Affinity Tutorial - Warping Shadows

For this tutorial I'm using two of the cards from the Jan 2025 BYOC collection Intueri by Rachel Jefferies and ninigoesdigi.

There is a warping tool in both Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. However as one is vector based and the other is pixel based the tools work differently. There is no warping tool in Affinity Publisher. For this tutorial the initial steps (steps 1 - 7) are the same for both Designer and Photo. Then once they differ I will do the instructions for Designer first, and then for Photo.
I am assuming that you are already familiar with the simple shadow techniques in my previous tutorial here.

Initial Steps For both Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo
1. Select the object
2. Duplicate the object by right clicking on it in the layers tab and choosing duplicate (alternatively you can use copy and paste, if you do so then ensure that it's pasted directly above the original object on the layers panel.).
3. Select the lower object, and open the Layer Effects Dialog.
4. Set-up a simple drop shadow..
5. Untick the "Fill knocks out shadow" box.
6. Set the fill opacity to 0%

7. This is now the object's shadow layer

Using the Warp Tool in Affinity Designer
The warp tool in Affinity Designer is a non-destructive layer tool. It can easily be re-edited at a later point in the creation of your layout. So you can apply the warp at any point in the layout creation you like.

8. With the shadow layer selected, click on the warp layer icon

9. There are a number of different warp types. Choose Mesh

10. I'm going to warp the shadow along the bottom edge, by moving the 4 nodes along the bottom of the mesh grid.

11. Move the inner 2 nodes up slightly, and the outer nodes down slightly.

12. ctrl select both the object and it's shadow and group them together {ctrl g}. This will ensure that if you move or resize the element later the shadow will be included.

Using the Warp Tool in Affinity Photo
The warp tool in Affinity Photo is in the lefthand tool bar. Once a warp has been applied to an object it can't be edited. So I recommend waiting until the end of your layout process before warping your shadow.

8. With the shadow layer selected, click on the warp tool icon on the tool bar, and select mesh warp.

9. The default mesh only has 4 nodes, one in each corner.
10. I want to warp the shadow on the bottom edge. So I am going to add 2 more nodes at the third positions along the bottom edge.
11. Double-click on the mesh line where you want each node to be located.

12. Move the inner 2 nodes up slightly, and the outer nodes down slightly.

13. Click Apply

14. ctrl select both the object and it's shadow and group them together {ctrl g}. This will ensure that if you move or resize the element later the shadow will be included.