TUTORIAL | SHAPED JOURNALING IN AFFINITY PHOTO

When I first decided I was going to learn to scrap in Affinity Photo this year I knew there were going to be some things that I was used to doing in Photoshop that I just couldn’t achieve. I remember pulling in a PSD template with circular shaped journaling and the shape was lost. Bummer!

Well, round journaling isn’t all that hard to achieve using a mix of return and tab keys so I was able to recreate the look fairly easily. But that got me thinking... maybe there was a way to do this in AP. Turns out the Shape tool is where it's at!

So for this example I knew I wanted a large block of journaling but I didn’t want it to be your basic rectangle or square. It also didn’t matter to me if it was all completely legible so I decided that a diamond shape might work just fine. Because the page itself is all about seeing the bright side in this current situation, I knew I could put it back behind the elements on the page, almost hidden.

So I’ll use my Shape tool on the left-hand side. (I think the default is a rectangle but once you click it you'll see all the other choices). Look at all these possible shapes! You have your basics like rectangles and circles but you also have fun things like stars and clouds. Because I had a large block of journaling already typed up in Evernote I was looking for a large shape. The diamond seems like it would work perfectly. 

My first time-saving step is to highlight and "copy" the journaling I have already typed up so that I can paste it when I'm ready. Then I use the Shape tool and I click on the page and draw the diamond shape with the pencil or my finger.

Once my diamond shape is drawn, I'll change to the Frame Text tool on the left. It's nested with the Art Text tool.

Then I click on the right hand side into the Text Studio to pre select my font and size and then I’m going to want to use my finger to click inside the shape to hit paste. I've found it works better than using the pencil for some reason.

One of the things I’ve found out via trial and error here is that unless the shape that I’ve drawn disappears except for the outline and I can see the little cursor the paste is not going to work. So I have had to click on the shape tool again, click on the Text Studio again and then go over and touch my finger to the screen and long press to get "paste" and it will finally happen.

When I click paste all the journaling flows right onto the page. Obviously, you don’t have to cut and paste your text you could just start typing. As you’ll notice all the journaling didn’t quite fit into the diamond shape that I’ve drawn, so to fix that I go back to the Shape tool, click the diamond to highlight it and grab one of those little blue dots/handles and resize the diamond to fit the text. Then to center the shape on the page, I’m going to go up to the Move tool and tweak it to the left a bit.

For the symmetrical diamond shape, it would look much better for my journaling to be center aligned. In the Text Studio, I'll highlight all the text and click the button to align to center.

My last steps were to move the journaling block to the bottom of the layer stack. Then I tweaked the placement a bit so that my title was still readable. I finished off the diamond shape by adding that date tag at the bottom.


It's a very difficult time in the world these days with all of us dealing with COVID-19. Lots of fears and uncertainty across the board. I hope you and your family are well and that you are coping with logistics and challenges the best you can. Virtual hugs for everyone!
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Stacia