Affinity and Cavalry give creatives somewhere to create freely… and for free

To explore the creative freedom of Affinity and Cavalry’s software, Melina K and Rob Farmer were tasked with using the free-to-use tools to depict somewhere they felt most unrestricted. The pair created a poster each, alongside a bespoke design kit that you can download and deploy in your own designs.

Words: It's Nice That
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Date: 21 October 2026
Tags: Brand Partnership
Features
Animation
Digital
Graphic Design
Illustration
Interactive

Affinity combines professional vector design, photo editing, and page layout in one seriously powerful app, while Cavalry has you covered for 2D animation and motion design. Brought to you by Canva, both are completely free to download.

Design platform Canva has an ever-growing suite of professional design tools that help power the creative industry. Affinity for pro design, photo editing, page layout and more – all in one app – and Cavalry for pro animation, are two such powerful, free-to-use, intuitive tools. Each gives creatives the freedom to truly realise their creative ideas without any of the usual industrial boundaries or stumbling blocks.

That freedom is the thinking behind our collaborative project, Free Form. We joined forces with Affinity and Cavalry to ask two designers – Melina K and Rob Farmer – to create something inspired by the place, space or moment where they feel most creatively free. This resulted in two posters that mark somewhere that’s creatively dear to them. Each creative has also turned elements of their posters into a toolkit of assets, delivered as Affinity files, so you can experiment and create with the same building blocks. On top of that, Rob has similarly supplied a Cavalry file, so you can get stuck into animating.

“Being offered the freedom to approach a project in your own way is a total blessing for a creative person.”
Melina K

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“Being offered the freedom to approach a project in your own way is a total blessing for a creative person,” our first artist, Melina K, says, speaking to her reaction to the initial brief which followed an unfettered theme: Free Form. “I knew I had a natural desire to create something that carried a hopeful message behind it.”

“Open briefs can sometimes be the hardest,” graphic designer and animator Rob Farmer adds, “but it was really nice to feel like I could make something a little different than I’d normally make.” For Rob, whose playful, personality-packed practice typically transforms everyday aesthetic scenes into subversive creative tableaus, he is often at the mercy of agencies and clients. “When the client is trusting enough to back your creative freedom,” he says, “it’s super nice and makes the process really enjoyable.”

“What genuinely surprised me was the user interface of each tool or functionality,” Melina recalls, giving the slider-like application and preview of adding Gaussian Blur as an example. “It sounds small, but having a straightforward and simple interface really helped lessen the stress of navigating unfamiliar tools.” Melina felt the same sentiment with the ease of switching between different Affinity studios – like Vector and Pixel – without leaving the app at all. Features like this go a long way in breaking down the impediments between a creative and their output for expression and, as Rob celebrates, Affinity and Cavalry have another ace up their sleeve in this realm: the price. Or rather, the lack thereof.

Canva_Feature — Above
Melina K poster for Free Form (Copyright © Melina K, 2026)

“To not have that financial pressure to use it and just be able to jump in and out at your own pace is empowering.”
Rob Farmer

“There’s already so many barriers to entry in design,” he explains, “it’s nice how you can just go to the website, download it and start playing around with world-class software,” – a fiercely enticing prospect when facing hundreds of pounds a month for other tools. “To not have that financial pressure to use it and just be able to jump in and out at your own pace is empowering.”

Affinity and Cavalry were thoroughly put to good use across the pair of posters. Melina’s piece, true to her tactile, observational work, is textural, engrossing, and delightful – a consistent quality of the Brisbane-based designer. Led by the theme, Melina depicted “the sky made room for me,” speaking to the “endless, open space” of the boundless ether. “‘Made room for me’ also suggests having the freedom to exist and just take up space without needing to know exactly where you’re going,” she adds, conveying a hopeful tone through both the messaging and the welcoming, buoyant colour palette. “I also wanted that light, airy feeling to also come through in the way the typography and graphics move across the poster.”

The text, subsequently, isn’t strictly confined, and floats its way across the space, which is a sentiment she practised in the act of making too – having opted for a rather analogue approach to printing, scanning and cutting that leant into the poster’s imperfections. “I wanted to embrace these moments of unpredictability instead of controlling every detail,” Melina notes, “and that’s also part of this creative freedom.”

The weightless quality of Melina’s poster is mirrored in Rob’s, through an albeit more densely-packed visage of typographic flowers. “Spring has really sprung here in Melbourne so there’s lots of colourful flowers and blossoms out in people’s gardens and front yards,” Rob recalls. “Flowers are just nice, like who doesn’t like flowers?” Rob’s kinetic creative approach is in full force, resulting in a piece that’s playful, bountiful and beguiling: not unlike the software he used to craft it. Speaking to us about the tools he used to create the artwork, Rob particularly favours deformers, amongst other things. “Deformers in Cavalry are so powerful and make motion fun, exploratory and without the need for keyframing,” he says, explaining how detailed one can go when applying deformers to values. “The oscillator is one of my favourites,” Rob says, that being an option which allows a value to move from one setting to another. “Understanding this, tinkering with values, and thinking of inventive things to apply it to make it super powerful,” such as the movement of colour across the text that makes up the flowers of Rob’s poster.

“I hope that through this poster, the messaging, and watching my process of making it,” she tells us, “gives aspiring designers ideas to play with their artistic expression.”
Melina K

For more static applications, Melina found Live Filters an incredibly useful feature, allowing her to quickly go back and forth on adjustments she’s made, like blur or noise, no matter how far she’s progressed in her design. “And, because I had a few different elements to extract from different image sources,” Melina notes, “I needed to use the background eraser tool a lot too – it does a really good job of accurately removing the background while keeping the finer details intact.” Together, these two tools, alongside a plethora of other features, kept Melina’s creative process flowing smoothly, allowing her to “keep working on the piece at an unhindered pace while preserving those details.”

It’s Melina’s dedication to details, championed by the use of Affinity and Cavalry, that makes for such an exciting, thoughtful artwork. “I hope that through this poster, the messaging, and watching my process of making it,” she tells us, “gives aspiring designers ideas to play with their artistic expression,” and allows them to create meaningful work. “I also hope creatives can understand that tools like Affinity are there to help bring their visions to life,” alongside one’s instincts, hands, and, as Melina concludes, “their willingness to experiment that shapes the work.”

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Rob similarly shares a hope that others embrace the capacity and capabilities of the Canva family. “I started using Cavalry a few years ago and had no idea what I was doing,” he says, “and it was frustrating because I wasn’t very good, but of course I wasn’t very good – I’d never used it before.” “You’ve gotta allow yourself to just play and explore without the pressure of being ‘good’,” or any other industry-embedded, preconceived notions of how work should be made. That same idea applies if you’re experienced too,” Rob adds, “just make something new without an end goal in mind and see what happens.”

Melina and Rob’s printed posters will be given out at November’s Nicer Tuesdays in London – but make sure you’re there on time; they’re limited edition, so when they’re gone… they’re gone!