Affinity for making a cartoon? Questions

[MarkusUz]

Hello,

 

just to be clear, I would like to draw the cartoon by hand, but use Affinity for certain purposes to make things easier and to enhance the final product. Therefore, I don't have use for a comic making software like Manga or such. The problem is, I don't have experience on this, and I don't know the technical terms of what I'm thinking of, so I'm not sure how to start asking whether I would able to do the things I'm thinking of with Affinity.

 

So, maybe I just describe what I have planned. I would appreciate if you would tell me if these are possible with Affinity, and what the terms are:

 

1. First, I would draw by hand some recurring things, like basic body shapes for main characters and such. I would scan them. From the scans I would like to somehow easily crop out the drawings along their outer lines (is there a name for this procedure?), and store the drawings in a bank for later use.

 

2. Then I would set up a page for a comic strip with Affinity. I would need to have points for the corners of the boxes to have the comic strip outlined. And then take from the bank whatever I would need in that particular strip and place them there, or even partially outside of the strip (for example if I only need a character chest-up). Can I set it up so the corber points stay on top, even if I would place a character on the same location?

 

3. Then I would print it and draw the rest for it. Connect the corner points to make the boxes of the comic strip.

 

4. Scan the whole finished strip, and apply some final touches, erase everything outside the strip boxes (for example the lower body of that character I used only chest-up).

 

The key points are that: the scanned drawings would have to be exactly the same size throughout the process, so a 0.5 pen would look exactly the same in 1. and 3. So when I crop them and store them, and then bring back again, they would be the correct size. And that I could operate on an A4 with the box corners outlined all the time.

 

I hope you got what I'm going for. I appreciate if you can say whether I can do these with Affinity, and I would appreciate to know what the names of there functions are.

 

Cheers!

[jkehoe]

Hello,

 

I have a similar interest in sketches, illustrations or cartoon-like images and I've found that using Affinity Designer's pen tool and layers to work well for me. I'm sure that there's a better way to do this and, hopefully, you'll get better responses to your questions. But for starters, I choose a digital photo where you'd choose your scanned cartoon character and we'd have a jpg or similar file type saved on our hard drive. Here's what I do next:

Open the file in either Affinity Photo or Designer and save that as a new file. This image is now the base or background of the project.

Add a new layer on top of this base layer and, in Designer, choose the pen tool. I like to zoom in quite a lot to get the level of detail for the project.

Trace the outlines of the object by clicking on the edges with the pen tool; these clicks set "nodes" along that path.

Break up the tracing in logical sections. For example, my quail image is made up of the body, head plume, left leg and right leg tracings.

Save the project as you go, being mindful of the overall size in pixel dimensions.

In Designer, click File >  Document Setup and choose a new size and rescale to meet your end result needs. Save that as a new file version.

Go back to your original Affinity file version and continue building other elements for your character.

 

Once we have an Affinity Designer project with these tracing pen lines we can choose/select that line, change to the node tool, and move sections of these lines around as needed. For example, a cartoon character's arm could be flexed as if waving its hand. The node tool is helpful here.

 

I've attached a partial screen capture of a project that uses the outline of a quail, rendered down to be a small icon. The Affinity image is zoomed-in to 400% to make the nodes more visible; there are a lot because the original quail photo was over 3000 pixels wide. The end result of my icon is about 200 pixels wide. It takes me a lot of time to do this but I enjoy it ;-)

 

Best Regards!

[MarkusUz]

Thank you for a lengthy answer. Though I'm not sure if I followed it all, and if that is answering my questions. It seems you are doing something quite different than I.

[MEB]

Hi MarkusUz,

I believe the term you are looking for is inking.

Here's a few third party tutorials that may help:

• Inking tutorial with Affinity Designer, using an old technique
• Affinity Designer - Tutorial 02 - Beginning a New project and Pen Tool
• Affinity Designer Inking

[MarkusUz]

Thank you, but those things are much more technical what I'm looking for.

 

I basically would just need to have the outline of the comic strip box, and then I could drag some drawn and scanned images into it. Then print it, draw the missing things, scan again, and that would be it.

 

It's really simple what I'm looking for, but I'm still not sure if it can be done or how to do it. There's a couple of problems. Like, if I drag a character to the corner of the comic strip box, so that it's half outside, it  would cover the lines of the box, but naturally I don't want that. I need to see the lines of the box. It would be really cool, if everything outside a box would be automatically cut out. Is this possible?

 

Also, I'm not sure how to set it up so I can see it as an A4 with a precisely 9 cm x 28 cm box (or divided into smaller boxes), and everything that I scan and place there would be in original size... so that if I draw something that's 9 cm tall, it will just fit into that 9 cm box, without any resizing or scaling. If I have to resize, the thickness of the drawn lines will change, and they should be constant.

 

I hope I can explain it well enough.

[MEB]

Hi MarkusUz,

Thanks for the details. In Affinity Designer/Photo create an A4 document (for print in case you want to print it later) then inside it draw a rectangle with 9 cm x 28 cm. Add a stroke to it as you see fit. Scan your image, go to menu File ▸ Place to import it to your affinity document then drag the image layer over the layer of the rectangle you have created in the Layers panel (not over its thumbnail but over the area on the right) - to use the rectangle as a clipping layer hiding everything that lays outside its area. Check attached sample.

 

You can stylise/customise the strip box using brushes or editing it's nodes to distort it a little if you want. You may have to convert the rectangle shape to curves first (select the rectangle and press ⌘ (cmd) + ↵ (Enter) to be able to add/edit nodes with the Node Tool.

cartoon_sample.afdesign

[MarkusUz]

Thank you Meb, this is starting so sound like what I'm looking for. I don't have Affinity yet, as I first want to make sure I can do with it what I want, so I can't check your sample for now. But this sounds promising. I assume I could also divide that 9 cm x 28 cm to any amount of boxes and have them separately act as their own clipping layers? That would be very cool, and would make things quite easy. I think my basic version would be three of 9 cm x 9 cm boxes separated with 0,5 cm spaces, but some strips would be different.

[MEB]

Yes, you can use whatever number of rectangular shapes you want (or any other shape actually - including drawn your own) as clipping objects, then place your sketches/cartoons/images/whatever inside them and position them as you wish. You can also use smart guides to help you align everything (rectangles/shapes) properly without much trouble.

[MarkusUz]

Ok, I think I'm convinced. Thank you, MEB.

 

By the way, could I do it with either Photo or Designer? Along with scanning and cropping the drawn images of course.

 

If I can do it with either, I think I would go for Photo, as I need some photo editing software as well.