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Since its first introduction over seven years ago, Affinity has evolved greatly and turned into one of the best apps for digital art. Powerful engine, perfect UX, and both vector and raster workspaces have ensured the love of millions — if you are one of them, you can’t go without these Affinity Designer brushes we’ve hand-picked for you.
Affinity Designer is a pro-end workhorse that brings desktop and iPad artists together, so it’s quite evident why more and more creators opt for this app. And though Affinity has already confirmed its status of revolutionary design software, artists still search of quality and appealing textures and brushes.
There are tons of graphic design projects where you may need Affinity Designer brushes. Illustrations, postcards, patterns showcases and many other. That’s why having a couple of tools you fully trust will facilitate your work process. We’ve decided to save some of your time and bring a selection of over 30 Affinity Designer brushes, including shader, wax, crayon, liner, and grunge brushes from The Artifex Forge and RetroSupply Co.
Our Team’s Top Pick
Hand Drawn Affinity Designer Brushes
The pack by Pixelbuddha contains 20 pixel and vector brushes — two essential formats of Affinity Designer brushes. All of them are accompanied by cute llamas magic! You can draw these jolly fellas or any illustrations for your projects using a sponge, pastel, marker, or noise brush. These brushes allow you to decorate your advertisement projects, inspirational posters, social media posts, and invent logotypes for your company blessed with cuteness coming along with indispensability.
If you are new to the Affinity Designer app, uploading the tools might be a little tricky for you. But nothing is impossible with a detailed, step-by-step guide in hand! Here I will teach you how to upload the Affinity Designer brushes on the desktop as well as on the iPad. Just follow these instructions and you will see how easy it is.
Adding Affinity Designer Brushes on Desktop:
Open the app. Find the Brush Panel at the top right corner. Here you can choose one of two options for adding Affinity Designer brushes:
- Pick the Import Brushes function in the dropdown menu. Then all you need to do is choose the files you want to upload and work with. Don’t forget that those items have to be in .afbrushes format
- If you are using a device with Mac OS, you can use Finder to upload the Affinity Designer brushes, as it will help you find the location of the afbrushes file you need. When you see it on your screen and the cursor is changed, you can release the mouse button and the confirmation message will appear on the screen. In case you are a Windows user, you can do the same process via Explorer.
The brushes you have added will always be available in the Brushes Panel, so you won’t need to follow all those steps each time to use the same tool. However, in case you need raster version, you should be in “Pixel Persona” mode, as it’s the only way to make these brushes appear.
Importing Affinity Designer Brushes to iPad:
Uploading Affinity Designer brushes to iPad is a little harder than on a desktop, but don’t worry, I got you! The first thing you need to do is check the format of the file you downloaded. In case you got a .zip before you start working you need to unpack it. If you have the brushes in the needed format, you skip this part and upload them to Dropbox, iCloud, or any other cloud storage you are used to. Now let’s get to the main part:
- Open the Affinity Designer app on your iPad.
- Choose Brushes Studio—Panel Preferences and pick the Import Brushes option.
- The Files Browser will appear on your screen in order to help you find all the .afbrushes files. Now you have to pick the needed one.
- In the final step, the app will import the chosen file and it will appear automatically. You can already select the brush and get creative!
If you are still not sure you understand how to add the Affinity Designer brushes, you can check out our illustrated guide! There you will find a wholesome instruction showing each step. Check how to add the brushes to the app, it’s easy.
Perfect Pencils — Affinity Brushes Pack
This exciting pack features quality Affinity Designer brushes that don’t stretch when strokes are elongated. It icludes 36 tools in total: 24 graphite and 12 coloring pencils. With this set, you can use just one brush to create a range of stroke lengths without having to switch brushes. This will make drawing quicker and much more like the real thing.
Free Wax Crayon Brushes for Affinity Designer
In case you are looking for free Affinity brushes, I have a great option for you! These authentic crayon strokes are perfect for adding naive charm to your Illustrator and Affinity Designer artwork. In the download you will get 40 high-quality realistic wax crayon brushes for Affinity Designer, 40 wax crayon brushes for Illustrator and many other tools!
Auto Car Supply | Stamp Brushes
Having a whole pack of brushes you can use in various artworks is a perfect addition to your toolbox, so check it out! Inside you will find 15 brushes that will help you finish a bunch of projects easily. They are simple to use and, most importantly, incredibly beautiful. Add some charm to your postcards, illustrations, patterns showcases or any other works. The tools come in a .brushset file.
Pigmento Daub Brushes
Suitable for both Affinity Designer and Photo, this set of brushes offers a natural media look and feel. To make you feel as much artistic freedom as possible, the authors added acrylics, gouaches, oils and more tools with expressive color dynamics in the pack. Get it right now and get to work!
Artista Affinity Designer Brushes
Name the tool you usually draw with, and you’ll see its equivalent in this collection of 60 brushes. Pencil, dry brush, spray, pen, and all their variations have found the place right here to rescue the next artwork of yours. Any creative task will be accomplished with immense success, even if it’s sketching, shadowing, hatching, or outlining.
Spray Paint Brushes for Affinity Designer
Creating graffiti in Illustrator and Affinity Designer has never been easier! Once you download this pack of spray paint brushes, you are surely capable of everything. Add a unique handmade touch to your project and craft an eye-catching illustration with the kit!
The Ultimate Brush Toolbox
You just found the one and only set of brushes you’ll ever need. Meet The Ultimate Brush Toolbox! In this pack you’ll find a wide selection of tools: acrylic paint, charcoal, watercolor, and oil brushes and so much more to help you with all your design projects. Not only does this set contain every brush, it’s also built for every industry standard app: Procreate, Photoshop, and so on.
Christi’s Comix — Affinity Brushes Toolbox
In this set, you will find Affinity Designer pencil brushes, erasers, professional inking tools, effects, custom assets and everything else you need to create stellar digital artwork from the scratch. Christi’s Comix Toolbox is a must have for giving designs a comic art look and feel!
Lighthouse Liner Affinity Brushes
Cute doodles and sketches with a fine liner can be transferred from the pages of your notebook to the artboard in Affinity Designer! There are 72 brushes, imitating ink, dots, lines, waves, dashes, hatches, asterisks, dots, squares, zigzags, and more. But don’t rush into closing this toolkit once you try out all the brushes: there are 20 seamless patterns made with the same inky liner to suit the flawless style of your composition.
Grave Etcher for Affinity Designer
Here comes a kit of 118 realistic engraving brushes for every Affinity Designer photo or illustration design situation you can dream of. With such a wide choice this brush set will surely become your favorite one! You can also create stunning projects in Adobe Illustrator, as the pack is fully compatible with the app.
25 Hair Affinity Brushes for Every Hairstyle
Draw every hairstyle you want faster with the new Affinity Designer brushes for every hairstyle! Straight, long, wavy, curly, short… bald, you name it! Even if you have absolutely no idea how to draw hair, the set is packed with various brushes that will help you improve your drawing skills and impress your audience! Take your drawing from sketch to finished look using this versatile brush pack. It is easy to install and use, so don’t worry about a thing.
Fine Liner — Affinity Designer Brushes
Affinity users will surely love this brush set. Designed specifically for painting and illustration, Fine Liner includes a huge range of different marks — straight and rough outlines, dots and dashes, stippling, hatching, zigzags and more. Download it and start having some fun creating your next art piece!
Gouache Shader Brushes | Affinity Designer
Get rich gouache effects in Affinity Designer in a few minutes with 50 shader brushes by RetroSupply Co. The brushes are perfect for flexible illustrator work for posters, books, and other artworks to scale. The arcive includes tools in .afbrushes format and also provides a friendly help file to guide you. Step into the magic world with these brushes!
Master Watercolor Affinity Brushes
Master Watercolor Affinity Designer brushes are just what you need to create backgrounds, patterns or wonderfully expressive greeting cards. Doesn’t it sound cool? With these watercolor brushes you can also create an eye-catching illustration or sketch, it’s you who decides what to drop on the canvas!
Dreamphotography Brushes for Affinity
Let your imagination run wild with the Dreamphography brush pack. This specially curated add-on for Affinity Designer features 88 raster brushes, including light, mountains, snow, dust, fog, smoke, moons, trees, skies, clouds, and other special effects. This versatile pack will bring an extraordinary dream-like quality to your compositions, whether it’s illustrations, postcards or just drawings. The brushes from the collection work with Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo.
Rough & Raw – Affinity Brushes
Welcome an Affinity Designer brush set that will give your sketch and illustration an urban grunge feel! This kit is perfect for drawing patterns, greeting cards or in case you want to add texture to the artwork. The Affinity Designer texture brushes are also compatible with Adobe Illustrator, so don’t miss them!
Shader Brushes for Affinity
This collection of 35 brushes for Affinity Designer and 12 textures will make your work sparkle! The exuberance of brush textures astounds with the different drawing techniques you can implement in the process: scatter, noise, hatch, pressure, shadow. Let your imagination guide you, ’cause now all the artistic means were made available in a new format!
The Ink Well Affinity Brushes
What do you think about getting some new Affinity Designer inking brushes? That sounds like a cool idea! So, I want to show you this kit of handmade ink paintbrush textures that are ready to bring your creative ideas to life. Black abstract ink splatters combined with your artwork will give a feeling of a controlled mess and the result will make you proud.
Grain Volume I Affinity Brushes
No need to look for an ideal pack of tools and spend hours on it, as I found it for you! Introducing a kit of 12 handmade grainy brushes for Affinity Designer for shading & adding texture to your drawings. Create a new layer on top of the others or paint the whole layer with one of the brushes and apply a blending mode to create a grainy texture (overlay, soft light, linear burn, multiply, etc). You can use the brushes for shading, and paint with them only on certain areas for a grunge look.
Outline Brushes
Whether your next project will be created in Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer or Adobe Illustrator, this brush pack will help you out! The 58 items of the set will make your creative dreams come true, it’s a sure thing. Let the wild marks of the outline brushes for Affinity Designer make your illustration shine!
Neon Affinity Brushes
Illuminate your designs and brighten illustrations with Neon Affinity Designer Brushes! If you find the majority of existing neon effects limiting, lifeless and a little unrealistic then this is the perfect set for you. With these tools, you can really give your design the wow factor due to their quirks of genuine neon tubing, so no flat, lifeless vector effects. The collection includes 28 brushes for Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo.
The Affinity Designer Airbrush
If you are looking for some new Affinity Designer assets, check out this brush pack. The 27 items of the set will provide you a wonderful movement and fluidity, so the working process will be a real pleasure. Also, the dense textures have been included so you don’t have to spend ages layering up multiple brush strokes to build tone. The designer resources are compatible with both Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator.
Tinge Texture Affinity Brushes
There are pencil brushes, charcoal, crayons and paper albums to be brought with you into an exciting creative adventure. Your artsy-craftsy doodles will get more personalized and vivid when you wave a magic wand, charged with the powerful 25 brushes for Affinity Designer of this set. They carefully mimic traditional drawing supplies, and once completed with 7 paper textures included, they turn into a teeny-tiny universe where you are free to put your fanciest fantasies, creatures, and worlds onto the canvas.
100 Blueprint Technology Brushes
This big brush package will help you to meet all your customers’ expectations. It contains a wide range of stamp-type brushes including machine parts, graphs and mathematical formulas. With such a large variety of tools to choose from you are guaranteed to find what you need, so don’t miss out 100 Blueprint Affinity Designer Brushes bundle!
Affinity Designer Texture Brushes
Add a pinch of personality to the illustrations with 24 handmade stipple, splatter, and hatch Affinity Designer brushes. They are amazing for crafting posters, flyers, postcards and many other creative projects. These brushes will be perfect for bringing a grunge or retro touch and making an artwork so voluminous.
Outstanding Oil Paint Brushes
Affinity Designer texture brushes are a great thing to add to your toolbox, especially when they are as cool as this set! Welcome Outstanding Oil Paint Brushes, a pack you’ve been dreaming about. It contains a mixture of art and anti-stretch brushes (which don’t distort over long strokes) which add a more dynamic feel. Being compatible with Affinity Designer, it gives you an opportunity to create artwork of higher quality!
70 Flower Stamp Affinity Brushes
No matter if you’re new to drawing flowers or if you have been drawing them for years, this toolkit was thoughtfully designed to help you save time! In this set you will find a collection of 70 brushes, including sunflowers, orchids, daffodils, dahlias, birds of paradise and many others. The files are compatible with Affinity Designer, but they also come in PSD and PNG files.
The Master Engraver — Affinity Brushes
It’s time to create something vintage, and for this purpose, I have a great brush kit! Meet The Master Engraver — a set of everything you need gathered in one place. The brushes come in four weights: heavy, standard, medium and light, so use them together to build a range of vintage tones. It will be a perfect set for artists who create patterns, sketches and any other artworks.
Free Banner Vector Brushes
Jeremy Child from The Artifex Forge has created a pack of realistic vector brushes for your Illustrator and Affinity Designer artworks. With their vintage look, these tools will be an excellent choice for creating retro-themed projects. Be sure to look at the brush previews to see how many different free Affinity brushes the selection features.
Free Organic Texture Brushes
Here comes a kit of Affinity Designer texture brushes that will blow your mind and give an inspiration boost! The 5 items of this set will help you create any art piece you’ve been working on and the result will be outstanding. These free Affinity brushes are compatible with both Affinity Designer and Procreate.
Frequently Asked Questions
There is nothing easier than getting new Affinity Designer assets — tons of them are waiting for you on the web! The hardest part is to choose which one you want to download, as they are unbelievably pretty. There are free Affinity brushes and premium alternative options, so choose wisely. If you need some tools, but don’t have too much time to look for them, I would recommend Dreamphotography Brushes for Affinity and Grain Volume.
Installing brushes in Affinity software won’t take you long. Here’s a quick guide so you don’t feel lost. After you open Affinity Designer, find Drawing Persona in the top left corner. Then go View > Studio > Brushes. Now, then you are in the Brush Panel, click on the Menu Bar and then on Import Brushes. Locate the file you want to install in the brushes folder and click Open. That’s it, now you can use the brush! It will be accessible in the Brush Type Drop Down Menu.
Affinity doesn’t support Photoshop brushes but there are some ways of converting these files into the needed format. No need to waste time on it, though — just get yourself some versatile Affinity Designer brushes, or more specific ones that will suit your project. Check out The Master Engraver, 70 Flower Stamp Affinity Brushes, Outstanding Oil Paint Affinity Brushes, and Shader Brushes for Affinity. These tools may help you out for sure!
The brush formats compatible with Affinity Designer are .afbrushes and .abr. Sometimes the download comes as a ZIP archive, in such cases you have to unzip it before trying to import the tools into the app. In case you are looking for some brushes for Affinity Designer to use in your upcoming project, you can check out Hand Drawn Affinity Designer Brushes, Free Wax Crayon Brushes, Artista Affinity Designer Brushes and The Ultimate Brush Toolbox. All of them are compatible with Affinity Designer.