PhilK

@summersara YES! That's EXACTLY what I needed. It did indeed work as expected when I pulled it into Fusion. Thanks so much for the pointer! @SrPx I haven't been so successful with Inkscape, but I'm still experimenting. We got the iPad so that my wife (who is the real artist) can experiment with Digital in an on-the-go environment. She's a traditional oil painter or pencil-on-paper kind of person, so moving into the world of digital arts is new, and a bit intemidating. I'm well aware of the typical superiority of desktop/laptop-based tools over tablet tools, but we don't yet have Affinity on any of our PCs, we have both Mac and Windows laptops and a main Windows Desktop, so I haven't made the dive into buying it for all the platforms (Hint Hint--Hey Serif, make a Mac+Windows+iPad discount license option). And yes, the expand stroke and add are on the iPad version :-). @DM1 Well, no not exactly, but that is an interesting feature that I might just have to go use!

Hello, My wife and I are new to Affinity Designer, so please bear with me as I certainly haven't learned the "correct" terminology, or the names of the menu items, their locations or their options! Some background: We are attempting to take my wife's pencil and paper drawings and convert them into closed-shapes in Fusion 360 (an Autodesk CAD program). Those shapes will then be extruded into bodies and used to "engrave" or develop 3D models that can be either 3D printed or more recently CNC carved into wood. We purchased Designer, because it can export into SVG, which Fusion will accept (but not always very elegantly!). We've done some test drawings, and if I draw with the pencil, pen or ellipse tool, I only get a single line in the SVG when imported into Fusion (what I would call a pure path, and NOT a stroke--but that may be terminology from other programs). After several experiments, it appears that the best workflow is to scan the paper image into PNG, do a bit of cleanup/brightness/contrast modification in a photo editor, and then bring the resulting cleaner PNG into Designer as a reference layer. We then tried tracing out the main features from the drawing using an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro, and can only get reasonbly good results using the pencil or the pen. Unfortunately, when these are imported into fusion, they can't be extruded or used as cut bodies, as they are a single line, and not a closed path-as-if-it were a line. (I hope that makes some sense!). I'd really like to find a clean workflow that isn't too time consuming. My wife is a traditional fine artist, so working on the iPad for her is a challenge. I'm an engineer and certainly no artist! Is there an easy way to convert the pencil/pen paths into brush strokes on iPad? I saw that a similar question to this was answsered on the Windows forum, but it's solution doesn't seem to work on iPad. I've tried a LOT of different software packages to make this a reasonable process, but haven't found one yet (I don't have Adobe Illustrator, which might be a way, but I was hoping Designer would be a better solution)--things I've played with: Photoshop, Inkscape, various environments in Fusion 360. I'd even take a completely better workflow if someone has already solved this in a different way. Thanks! -- Phil