I assumed that since the Pencil worked with Notes a few days ago that the issue was with Affinity s/w. Neither of which has anything to do with Affinity. I suppose a drained Pencil battery would look the same. I enabled Bluetooth and, of course, the Pencil started working (with gestures!) with Designer. These awesome Affinity assets are free to download, so you can create that rough, hazy look in works of your own. If youve never used the Apple Pencil before. Artist StuartRc created these Affinity Designer brushes that are free for an illustration of a highly textured ammonite fossil sitting on the seabed. If I had gone back and retried the Pencil with, for example, the Notes app, I would have discovered that the Pencil wasn't working for any app. You can write, compose music, play the violin, mark up PDFs, and more. Bluetooth, of course, is how the Pencil communicates with the iPad. This is a little embarrassing but hopefully will help future newbies that stumble on this post but I had (for reasons I don't remember), disabled Bluetooth on the iPad. Affinity Designer supports iPad Pro, iPad Air 2, 3 & 4, iPad Mini 5 and. The iPad popped up a note asking if I wanted to enable Bluetooth to pair the Pencil. The iPad app takes cues from the popular desktop version and offers full support for the Apple Pencil and much more.

I know this doesn't make sense but I thought maybe I needed to pair the Pencil with the iPad every time I used it so plugged it in again.

I had, in fact, already 'paired' my Pencil with the iPad and tested it with several iPad apps so knew it was working. Thanks! I guess that explains why I couldn't find any help/forum info on how to 'enable' the Pencil for Affinity.

Affinity designer apple pencil