In this third Affinity Designer tutorial in the series, we will continue to work on our digital artist manikin. As the manikin's body proportions have passed the Heads Count measurement test, we will concentrate on the proportions for the head and face. As we draw the final line art for the head, we will also set up some guidelines that will indicate where we should add the eyes, eyebrows, ears, nose and mouth.

Open your project into Affinity Designer. You should already have all the layers for the manikin sketch grouped in to the step 1 - rough sketch group layer. As we did before, lower the opacity of this sketch layer, so that we can use it as a guide. Of course, we will be drawing on new layers above the sketch layer.

1. Select the step 1 - rough sketch group layer.


2. At the top of the Layers panel, reduce the opacity of this group layer to about 50%.


3. With the Zoom tool, zoom in to the head area of the sketch below.


4. From the Context Toolbar, turn on Snapping.


5. Hold down the Shift key and draw a circle with the Ellipse tool. The top of the circle should touch the top of the head in your sketch and be about three fourths the height (see screenshot).


6. Name this layer head circle.


7. With the circle still selected so that the nodes are visible, drag a Guide from the top Ruler to intersect the vertical center left and right nodes.


8. Repeat the previous step and drag a Guide from the side Ruler to intersect with the horizontal center top and bottom nodes.


9. Now, switch to the Tear tool and draw a tear shape on top of the circle (see screenshot). The top of the tear shape should intersect the top of the circle and the tear shape should be one fourth longer than the circle (ie the length of the head in your sketch). In the Context Toolbar, click the Transform - Flip Vertical button.


10. Name this layer head chin.


11. Select both the head circle and head chin layers. Right-click and choose Group. Name this group layer head.

The chin is a little pointed. Let's fix this. In order to reshape a vector shape, such as the circle or tear, we need to work with the individual nodes. We can do that by converting the shape to curves.


12. Select the head chin layer and click the Convert to Curves button in the Context Toolbar (see screenshot).


13. Select the Node tool and then click on the bottom node at the point of the chin.


14. With the bottom node selected, click the Smooth option from the Convert section of the Context Toolbar. You should see two Control Handles. (see screenshot).

You will notice that the lines from the point are a little smoother but not smooth enough yet.


15. Click on the end of one handle and drag outward to smooth the chin. Repeat with the other handle (see screenshot).


16. Next, select the node on the left side of the tear shape (ie the left side of the manikin's head).


17. Drag the node until the tear's line intersects with the circle's line (see screenshot).


18. Use the Control Handles to reshape the left side of the tear shape to completely overlay the circle's rounder shape. However, do not shorten the height of the tear shape (see screenshot). To make the job a little easier, thin the stroke lines for the tear and circle.


19. Repeat this for the node on the right side of the tear shape.

Next

INDEX - Artist Manikin in Affinity Designer

Screenshots used by permission of Serif (Europe) Ltd. This article is not endorsed by Serif Ltd.