Filling in multiple areas of a shape in Affinity Designer for iPad

Question

I'm just starting out in Affinity Designer for iPad, and I'm trying to perform a pretty simple fill operation on this eye that I've drawn. I come from an Illustrator background and it's incredibly simple to do in there.

Basically, I've drawn the outer shape of the eye, and added a line through it. I'd like to fill in below that dividing line with one color, and use white above it (as you'd expect for an eye).

The problem is, I can't seem to fill in the eye color without creating another complete shape that overlaps the outer shape along the bottom and left sides of the eye. I can work around it like that, but it's tedious and would definitely end up taking forever on more elaborate illustrations. Surely there's some way to fill in color without completely overlapping lines all the time, right?

Answer 1

There's a workaround for the lack of Illustrator's Live Paint and Shape Builder:

In the left there's a closed path.

In the middle an overlapping closed path has been inserted, both are selected and boolean "Divide" is clicked.

In the right the generated parts are moved apart to show them. The dividing shape must be a closed path, but the unnecessary part of it need not to have any specific form, because you delete it. You draw exactly only the dividing curve.

Not asked: This will generate perfectly fitting seams. Affinity Designer will make them transparent. If you have something bright in the background and the facing shapes are dark, the bright part can be seen through. The transparent gap is about 1 pixel wide and it's caused by anti-aliasing. Overlap or a stroke fixes it.

You get the overlap and save the bottom object intact if you duplicate it:

Here the blue shape is duplicated before the division. In the right the parts to be deleted are moved aside.

Answer 2

I use Affinity Designer both on desktop and on iPad - there's not direct equivalent to Illustrator's Shape Builder if that is the kid of thing you mean - for myself, based on your screencap, I'd have the white element of the eye beneath the iris, I'd fill the white with a subtle gradient, and the iris would have a different fill. I tend to take the same approach with Affinity Designer work that I used to with my architectural illustration Illustrator work - that is, I keep linework on a whole separate layer stack than fills and treatments, to allow for easy re-styling of the project as I move forwards.

Hope that helps some.