How can I fill this shape and remove the overlapping lines

[einfachnurtimo]

Hey everyone!!

 

I am very very new to Affinity Designer.

 

I wonder how to make a shape out of a couple of lines ... have a look at the picture!!

 

Hopefully someone can answer!

 

Thanks!

[R C-R]

In Affinity Designer shapes do not have to be closed paths but they must enclose an area before they can be given a fill color. That means you can't fill a straight line, but even a two node open path can be filled as long as at least one of its nodes causes the line to curve.

 

There are several ways to combine several lines into a single (usually closed) shape & remove any overlaps. One of them is to use the Boolean Geometry Divide operation on them & delete the extra shapes the division creates. The diagram below & the attached Combining lines.afdesign may make this clearer.

Others will probably suggest better alternatives.

[gdenby]

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.

 

 

 

 

[R C-R]

You might find variation 2.afdesign of interest. It is sort of a variation on the last method @gdenby mentioned, one that uses a few features of vector shapes to reduce the number of nodes that need to be added or deleted. It does not look quite like his version but it hopefully will give you some ideas about the different ways you can combine shapes to get different results.

 

The shape I named "body" was created by joining the top & one of your outer shapes & then joining that with the other outer shape. Nested inside it is the line I named "beltline." Because that line is nested, there is no need to add or delete any of its nodes. Its stroke color & width can easily be set to whatever you want without that affecting anything else.

 

The two 'wing' shapes were created with the Pen tool, & stacked over the body shape in the Layers panel, which hides the sharp nodes of the body shape below them. That creates an overlap of the wing stroke into the body, which you may or may not like. I did not do anything to the two eye shapes besides fill the larger ones & make sure the two shorter ones were above them in the Layer stack. You may not like the effect this produces but there is a way to get something that looks like a non-overlapping shape that does not involve deleting any nodes, which I used for the Mouth shape.

 

For that, I duplicated the top mouth line & moved the dup up on the canvas until it was above the ends of the lower mouth line. I then joined & closed the two top mouth lines, placed that above the lower mouth line in the Layers panel, & then subtracted it from the lower mouth line. (To make this more obvious I actually created a compound object by holding down the alt/option key during the subtraction, but you don't need to do that.) The resulting "Mouth" shape can be filled with any desired color without affecting anything else.

 

The end result is this:

Please understand that I am not suggesting this is the best or even a very good way to get what you want. It is only intended to show some of the possibilities the app offers.