Bending my shapes

[CalebK]

Hello,

I am a student trying to make a logo for a LGBTQ+ club at my college campus. As such I am trying to make sure that rainbows are sprinkled tastefully everywhere in the design. Recently there have been some shapes I have been wanting to create but have been unable to due to lack of knowledge on how to make them.

Most of them end up being essentially rainbows but bent. 

For example this shape

The black part I would love to be a continuation of the rainbow

 

I made a few stabs at it by adding curves

But as you can see you run into issues where they don't converge properly and each bit of the rainbow needs proper curvature.

And while I could potentially make this work I would love to be able to create more complex curves that are made with rainbow colors. How would you do this in Affinity Designer (or any other product)

 

 

[GarryP]

It really depends on the shapes you are trying to make but you could use the Appearance panel to add multiple strokes to your shape like the attached document and image.

Note that the fill is drawn over the strokes to stop the colour being repeated.

rainbow-outline.afdesign

[firstdefence]

You can make a rainbow image texture brush and use that to stroke a curve: Rainbow Brush.afbrushes You would end up with something like this.

  

There are several ways to get the curve and I'm sure in a bit you'll see a variety of ways to do that. One of those ways would be to draw straight lines and then using the node tool bend the section you want to be curved using the grid to help you.

[lacerto]

(...)

[dutchshader]

Set the stroke color to none

[lacerto]

(...)

[R C-R]

FWIW, a variation on @GarryP's Appearance panel approach with no fill color can be used with closed curves if you need objects behind them not to be obscured by the shapes' fill. However, this only works with closed curves, I suppose because open curves have no inside or outside. Nevertheless, since a set of strokes can be saved as a style & applied to objects from the Styles panel, it may be useful for some things.

Also, because closed curves do have an inside & an outside, it may be useful to have 2 rainbow styles, one the reverse of the other, as in the attached LBGTQ+ rainbows.afstyles file.

LBGTQ+ rainbows.afdesign

[firstdefence]

There is a way to also make a vector version, see my video below.