let's make silhouette portraits with affinity designer these are all examples of portraits
i've made using affinity and uh reference photos so let's get started i've always loved portraiture
and silhouettes are some of my favorite and they are so fun and easy to make in affinity here's an
example of a silhouette that i made of my son a couple years back and i place my silhouettes on
fun different backgrounds i used to sell digital downloads of custom silhouettes so these are the
listing photos i used i don't do it anymore but if you do have a small business it's a really
great way it's a really great product to offer and i highly recommend you do it when i offered
them i offered i think nine or ten different backgrounds and i just placed the silhouettes
and um send people a huge pdf with all of the printable silhouettes on it
here's my daughter from a few years back this is a more whimsical silhouette so i know that there
are some programs where you can just take a photo so here's an example of a photo i found online
you can take a photo of a child and in photoshop you can either you can deal mess around with
contrast levels or there are apps that will just turn this profile into a flat black
silhouette and those are great but there is an art to silhouette portraiture
and so if you have the if you're so inclined to create an actual silhouette in affinity
um you can add some elements some fun artistic elements so here's my
beautiful niece and my handsome nephew they both wear glasses so here's an example
of adding some details that you won't get if you just do a conversion and then most standard
actual real silhouettes who are cutting paper with a pair of scissors on the spot you know those two
minute party silhouettists who are just amazing and i've been trying to become one myself but i'm
not there yet they also cut in you can see here eyelashes they add some details that you won't get
uh if you do a conversion like convert an image to create your silhouette so
for example here this child had a lot of bumps in his hair but i smoothed out the
top of the hairline and you can add some details just in the back and make your
silhouettes far more charming if you create them in affinity from scratch instead of just doing a
conversion my best tips for getting your photo is you want to contrast a contrasting background
i pulled this from the internet this is like a free use image of a child from one of those
databases with public domain photos so this photo looks like it's professional but whatever photo
you get to turn into a silhouette you obviously want some kind of contrast this is a decent
contrast you can really see all the lines because this is a professional photo it has some more
blurring around the edges than i see from normal photos that people send to me the other thing i
like about this photo is this child's chin is tilted down just a bit i think child
silhouettes look best if you can see here my son is looking down a little and we have that little
um the little hair puff up in the back i think they look better when children are tilted down
versus with their chin up like this one for some reason i've learned that when people take photos
of their kids they always put the chin up so if the chin is too high you can always just tilt it
so you can always rotate your image and just move it this way and then you'll
adjust the way the neck is angled in your final design but this is a really good photo to start
with so here's how i start my silhouettes i start every silhouette with an oval
and i like the color depending on what the picture is i like the color to be a nice contrast
i give it a stroke that's thick enough to see
and i like the stroke to be centered on the line it's easier to grab your um nodes well
it's easier for me to grab my nodes when the stroke is centered and then i just take the oval
and just bring it out to around the edges of the child's face and then i convert it to a curve
so now in my layers panel instead of being a shape this is now a curve so i pick up my node tool
this white arrow and now i have complete control over this curve so what i do next is i just move
to the outer
all the outer edges of the child's face and i just create these round nodes
in every edge so if you move the minus instead for oops mine isn't creating
these sharp nodes it's already set for smooth nodes but if you move your curve before you add
a node if it is giving you hard on sharp nodes if you're moving a curve and then add a node
it'll always be a smooth one just a little tip for you so i'm just going to pull that in here
let's see what we have here i'm going to place a node there to keep that spot back there none
of this is really about precision it's more about just getting a general outline because
it's a lot easier to manipulate all of your nodes once you have oops once you have a basic
outer shape so did you see what happened there if you move the curve before you create a new node
then it affects the line and the outside of the surrounding curve so it's usually
if you're trying to do this general shape it's usually best to add your node and then move it
and it only affects the space in between the surrounding nodes when you do that so here this
is obviously not a finished silhouette this looks kind of like a child but not really and this is
where the fun begins so you're gonna just start when you get here now you're just gonna start
to outline the general shape and so the i always add these little details in last so you can see we
have some hair that's spiking up at the top this spiky hair in the front is obviously going to be
really important for this silhouette because this is really characteristic of this child's profile
but i'm not going to do any of that yet what i start with is just the basics
just getting things out just getting these lines evened out a little bit
there are some parts of a silhouette that are really more
more important to get correct than others and that is of course this whole area here the nose
the forehead and then this eye area so i come in really really tight when i'm doing this part
and i want to follow as closely as possible and so this child has a very
minor little detail here i'm gonna pull that up
barely visible but it will make a difference and this is where
portraiture silhouette portraiture really becomes more of an art than anything because some details
you want to make sure you get and some are not as important so here
i'm just pulling in this i want to be a sharp node
if i weren't doing this on video i would not
add so many nodes willy-nilly because i do like to have the
least amount of nodes possible in my designs but it is of course much faster to just pull
pull the curve with a node there so here it's a little complicated because his hand is on his chin
and since i don't know this child i'm not really going to know if i get his chin correct but you
probably don't know the child either so we'll just assume it looks good based on what we can see here
we want this to be nice and smooth so i'm actually gonna delete this
and i'm gonna work this line a bit like this i like the traditional
look of silhouettes where they have this kind of situation so i always pull that
up and this is you know this is also gives you the impression of a shoulder which of course is
a good negative space to have there so now you can see just by doing a little bit of work
this is starting to look like an actual child and not so much a cartoon child
so now i'm going to save my work
and this is the point where i'm going to start adding in those important details
so up at the top i think that these these little hair spikes are important so i'm going to turn
this node into a sharp node because we have spikes i'm going to have some other sharp nodes here
and then i'm just going to pull oh we're gonna pull this hair
let's get some little spikes going on
that might be too i like that and so with your no tool it's just so easy to add these
teeny tiny details that don't look like much at first but you'll see as we get
as we add in more and more they really do change the overall impression so hair is probably going
to be the most challenging part of any silhouette that you create and you'll have to decide how
how much you want it to be very very true to what you see in the picture or more impressionistic so
this i made of my daughter when she was little and she had those little baby curly cues so
these obviously don't look like what her curls actually looked like they were kind of cartoony
and then this is an example of thicker i think i did these two in the same year so they're the
same kind of style but if you go down this down here i pulled in a lot of these little
spikes because this child had really really spiky hair so instead of just
doing leaving the impression of spikes i wanted to put them all in there
so it's really up to you and what you want if you're working for yourself it's really easy to
figure out what to do you just make a decision if you have if you're offering this as a as a
product for a business i think it's important to make your style clear for your customers
and hope that you get customers who trust your artistic vision so i'm going to try
something here i'm going to add a bunch of sharp nodes and see how it looks if i just pull
pull them up and kind of do like a spiky situation i don't like the way this is curved here
i'm not sure how this is going to look so if i'm going to add a bunch of spikes i want to make very
sure that they don't all hit the same line here so so you want to very you want to kind of vary the
the the line and where you're pulling them in
because otherwise it might just look a little goofy
or a little too symmetrical so we'll see how this ends up i'm not sure i'm gonna like it
the fun thing with affinity is it's really easy to change your approach and start over so these
are really choppy let's see what they look like i kind of no i don't like that i think it's too much
i don't know i'm gonna hide the picture layer so i can see what it really looks like
actually i kind of like that so now that i think i like those spikes
i'm going to curve them a little so they aren't just um straight
so the irony is the real silhouette the real silhouettists they um look at a person
they have their scissors in hand and they create these beautiful silhouettes in minutes
maybe you've had the pure joy of getting a silhouette done at a party
and here we are trying to duplicate this beautiful art in affinity and it ends up taking
not so much time but definitely much more time that it takes in this in the original art form
whoa did you see what i did there i'm just going to pull the handle for this node instead of
ruining it so here so now with that detail i'm just going to turn it black again and see what
i think oh i like that so i like that maybe i'll go back and add some more hair but i kind
of like this i like it exactly as it is now and what i don't like is this here is way too
that node was not necessary so we're going to get rid of that now there's this one
i'm an english professor by day and i always tell my students when we're talking about editing
and revising you can cut words because they don't bleed and the same thing goes for these
little notes just chop them out if they're not serving you so here i'm going to pull this down
i converted this to a sharp node because i want to pull this in and make just a little more
of a curve back here let's see how this will look okay here we go so now
now we're going to add some eyelash detail and i think this is a real hallmark of a true
portrait um i have some books i have a book by charles burns who is probably
one of the most famous living silhouettis he's just amazing and the book has a lot of
examples of silhouettes from different time periods and different work and if you look
at the work of silhouette artists they do a lot of them pull these um eyelashes out and i think
it's their i'm sorry yeah these are eyelashes it serves a couple things so i just selected
a group of notes because i want to bring it down i want to bring this little detail down a little
um one it gives you the impression of where the eye is oh there i like that so
it tells you where the child's eye is which is always really nice and it's a little detail that
if you're looking for it you really notice it but in the final situation i don't think
anyone's looking and thinking oh look there is an eyelash there but it does add to the overall
um impression of the child so i'm i'm i'm getting my stroke out a little because the
the lips are important because that's where you capture the child's expression
and i have a little situation here where i don't think it's quite right it's better and
so sometimes with lips too there's a lot of shadow going on in here and this is obviously the child's
lip but he's turned a little towards the camera so i'm gonna pull this
lip i'm gonna pull it in beyond the photo and i think that's going to be a more
accurate depiction of what this child's actual silhouette looks like
and so you can see here too with the chin do you see how it comes in a little here
but we don't totally see that because of the angle
at which this portrait was taken so i'm gonna i'm gonna just finagle the chin a little as well
and so when you're working off of pictures
it's really helpful if you don't know your subject when i was selling silhouette portraits to people
i asked for i would sometimes ask for multiple pictures of a child so i could really get a feel
for what they look like so let's see what we have going on here i'm going to hide our
photo layer look at this so this child is really leaning his neck is kind of
angled forward a lot and so what i would do is i'm going to move this i'm just selecting
this whole area and i'm just going to move it down
and over and this looks this looks a lot better to me and so there's some eye work going on here you
do have to use your eyes and just see what feels right and make the change so the other detailing
that i would add in for this child is he has this really striking hairline right here so i'm going
to create just a regular rectangle shape for all these detail shapes i create a rectangle i
convert it to curves i pick up my curve tool let's see just kind of play around with it
just gonna see what this would look like this is a pretty unusual little hairline
and in the silhouettes i showed you in the beginning for example with the
with my niece and nephew in their glasses
those kind of details are always really fun to add and they're super easy to add with simple shapes
and you'll see this shape you can you can save it as a white shape or you can use
your tool up here and just remove it so your final product ends up being just one curve
so here you don't want it to be perfect
it might be a little that may look a little weird i'm not totally sure
so what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn this white and i'm going to turn our base curve
i don't know if i like that let's see
so the other thing is you're going to do a lot of back and forth
and eyeballing things to see how they look i feel like there's something missing like maybe
i need to pull this up oops i didn't want to add a curve maybe i need to pull this up like this
and then
well the undo tool is your friend here when you're working and then maybe add this detail here
because really oops sometimes you gotta get really far in to grab a node if you're working in a small
yeah maybe something like this is what i want to add this detail oh my goodness gracious
what's going on here oh i need to make that a sharp node it'll be much easier if i do that
here we go yeah i can already tell i'm probably not gonna like this but it's worth checking out
sometimes less is more with the silhouette and it doesn't need the detail so this is an example
where i don't want this detail because it's just not working out for me but i do like the
silhouette as it is for a super fast silhouette so what i would do now if i'm creating a printable
i'm going to group one trick so you don't end up distorting the curve you just created is i turn it
into a group and that way i won't accidentally distort it because it will resize to scale
as a group versus if it's just a curve and so here i can just create an eight and a half by 11
inch art board and i have this nice silhouette and you can you can change it you can change
the angle if you want him to be looking upward a little more if this is your child and you really
know what he should look like you could obviously make any adjustments you want
and then if you have a background this i just created i i laid a background in the back
and then an oval with some fun detailing and i could just add this here
boom and pick up a color from the background if you want to make it
um look like more of a traditional silhouette they were often framed
in oval frames i've had some luck finding oval frames in michael's recently
i'm going to copy my i have a little digital signature that i put on them
and i just add the signature i tuck it in somewhere at the bottom where it doesn't look
too obtrusive and there you go a beautiful silhouette i hope you have fun making them
if you make any silhouettes please um let me know add it in the comments if you have any
questions i'll be there in the comments to answer them thanks so much for watching bye