A taxing day

Besides baking some peanut butter cookies and tempeh coated with cornmeal and spicy buffalo sauce, I attempted, once again, to get the Intuos tablet working on macOS … and failed again. To solve the problem I bought Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for Windows. Problem solved, I hope.

Speaking of the unexpected, there’s always taxes. When I filed my taxes this year, I forgot to include some income. When I filed the amended tax form, I had to return all of the refund we got. That’s life.

A Floundering, Frustrating Day

I made a big mistake today. That translates to, I switched from Photoshop to the desktop version of Affinity Photo to color today’s image. The result was that I wasted today’s painting time. My first error was to forget that I need to practice using the Wacom tablet to get my touch back. My second error was to naively assume that Affinity Photo was a drop-in replacement for Photoshop. It’s not. It’s as different from Photoshop as French is different from ancient Latin. I see now that the only reason to switch to Affinity Photo is to avoid paying for Photoshop every month. I’d rather pay $50 a month than use Affinity Photo.

Here’s a doodle.

Picture #31, Family United

Now that I’m not using wi-fi and not using my iPad, I inked this picture on my desktop computer with my Wacom tablet and Affinity Photo. I felt like a clumsy beginner. But I will get better as I do more work. I used a plain round brush with no personality except for the characteristic wobble that my lines normally have. Wobbly lines have become the hallmark of my style.

Redrawing the Cover Image, Take 2

Here’s another version of the cover page. I started to redo this page in Affinity Photo for iPad and ended up using Photoshop. Although it’s cool to be able to edit images on the iPad, I’m a lot, lot, lot more efficient on the big desktop with my Wacom tablet. Even if I were fluent on the iPad, the desktop workflow is smoother and more efficient. For example, on the iPad something as simple as making a selection and deleting it takes 4 or 5 clicks to change from edit mode to select mode then back to edit mode to click a menu to delete. To make it seem more powerful and friendly, Affinity calls these modes “personas.” and the contextual menus are called “studios.” I’m not charmed by the marketing bullshit.

Of course, the real advantage of the iPad is that it’s portable and you can work anywhere, no matter how clunky the software is. Perhaps my gripes will vanish once I’m more accustomed to the subtleties of editing on the iPad.

The revised image, which may be revised again.

Redrawing a Picture of Jimmy Standing by the Chimney.

Today I decided to correct the cover image. As you can see, there’s too much missing. I drew the image thinking I would put it into a frame, or have the picture flush with the side of the page. And I decided to redraw the chimney itself. Months ago I cavalierly drew it as a cylinder, and for the rest of the book I drew it as a box. So, I opened the original image in Affinity Photo for iPad and started changing it up. The first thing I did was to flip it horizontally, expand the canvas, and start sketching.

The biggest problem I have is matching the style of the original lines, which were drawn with a fine liner on semi-transparent layout paper, then accidentally scanned on the wrong side. Hence, the appealing blurry, almost glowing line. I’d be pleased, indeed, to get that charming, messy look digitally.

It’s a work in progress for sure.

He’s on the wrong side of the chimney, and the chimney is cylindrical, not boxy.

There are 8 layers showing here.

Doing Laundry, Whacking Weeds, Chopping Down a Tree, Scraping Moss off the Roof, and Painting

The title says it all…that’s what I did today. It’s Saturday and my regular chore is to do the laundry, which I enjoy because I get some unbroken reading and surfing time. I had a lot more to do than laundry. It so happens that Spring is here and all of the trees and weeds have gone berserk. It’s my job to keep them from taking over. Weed whacking is one of my favorite chores, and chopping off a huge limb that was threatening to crush the neighbor’s fence was fun.

With all the excitement going on, I still had a few moments to work on the picture showing Jimmy diving to catch Buddy as Buddy is falling down the chimney. I loaded it into Affinity Photo, scaled it up to 5000x3500, and inked it again. I ran out of time while coloring it, so I’m presenting the half-painted picture.

BTW, this image was exported directly from Affinity Photo on the iPad Pro. For the first time Photoshop was not involved in my workflow.

Drawing a Bored Child Jaybird Wearing Hightops

Note to self: add Jimmy’s playthings strewn carelessly around him. I want to show that he’s bored with everything that has amused him, his mobile phone, his music, and his comic books. Life is so painful when your toys lose their charm, and the craving for new adventures clouds your judgement. Jimmy’s friend Buddy Butterfly will contribute to his delinquency, and mayhem will ensue.

MEMO: Adjust Buddy’s color!

Falling Down a Sooty Chimney

This drawing was colored with Affinity Photo on the iPad, then finished in Photoshop. I have to say that Photoshop is a really marvelous program. I wonder at times why I’m trying so hard to avoid it. Perhaps what really matters is that I run Photoshop on my 27-inch iMac, where everything is easier than on the iPad. I love the big, gorgeous screen. The one really big upside of Affinity Photo is that I also have the desktop version when I need it.

In this picture Jimmy has just jumped down the chimney to rescue his foolhardy friend, Buddy Butterfly.

Looks like I’ll have to change the color of Jimmy’s pants or the chimney.

Walking into the Light at the End of the Story

I plan to make this drawing of the family walking (and flying) together the final image in my children’s picture book. I’ve done several other pictures that seemed, at the time, to be the right picture for the last page of the book, and I may change my mind about this picture. So many options in designing a book, an infinite number, in fact! At some point I’m going to stick a fork in it and declare it finished.

There is a problem with this drawing — the line width is too thick. This happened because, again, I couldn’t find the original PSD file and had to scale up the PNG that I created for a previous blog post.

I painted this image with Affinity Photo on my iPad. I’m a little more comfortable with the program today than yesterday. Practice works wonders. I’m optimistic that Affinity Photo will be my go-to painting app.

And so, one story ends and another begins…

Changing Horses Midsteam, Against My Own Advice

A few posts ago I pondered the foolishness of changing software in the middle of a project. Climbing the learning curve of a professional quality graphic editor is really spinning your wheels when you have a deadline. But I did it anyway.

I’m now using Affinty Photo for iPad to color my images. After some initial confusion and frustration, I was able to learn enough in one day to color several images. The irony is that I opened them in Photoshop to clean them up for this blog post.

So far I’m intrigued by Affinity Photo, but I have to say, it has an amazingly incomprehensible color picker. Something that should be drop-dead simple turns out to be mind-boggling. There are actually three color pickers, and they all seem to do something different! After an hour of fumbling and googling I found a way to pick colors, but it wasn’t with the color picker tool in the left sidebar, nor was it with the color picker in the color panel — I have no clue what those two color pickers do. The color picker in the brush color panel does work the way Photoshop’s color picker works…I think.

Today is the first day of my one-week vacation, which explains why there are two pictures in this post. Affinity Photo has a lot more brushes than I wanted to deal with today, so I created a simple round brush with 50% opacity, 5% flow, with size modulated by pressure — basically a marker brush. It worked great and was not at mysterious, puzzling, or baffling.

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