How to make stroke a darker version of the fill colour? (Affinity Designer)

[Glinkot]

Hi,

Here's a snapshot of Bluey, an awesome animated series from Australia.  I love the style they've adopted with the strokes being a darker version of the fill that they surround.  I've tried a few things to achieve a similar effect but I lack the skills I think.  Avenues I've thought of but not managed to succeed with:

• Joining multiple pen strokes using different colours.  Perhaps this would work but it would be quite time consuming. 
• Layer effects perhaps?  With a 'darken' type filter applied a to a certain radius around the shapes. 
• Trying to coopt the 'outer glow' type effect to the fill part (could work but probably not, and the fill sits beneath the stroke part)
• Making every such section its own layer, but keeping those synced would be a challenge.

These guys probably do much of it by hand I think.  You can see the transition between stroke colours is on an angle, where the fill shapes are on an angle, they aren't just straight lines bisecting the stroke at right angles.

Anyway, thoughts on achieving a similar effect welcome!

Thanks

[firstdefence]

I think they have expanded the main body stroke so that the stroke is on it's own layer, then drawn the lighter shapes like the belly and the nose shape and duplicated then and nested the duplicate in the stroke and manually changed the colour.

Like so...

The stroke around the nose will probably simply be a drawn curve sat above the nose and mouth part.

[h_d]

Or possibly...

I created two coloured shapes for the upper and lower areas of the body. I then grouped them and duplicated the group. I then used Boolean Add to combine the elements of the second (upper) group, and then ungrouped the remaining single object to give me the Border layer. I set the fill on this object to none and its stroke colour to black, aligned inside.

I then set the blend mode of the Border layer to Colour Burn and its opacity to 40%:

The body colours can be edited to taste:

And you can add extra bits without any modification of border layer:

Original .afdesign doc attached.

Cheers,

H

 

animal body.afdesign

[loukash]

1 hour ago, h_d said:

set the blend mode of the Border layer to Colour Burn and its opacity to 40%

Just to add:
Be aware that on vector export, any such effects will be possibly rasterized. And if not aligned precizely to the page/artboard pixel grid, you may see some unwanted and ugly antialiasing artifacts on object edges.
You may want to choose "Rasterize: Nothing" to keep the vectors and – to some extent – the effects intact, but that may again break other features of your design.

[Glinkot]

Wow, thanks guys!  Such thoughtful responses and effort, I really appreciate it.  I think a combo of those techniques will do the trick really nicely.

Good point about the rasterisation - I think as long as my sources are in Designer and nice and vectory, I'll be happy to rasterise on export and if I ever need changes I have the high fidelity source to work with.

Thanks again gurus!

Mark

[loukash]

9 minutes ago, Glinkot said:

Good point about the rasterisation

Some time ago I made a few experiments with Designer vs Illustrator CS5's rasterizing method on PDF/X export. Sadly, the rasterizing method that Serif has implemented in Affinity is seriously pathetic in comparison: