How to Expand Stroke in Affinity Designer

The Expand Stroke in Affinity Designer essentially turns a single stroke into a shape. The shapes are then flattened so that you can manipulate them. Expand Stroke is useful for creating quick designs or outlines. In this tutorial we will show you how to use the Expand Stroke in Affinity Designer.

The Pen Tool will be used to draw out our shapes. We also have a very helpful tutorial on how to use the Pen Tool in Affinity Designer.

Step 1 - Apply the Expand stroke to a single curve

Let us start off with a single line curve to get an idea of what the Expand Stroke does.

Open Affinity Designer, click New Document then adjust your settings if needed and click Create.

Draw out a single curve using the Pen tool located on the left side. Adjust the nodes and their handles to create the desired shape.

On the right side under the Stroke panel, adjust the width to about 30 pt. It may appear as if the line is a solid object. But when you click on the Pen tool you will notice that it is still a single line but with a thicker stroke width.

You will only be able to change the color of the stroke. If you add a fill Affinity will try and compensate by filling in where it believes the color should be.

As this isn't how we want it to look, we will use the Expand Stroke option instead. The stroke width will determine how the tool is applied. We created a duplicate to give you a comparison. It is not necessary for you to do the same.

Click on the Layer menu at the top of the screen then select Expand Stroke. In the image below, the Expand Stroke was applied to the bottom curve.

The single curve has been flattened and the stroke expanded. The fill, stroke color and width can be changed.

Step 2 - Use Expand Stroke to create a shape outline

The Expand Stroke tool can be very beneficial for adding outlines to solid shapes. Let us take a heart shape for example. In the image below we used the Pen tool to draw and copy the heart shape.

This created a single line but we want to create just an outline of the heart. Adjust the width of the Stroke to the thickness you want. This will be the thickness of the outline. Next, click on Layer and then choose Expand Stroke. Adjust the stroke width under the Stroke Panel to better see the outline.

If you look under the Swatches panel you will see the Stroke and Fill represented as circles. When you adjust the color for both, only the outline will change and not the middle of the heart shape.

Step 3 - Keep the Stroke width consistent when resizing

Affinity Designer has an option under the Stroke panel to consistently resize the stroke width. This will keep the stroke from changing as you make the object smaller or bigger.

Under the Stroke panel on the right hand side, be sure to tick Scale with Objects. You can now change the size of the object and not worry about the stroke being inconsistent.

Play around with your design by combining the different elements you created together. Change the fill and stroke properties or add a gradient for a more creative look. You can learn how to make a gradient with our tutorial if you need some help.

Next up check out our tutorials on creating Affinity Designer brushes, making a gradient background, and designing an Instagram carousel in Affinity Designer.