gdenby

After defining the stroke weight, you can set the gradient in the stroke dialogue if you like. But to change its position and direction, you need to us the fill tool. Select the object, select the fill tool and change the context from "fill" to "stroke." Then adjust as desired/

I use Image Vectorizer, but only rarely for scans of hand drawn work. It has a decent ability to improve contrast, sharpness, do de-speckling and set edge threshold. It also seems quick to me. For $5, it performs very well, and only adds maybe 15 seconds to getting a trace into AD.
If I need something w. multiple grey scales, I use (free) Inkscape's trace  tool. Inkscape runs poorly on Macs, so I don't use it often enough to be familiar w. the more complex settings. But after thrashing about some, I can usually get very good results.
FWIW, I've been using auto tracing to start works based on old decorative motifs for years, mostly w. Corel. To this day, I haven't come across a tool that gives me results that don't require lots and lots of adjustment. Often enough,  I spend more time fixing trace problems, than just re-doing w. a pen tool. W. the advent of resonabley priced tablets, for my own works, I no longer start w. scans from paper. 

On Mac, "transform separate."

I'm assuming the art is all vector work. If so, it is easy. Select all, and make a copy. Group the originals, and lock them. Paste the copies in, and while they ar highlighted, use the boolean add. Change the fill to none, and change the stroke to a white line of whatever size you might need, and have the stroke set to "align stroke to outside" in the stroke dialogue.
 
 
Outline.afdesign

Hi, Igull,
Don't worry about the annoyance. Lots of people trying to move from AI to AD show that. Usually it is mostly a matter of learning new habits. I doubt Designer will ever work the same way as Illustrator. Basic differences in how the shapes are made and modified. There will disruptions in routine.
But, you a quite right. There isn't any way as far as I can tell to snap the center of rotation to  guides at present. 
From my experience, AD has features that AI had after 5 - 10 years. A few, well beyond that.  What you describe was once nothing AI could do. Believe me, Illustrator after 10 years of admittedly ground breaking development was still not faster or easier to use than a drafting board and Letraset press ons. IMPERATIVE may have taken 30 years. If you have to have some features, at the moment it doesn't seem you have many options other than the Adobe ecosystem.
Myself, the $$$$$ are not an issue. Its the subscription model, and the apparent necessity to be connected to Adobe network. 
Referring to an attributes picker, Designer does allow copying layer "styles," which are a combination of stroke and fill attributes. Those can be pasted as a style, just as easy as using the color picker.
 

Hi, AffinityAppMan,
 
I've been using NeoFinder for the last 18 months, or so. Thanks to your note, I'm d-loading an upgrade right now. I've been quite happy with it. Very fast. Can search and find a few files out of several 100 thousand in a few moments. I expect it will work w. the Affinity files as it does w. every other.
 
Took about 30 seconds to build a catalog of of all my Affinity files, including .pdf documentations. More than 2000.  Did a couple of finds, response was quick when I pointed to the new catalog.

On Mac, "transform separate."

Make a copy of the path. Add it to itself. Do a divide. That resets the box. If you have an open curve, as illustrated, that will close, and need breaking/deleting.

Speaking as someone who has to run Inkscape under the XQuartz windowing system on a Mac, I'd have to say the on screen response is not good at all. And, I've read comments indicating that the XQuartz project itself may be fading, as there has been no update in about 18 months.
Inkscape has a bunch of features not found (yet) in Designer. But on the Mac side, the interface is so hard to use that over 15 years of intermittent use, I'm still often at a loss for what to do. I guess in common use, I'd have to say that Inkscape's learning curve is way higher than AD. If you already are comfortable w. Ink... and it gets the job done, sure stick with it. I keep it on my system and thrash w. it a bit often enough. But Designer, once you get the hang of it, is remarkably easy to use, and on my hardware, fast enough that there 90% of all operations are done with no lag, or ones that are at best a few seconds.
And, from my perspective, Serif's fees for Affinity product are nominal. 

Sorry to be slow in making a reply. Sure, you can have the letter "S' in an improved version. I've been working on a whole alphabet in caps, and when finished, if anyone want it, they're welcome to it.
 
I'm learning a lot, not only about AF, but fonts and chiseling. I've become much better at breaking the font letters into chisel cut sections. Still not quite clear on what the carving standard in reality is, if there is one. Also, fussing w. adding chisel marks within the cut sections.
 
For now, I hope the portioned letter shape can be made to work w. gradient effects to simulate light from a specific direction.
 
Letter_S_parted.afdesign

On Mac, "transform separate."

Hi, patriciamelvill,
I haven't the faintest idea how it might have happened, but it appears that the brush "dab" spacing and/or x - y spacing was altered. Select the brush, use the right mouse button "Edit Brush" menu, and reset the brush.

With the object selected, use the command Layer/Fill Mode, and switch the mode from Alternate (the default) to Winding.

Hi, Foomandoonian,
This issue has come up more than a few times. It appears when shapes of the same color are butted together. The 1st time I encountered the problem, the thread mentioned that it was an anti-aliasing routine problem. Essentially, the white of the background was being added into the color of the shape. 
There are 2 solutions. One is to turn "precise clipping" in the performance preference. The other is to add a centered stroke of the same color. I'm not sure how thin the stroke can be. I have a file open just now, and a stroke as thin as .04 pt works.
There have been some problems w. booleans when points have a particular geometry. My recollection is a thread where a diamond was being subtracted from a circle. When the diamond point was placed at the exact center of the circle, the subtract shape would vary between several different point positions. By moving the point a very small amount away from the center, the subtraction worked as expected.

If you want to paste a bitmap, use the fill tool, and choose bitmap. Then save the object as a style, and it can be applied top any number of other objects 

I'm supposing it is pretty much the same for Windows as Mac, which is what I'm using.
 
Draw a vector shape on the Affinity canvas. Click on the fill tool, and select the fill type "bitmap." Navigate to where you have the image you want to use as a texture. High quality .jpg seems to work fine. Select, and open. W. the now vector filled object still selected, go over to the styles panel and click on the little menu icon. Use "Add style from selection." Done.
 
When the style is reused on other objects, selecting the fill tool will allow the texture cell size to be changed.

Ummm, yeah, the stroke scales,

Hi, timlt,
Look at it the other way around. Photo is the niche app for people doing digital photo developing and image manipulation. Photo does have many of the vector tool Designer has. In terms of making vector graphics, it does not have the vector brush tool, or symbols. The vector brush is remarkable, because one can create a curve, and stretch or repeat a paint brush along it. If the vector isn't positioned quite right, one can continue to adjust it. Or assign another of many brushes to it. 
Symbols are great for making patterns whose elements can all change simultaneously. For instance, if one made a generic conifer tree shape, duplicated it several times, and made them symbols, one might then place many symbol instances to make tree lines on ridges. Then, by adjusting a single one in a row, all could be faded, or darkened to indicate distance. And, one can place symbols inside symbols, so a vector brush gesture can be nested inside another symbol, and the brush changed across all the instance.
You might not want to look into it just now, but keep it in mind for the future.
 
 

Do you know about the so-called "power duplicate" method?
 
Here's a loop sample I made up in a couple of minutes. I started w. a tear shape, converted it to curves, broke the curve at the tip, and repositioned the nodes, one up and to the left, the other down and to the right. Drew some circles along the line. Grouped all, and used "duplicate." Moved the group off to the side, scales constrained around center, and lined the ends of the loops. Repeated the duplication, which carries forward the translation and scaling. The group could also have been changed into a symbol, and have the same power duplicate. That would allow one to make changes to elements of all the symbol instances at once.
 

Another approach.
 
Making the lines a shape is easy. Filling and trimming becomes problematical. If the curve layers are rasterized, a few seconds painting out the overlapping lines, and a few more using the flood tool works, except for the bottom, which would have no boundary.
 
You could also expand all the strokes, add them, and delete (a lot) of un-needed nodes. Then divide the shape into many curves, and fill and stroke those. More fuss than is desirable.
 
The remaining method I can think of requires adding about 20 nodes to mark the new ends of the curves, and joining those into shapes that can then be filled. The attached image shows in yellow the points where nodes need to be placed on the cross line. In red and magenta,  some of the positions where the outer shape lines need to have nodes added, old nodes deleted, and then joined to the next section.
 
Also attached is a very quick .gif sketching the process of adding nodes, deleteing, and then joining to the next curve, etc. etc.
 

 

 
 

Control click on the style icon, and select the "rename" option from the mouse over pop-up.

Hi, jgowrie,
 
I came at this from a different direction. I've been working w. image brushes, but what I've learned so far is not enough yet to let me make a brush that would always give exactly 70 sections of pattern.
I messed w. the problem a few times, trying to find a way to power duplicate the motif in a circle. Ended up making 2 70 section polygons, and drawing the form starting from a shape defined by the 1st section of the outer poly, and extending to over the next in the inner. Then moving the rotation center of the drawn form to the center of the outer poly. Then power duplicating it 5.143 angle X 69.
Had a number of problems. My shape, based on the very pixelated and distorted image you posted didn't work quite right. So I changed the shape to a symbol, so I could tweak the nodes, and get a reasonably even set of sections around the periphery.
Put some fx on the symbol group to make it look a little more photo like.
If you like, examine and use the included file as you like.
RopeBorder.afdesign

'...I'll keep messing about until I do."
 
I find messing about to be great fun, at least when I have the "aHah!"" moment.
 
Not to deprive you, but maybe defining some terms will help. In Affinity, if you work in the "Outline" view, you will only see a thin black lines representing the objects. One does not see either "strokes" or "fills", altho' the object(s) may have those attributes. If you are using the node tool, you will see the squares or circles that define the shape of hand drawn objects. The built in "shape" objects, such as the polygon, star, trapezoid, etc will show red control dots when interacting with the node tool.
 
One can directly alter the position of the nodes in a hand drawn shape. One may add or delete them. Not so the built in shapes. One can move the control points, making a star more pointy, for example. One can change the proportions by modifying the shape's bounding box. One cannot add or delete nodes, except where their number is changeable, such as turning a 5 point star into an eight point star. 
 
So if you wanted to delete a lib from a star, it needs to be "changed to curve." That was a single node could be deleted, truncating the star.
 
If one then shifts to the vector view, one will see the object with their associated fills and strokes. If you look at the stroke dialogue, you'll see that the stroke can aa wide range of thickness, as well as being aligned and capped in various ways. Sometimes you might want to do something with the stroke other than having it be a solid or a dotted line. Perhaps you would want one side to be irregular compared to the other side. This can be done after using the expand stroke command. Instead of the stroke being a line drawn over the wireframe, it becomes a wire frame itself, which can then be re-formed w. the node tool, and have its own fill and stroke. Those strokes can then be expanded again, and given their own stroke properties, etc, etc.
 
 
 
 

Hi, rodsal23,
What's your market like? Where I live, it used to be pretty easy to get work designing T-shirts and vinyl signage w. base level skills. But professional work usually required having a portfolio showing about 4 years of work. And, often, at least 2 years of college level graphic design. I understand there was a market at least just a few years ago for CD covers. My elder daughter and her husband use CG all the time to develop tattoo designs for their clients. The clients often change their minds, so be quick to adapt is good.
But most clients are like that. "Yes, yesterday I said that design was OK, but can you change it this way and be ready to go later in the day?"
Maybe your question should be more like "Am I adept enough to change a polished design in 2 hours?"

Looking at the help files, the expressions don't seem to have a random function. 
 
I messed w. the problem today, and plain human eyeballing coupled w. power dupe can easily give a wide range of scales.
 
Draw a circle, duplicate it. With scaling OFF, do a small constrained scaling, and move away to the right enough to clear the original. Repeat until there are a bunch of ones w. different sizes.
 
Grab the row, and use the boolean combine. Dupe the combine, and as above, scale and move away down. Dupe, dupe, dupe.
 
So then you will have a sort of warped grid. Select all the combined objects, and divide so there are just a bunch of circles.
 
To randomize the positions, grab all, or bunches, and use the distribute functions. Distribute by vertical and horizontal centers works well. Space by vert or horiz can be good to. You might need to various bunches to get a decent irregular distribution.
 
See appended.