illustration for physical products.
• Concept sketches and studies: loose raster brushwork for ideation before committing to vector.
• Icon and asset sets: consistent scalable shapes with an optional textured finish.
• Campaign and social graphics: on-brand illustrated visuals produced end-to-end in one tool.