color illustration

[Mmillecamps]

Hi everyone,

I'm a total noob at this. Maybe this is a really stupid question.
I quickly drew something. Traced it with the pen tool to create a vector.

Now I would like to color this illustration, like fill spaces with the bucket tool (flood fill) or gradient.
What should I do now?

Open it in affinity photo, create a new layer?
Tried that but the whole background is colored.

I've watched some tutorials but not sure how to do this....

mr hat.afdesign

[R C-R]

You can do this in Designer, & keeping everything as vectors is nice, since then the project can be rescaled to any size without loss of quality. However, it will take some work because while you can fill shapes with color or gradients, you have to make everything you want to color a closed shape so its fill won't show in places you don't want it to.

 

For example, it is easy enough to fill the face/body ellipse with whatever color you want because it is a closed shape, if you tried to do that with the curves that make up the hat, arm/hand, or grin you will get fills that 'leak' into places you don't want.

 

So what you will have to do is use the break, join, & close curves features; along with some shape duplication & node pruning; to get the closed shapes you need.

 

I downloaded the file & looked at what it contained. I noticed there was a lot of unnecessary duplication & some odd grouping of unrelated curves. I wanted to show you one way to do the coloring so the first thing I did was eliminate & ungroup some stuff to simplify that process. From there, it took quite a bit of duplicating, breaking, joining, etc. to separate the project into closed curves & where appropriate, unfilled strokes.

 

I have attached what I came up with because it would be too time consuming to explain it step-by-step but I added some grouping that might make it easier to see what I did.

 

Hope this helps.

mr hat v2.afdesign

[Mmillecamps]

Thank you very much for your reply.

I'll have a close look at it soon. It sounds a bit complicating as I'm just starting out.

I indeed noticed I duplicated some curves not sure what I did wrong, I tried to adjust the existing shapes sometimes that worked, sometimes it duplicated.

It looks very time consuming to make closed shapes.

 

I was also wondering if I open this file in Affinity Photo, is it possible then to fill it easier. (I do understand I will lose quality)

If so , how to do this? Open a new layer?etc?

 

I've been thinking about buying a Wacom tablet too, so might be able to color my drawings. Good idea or not?

I'm the kind of person who likes to work quickly. More natural. I do like the vector drawings, but it's not really my style.

I did some illustration work for childrens books the old fashioned way ( watercolor) and some on the ipad. (Draw black lines, scan it with adobe shape and import it in Procreate, there you could easily fill shapes as the drawing was vectorised.

 

So maybe that's another option?

[PixelPest]

I find there´s nothing wrong with taking a brush and a new layer underneath the line-work and have a good play:

After you made colors available as your linked document is in greyscale mode.  :D

Cheers

P.

[R C-R]

If you are willing to forgo the benefits of keeping everything as editable vector objects, you can rasterize the drawing (in your mr. hat example, do this by selecting the group layer, right click on it & choose "Rasterize..." from the popup menu).

 

In Designer you can then switch to the Pixel persona & use the Flood Fill (paint bucket) tool to fill in enclosed areas. You will need to make sure the "Continuous" option is checked & you may need to reduce the tolerance level & zoom in to fill in some areas without affecting others. You will probably find it useful to scale up the drawing while it is still in vector format before rasterizing it so you have more pixels to work with.

 

Photo gives you a lot more pixel-based options to work with, & you can use the File > "Edit in Photo..." menu choice to switch to that app without having to save the changes in Designer first & then opening the saved file in Photo.

 

Either way, in either app pixel based tools (Flood Fill, Brushes, Eraser, Burn, Dodge, Blur, etc.) will only work on pixel (rasterized) layers. So for example, you could use a Wacom tablet to draw vector strokes in AD, scale up as needed in that app & then switch to AP before or after rasterizing, & apply pixel effects in that app to any or all rasterized layers; or do everything in AD if you don't need the pixel tools & options only AP offers.

[PixelPest]

If you are willing to forgo the benefits of keeping everything as editable vector objects, you can rasterize the drawing 

Guess what all conceptual artist do all the time.  ;)

 

Cheers

P.

[evtonic3]

Here's my approach, way more destructive, but gets the job done. I also would probably make a duplicate of the curves layers in case you want to edit the shapes again. I cleaned up some layers to get to the curves only- for simplicity sake. 

[Mmillecamps]

Thanks everyone for your time! This will help me a lot. Now I know what to do. Many options, I'll try them all. And see what suits me best. It's also good to know all the options depending on what project I'm working. So glad you all helped me out.

 

MANY THANKS!

 

 

@evtonic3 I'll check the movie tonight, won't open on my ipad. Thank you :)

[Mmillecamps]

evtonic3, I watched the video and tried, it works like a charm thanks a lot! :-)

pixelpest tried your thing too in AP and it worked. 

 

RC-R Sorry for my noobness, managed sort of to group things.
But not sure what node pruning is and why and how you duplicate shapes.
I get this now...probably something to do with the above things not done.

mr hat trouble in paradise.afdesign

[R C-R]

By node pruning, i just meant deleting nodes (using the delete key on the keyboard) to get rid of extra nodes you don't need. Sorry for the confusion about that.

 

To duplicate shapes, the easiest way is using cmd +J with one or more shapes you want to duplicate selected. One reason for doing this is so you can cut them into separate sections (using the break node action), discard the sections you don't need, & join the remaining sections to make closed shapes without having to redraw the same sections again.

[Mmillecamps]

Thanks again RC-R