Expand Stroke Effects In Affinity Designer

[Music] hey what's going on guys in today's video we are inside of affinity designer and i want to talk about the expand stroke feature and some of the cool effects you can get with this so for those of you who don't know what expand stroke is i'm going to quickly demonstrate that before we get started so in simple terms the span stroke generally means that it will take a stroke from an object and it will make it into its own shape so to demonstrate i'm just going to grab a circle it's going to drag that out make the stroke a little bit bigger so we can see it and make that around 10 and we're just going to give this fill a color so we can see that also so if you pay attention to the right hand side the layers menu you can see that at the moment this is just one shape the fill and the stroke together if you want to separate these to make them two individual shapes we would do that by going up to layer at the top and we're going to go down to expand stroke once we click on that you can come over here again you can see we now have two individual shapes in here one being the stroke that we just made which has now become its own shape as well as a fill and this is generally what expands stroke means it just takes a stroke and it turns it into its own shape and i'll demonstrate that again just by grabbing this pen tool and we just make some a little bit custom something like that we'll do so if we wanted to now turn this curve into a shape like we did before it's the same process up to layer just down to expand stroke and now that becomes a shape rather than a stroke and we can come over and grab that no tool and we can actually start to manipulate that a bit now if you wanted to so i hope that explains what this feature is for and how you would use it so before we get started i'm just going to delete all of this so we've got a fresh clean canvas and delete that one also so this technique is generally used a lot in logo design so i'm just going to demonstrate that by grabbing a random shape i think i'm going to go with a heart i'm just going to drag that out to size and i'm just going to center that with these toolbars at the top there so primarily we're going to work with the pen tool today if you're unsure how to use a pencil i do have a tutorial on this which i'll link in the card in the corner it's around 10 minutes long but you will have a great understanding how this works and be confident enough to use it if you want to check that video out so to get started i'm just going to draw a random curve on this heart maybe start here and bring it down there it's going to zoom out a little bit so i can bend this and get a rough shape that i'm going for and i'm going to put a stroke on it so we can see it so i'm just going to give it a color white and maybe make this a little bit bigger or smaller i'll go for a little bit bigger around 45. if you guys aren't seeing the stroke menu down here and you want that there just simply go up to the view menu on the top menu bar go down to studio and just make sure that you got stroke checked and that will give you access to this also okay so to continue i want it to be thick at the top but i want it to get slimmer at the bottom and in order to do that we're going to go into this pressure menu down there and we got these two little boxes on the end here if we drag this down it's going to move both together which is what not what i want to do if you hold down the option key on the mac and i think it's the alt key on the keyboard you should be able to individually drag these down just like that so if you pay attention we can see it's got really slim at the bottom but remains the same size at the top and if we grab that no tool you can adjust this to whatever it is you're going for so if i'm going to bring that down a little bit more maybe make that curve just a little bit wider and i'm just going to kind of intercept that together so this is going to be its own piece there and i think i might make that bit bigger on the top so i'm just going to increase that size and just move that back down to align it with the center of that heart okay so what we're going to do now is we're going to convert this into its own shape like we did before so if we go up to the layer menu at the top we come down to expand stroke that now becomes its own shape like it did before and what we can do now if we come over to the layers menu we select both of these by holding down command on a mac we can come up to the shape building section up here and we want the one on the far right which is divide so once you hit that divide button what you can see has happened here is this give us all individual pieces of this and what we need to do is just start deleting the bits that we don't want so we can get rid of that white one and get rid of that one and all the white pieces we want to get rid of so now we've got this heart in three individual pieces and what this means we can do now is color this individually into different colors so turn off that stroke and we can just give that a different color and if we group all these together we'll be able to resize that and because we've moved the white shape that we just created it now becomes transparent so if i give us a different background quickly you can see that if we move this on top of it we can see straight through that just going to zoom back in quickly with control 0 or command 0 and if we come back into the group we can just come put some effects on this if you wanted to like your fill tool to give it a gradient just to make it look a little bit better just like that so this is kind of the thing you see a lot in logo design where it takes out a piece of the design so you can individually color it we'll get rid of that because i don't know why that's there so in the way it's really good for cutting up shapes to give them their own individual colors and we'll just do another quick example of that by drawing maybe a basketball so if i just draw a circle change that color to maybe a lighter brown go ahead and grab our pen tool once again and we'll just start drawing in some lines let's give that a little bit of a curve and zoom out a little bit so i can curve that better and give that a stroke of black i'm going to reset this pressure so we get that line back to normal and i'm going to make that a lot smaller somewhere around five i think would be good and we're just going to hit escape to come off that one and we draw our second one and we'll just come over in the center here and just curve that a little bit as well and escape again to come off that one and we'll just draw a couple more in here let's give it that kind of basketball design escapes come off and do the same over here i'm just going to drag that in and we'll hit escape again and we'll do exactly what we did before we're going to convert all of these and we're going to do that by selecting the top one holding down the shift key and selecting the bottom one that will select all of these and once again we're going to go up to layer and we're going to expand that stroke so it turns all of them in to a shape and i'm just going to zoom in closer on this because i want to show you something so the way we did this before is we selected all of these and we selected that one and we went up to the divide option if we do this at this point and we hit that divide we've got this problem here it's not cut out properly and i'm just going to commands there just to undo that or controls that on the windows computer so the reason this has happened is because these have overlapped each other and you can see here we've got these little squares in the middle so where we've divided it is trying to divide all of this together so anytime you overlap a line the best thing you can do to avoid that is just select all of these again like we did before hold down shift at the top and the bottom to select all of these and we're gonna add these instead so first of all we hit that add button and then that will combine that into one entire shape and it's going to eliminate that problem we had where we had those squares in the middle and now we can do the same what we did before so we select that one and we hold down command or control and select the one underneath it and now we can hit this divide button and that will solve the problem that we just had and now we've got all these individual pieces that we had before and the first thing we want to do is we want to come in and delete the pieces that we don't need so i'm going to zoom out a little bit and all these outer parts here we don't need those we're going to delete that one delete that one and get rid of all of those bits so the shape we've got left is actually inside of the ball and what we need to do now is just group all of these ones together and just hit command or control g to group and then we can actually turn this one on and off now so that will remain transparent if you don't want the lines in the background and i'm just going to group both of these together as well just so we can resize this and move it around so i'm just going to zoom out a little bit again if we just drag this over and we come back into this group you see if we turn off the black lines it's become transparent and we can do exactly what we did before where we can start to individually color this that's on the stroke size make sure you're on the fill and we can give these individual pieces different colors so as i say before this is a kind of thing that you see all the time on logo designs where you just split up the shape but you can still see obviously what it's meant to be but you can color it all differently and once again if you want to just come in another gradient on those just to make it look a little bit better and as i stated before you can just turn that back on if you do want to keep that and then we can just move that out the way and we'll start to begin the next process so just put that anywhere out the way for now so i'm just going to hit command or control zero just to reset that fit to screen and we'll delete that because i don't need that for the moment so last but not least we're going to use this in a completely different artistic way and we're going to do that by selecting a letter so we'll go over to the artistic text tool and we're just going to draw out any letter that you want to use i think i'll use an a and i'm going to go and select a different font for this i'll go for that impact and i'm going to convert that one to curves like we did before so it changes that to a shape so i'm just going to give that a different color come off the stroke and select the fill just move this out the way a little bit from that heart okay this time round we're not going to use a pen tool we're actually going to use a pencil tool so we can kind of go free hand with this and make a bit of a better shape or style so once you select this you're just going to come in here and just randomly do any kind of scribble effect so it's going to start here and we just go all the way around kind of like that and if we turn the stroke on so we can see it give that a stroke of white and you can make this as big as small as you like and i'm going to go and change this pressure settings because i think i want it smaller at the bottom and bigger at the top so it's got to come in and reverse this that's looking better to me and i just want to grab a new tool and just want to adjust this a little bit up here that's better so now we'll do the same as before we go up to layer and we're going to expand that stroke just to convert that to reshape and this time around we haven't crossed over any of this so we can simply just select both that curve and that a and we can just come and divide that and i'm just going to move this ball out of the way so it doesn't distract us and just put that down the bottom and same as before we just want to come and start deleting the pieces that we don't need so we've got one out there that one that one in the middle just like that and we'll do what we did before we're going to group these together all these white pieces we come on g or control g and we'll do the same with these ones and we'll group that one together as well and then we'll just go ahead and group both these together so we know we can resize that so like i stated before we can come in here now we can start giving these different colors make sure we're on the fill and not the stroke i'm just going to change all of this to make someone look a little bit better so once you've got the colors you're happy with we can then go in now and focus on this bit we cut out with the white strike so we're going to open up this one again and this time around we're not going to delete it or make it transparent we're actually going to give this its own colors as well just to make this look even better so as you can see we've got this pretty cool effect in here now where it combines all this into different shapes and colors but if we go in and add a gradient it's going to make it look even better just on all these pieces so once you've got the codes you're happy with we can close this and just resize it if you want to to anything you want so as you see it looks pretty cool but what we can do like we did before is we can just come back in here and we can turn off the stroke so we just left with that shape and that will make it transparent like it did last time on the other shape as well so we could see straight through that and what else you could also do with this is just start adding a few effects on there so if we come in here we could maybe make this 3d which looks pretty cool in my opinion and you can turn that stroke back on just so it makes it look a little bit better almost like it's embossed in the background or we can turn that off again and turn off that 3d and maybe have a drop shadow in there instead and resize that if you want to or another thing we can do is just generally jumble this up so if i just turn off this effect and we come in here and we grab all these individual pieces we can just move these around a little bit and just kind of create the same shape but as though it's being dropped on the floor and smashed we still make out that it will be in a something just like that which looks pretty good and if we just come in we select all of these and we put a drop shadow on these individually it should give us an even better effect so maybe two and two and then you can see it generally looks as though they just sat on top of each other with a little bit of a shadow underneath it and as long as you remember to grip everything that you are free to then just to move it around and resize it without losing any kind of quality or anything so i hope you found this video useful and you understand what a span stroke means and how you could use it creatively if you did like the video please give me a thumbs up as it really helps with the youtube algorithm and helps people see my video please hit that subscribe button to check out any future videos as well as all my current ones but for now have a great day and i will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: MJW Media Studios

Views: 2,090

Keywords: Affinity Designer, Affinity Designer Tutorial, Expanding Stroke, Affinity Designer Effects

Id: Lki19HpbwbY

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021