Okay, I've been messing around with Affinity Designer on the iPad for the last 2 evenings and this program is amazing.
Yesterday's masterpiece was a little rough. I was just sitting outside with the iPad and decided to do a quick vector scenery drawing of the back yard. I really just wanted to get used to where everything was at in the program and this little gem accomplished that. I can now safely say that the app on the iPad is very, very close to the full program on the PC. It is powerful.
As you can see, I spent hours and hours producing that wonderful work of art. Okay, okay. It took me 45 minutes to make while I figured out where all the tools were. It gave me a good feel for the program and there are some things I really, really like about it.
The pencil tool has to be my favorite right now. It was good on a PC using a mouse. But now it's just incredible using the Apple Pencil. Turning the stabiliser on just a little bit gives you such a smooth stroke with zero noticeable wobble. It's super easy to use for filling in colour after the lineowork is done, too. You can just also turn on the 'sculpt' button and build on your line even after you take your pencil off the page. It's similar to the blob brush in Adobe Illustrator.
So today I really got into the pencil tool. I made this eagle this evening to get a little deeper into the program with layers, groups, and masks.
The whole thing is made exclusively with the pencil tool. I can certainly say I have a good feel for how it works now after all those lines.
I did notice something strange about this program. There is no option to make Colors global. I hope they fix that in the future (they are supposed to from what I found online) because I use that a lot. I usually draw some things in brighter colours and then change them to the colour I actually want a little later as more parts get added. Without a global colour option, I had to get a little creative. For all the lines on the feathers, I put each different colour that I used in a group and then was able to change the colour of the whole group later. This won't always work because it won't always be possible to group the same Colors like that, but it worked this time at least.
And today I noticed an article about Adobe going to be releasing a full blown photoshop program for the iPad sometime in the future. Eventually they will also add Illustrator too, the article said. I think someone might be getting a little nervous that there big expensive programs might have gotten too expensive and now there are much cheaper alternatives coming in to steal the market. Unless adobe can give me photoshop and illustrator on the iPad for $20 each, Affinities got them beat in my books. I get that photoshop caters to big production and design companies, but paying hundreds of dollars in never ending subscription fees for their programs is just ridiculous and greedy. Obviously another company was going to come in and start stealing artists away with a cheaper and comparable program.
To top off the day, it was also my last day of work for 3 weeks. I'll be headed to Cape Breton on Sunday to do some sailing around the Bras D'Or lakes. It's been a few years since I've been back to Cape Breton so I'm looking forward to it. I've also only ever been in a canoe or a kayak on the lakes so a sailboat will add a different perspective, I'm sure.