iPad Digital Art

monquixote

I recently acquired an iPad Pro with a Pencil and that has prompted me to start fiddling around with doing some drawing. 

To give you some background I had any enthusiasm for wanting to draw well and truly beaten out of me at school and so I haven't drawn much more than a stick man in the last 30+ years and I am terrible at drawing. I'm mostly just drawing Mario characters etc to amuse the kids. 

I started on Procreate and I enjoyed that a lot, but I feel like I want more control to move things around and redo lines etc so I started playing around with a couple of vector packages like Amadine and Affinity (Similar to Adobe Illustrator, but without the silly cost). These give more control, but the process is much slower and less fun. I'm not sure if it's because those apps are much more pro and so I need to learn or if I'm trying to act like a professional graphic designer and I should stick to having fun with Procreate and this is just procrastination. 

I've noticed some of the pros who do tutorials seem to draw with something like Procreate and then use vector apps to trace over and tidy things up once they've done a sketch so maybe my workflow is wrong.

Interested if anyone enjoys some digital art and what apps / workflow you tend to use?

strumjoughlamps

I use Affinity, I'm not very skilled but I do enjoy it, it's very calming and like most things I do now it really helps my Parkinson's.

Wazmeister

Procreate is one of the best, and easiest to use, imho

stickyfiddle

I use Procreate for drawing, Affinity Designer for graphic design. Both are excellent.

thecolourbox

I use Krita on Windows and its pretty cool, but I imagine the ipad ones will be better as they'll be aimed at the typically more creative user? I've not tried ipad ones because my (non-apple) pencil isn't very accurate compared to my graphics tablet.

EDIT: forgot to talk about workflow and editting. I think Krita is similar to Procreate in the sense that once it's drawn, it can be erased like how you might use a rubber eraser, but you can't select a section and delete it or edit it in the way you can with a vector (as far as I know). It's frustrating but I just keep rubbing it out and drawing it again until I like what I've done. I use a lot of layers so I can use colour washes and outlines without them merging together, but also it gives me the ability to "trace" over a layer beneath but do it slightly different if needs be. Like draw the same window on a building but make it a bit more angled etc.

My workflow is pretty much layer upon layer upon layer etc. Each layer contains similar things in the sense of features and where i need it to be in the "front to back" sense". I'll normally start with a basic black outline drawing, sometimes i keep it at the end, sometimes not, or sometimes I'll make it a bit opaque as I did with the example below. Once the outlines are done I'll do some basic colour washing on the background like underpainting in real life, then just add detail on different layers to build it up. So it basically looks like a 5 year old's colouring book to start with but eventually looks nice once i've built it up

Here's an example of what I do, not done it for a while until this weekend when I was working through a big one of a local heritage building. This one is my parents dog

monquixote

strumjoughlamps said:

I use Affinity, I'm not very skilled but I do enjoy it, it's very calming and like most things I do now it really helps my Parkinson's.

Are you using Affinity Designer, or one of their other applications?

monquixote

stickyfiddle said:

I use Procreate for drawing, Affinity Designer for graphic design. Both are excellent.

Would you ever try and Draw in Affinity or do you think it's better to use Procreate and then Vectorise it later (If that's what you wanted to do?)

Sporky

I use Adobe Sketchbook, on a Samsung Galaxt Tab something, with an S-pen.

I lockdown I joined in with The Joy Of Painting, and got not-very-good at it. 

strumjoughlamps

@monquixote it's Affinity Photo, it's classed as a photo editor but it's really good as a drawing tool..

I am just having a read up on this Procreate app, I have always dismissed it as I have Sketchbook and thought it too similar but looking at it now Procreate looks good.

stickyfiddle

monquixote said:

stickyfiddle said:

I use Procreate for drawing, Affinity Designer for graphic design. Both are excellent.

Would you ever try and Draw in Affinity or do you think it's better to use Procreate and then Vectorise it later (If that's what you wanted to do?)

I haven’t considered it tbh, but that’s mostly because I started with procreate years ago, then picked up Affinity on Mac first, which is mouse & keyboard, so for what I do it just doesn’t map across 

TimmyO

Sporky said:

I use Adobe Sketchbook, on a Samsung Galaxt Tab something, with an S-pen.

I lockdown I joined in with The Joy Of Painting, and got not-very-good at it. 

Did you paint a happy little cabin? 

skullfunkerry

strumjoughlamps said:

@monquixote it's Affinity Photo, it's classed as a photo editor but it's really good as a drawing tool..

I am just having a read up on this Procreate app, I have always dismissed it as I have Sketchbook and thought it too similar but looking at it now Procreate looks good.

My stepdaughter uses Sketchbook, I’ve suggested to her that she could try Procreate and I’ll get her an Apple Pencil, but for the time being she’s happy using Sketchbook & her finger.
She makes characters which she then uses on a site called Scratch where she uses them in coding projects. She sent me this one the other day:

Kittyfrisk

^ Made me smile, not 'LOL' pisstake 

skullfunkerry

Kittyfrisk said:

^ Made me smile, not 'LOL' pisstake 

That's alright; I'd already considered the possibility that someone might make a sarcastic comment, and I was all ready to fire up the "She's only 11" line. All good

Sporky

TimmyO said:

Sporky said:

I use Adobe Sketchbook, on a Samsung Galaxt Tab something, with an S-pen.

I lockdown I joined in with The Joy Of Painting, and got not-very-good at it. 

Did you paint a happy little cabin? 

The trees came out a little sad. 

monquixote

skullfunkerry said:

Kittyfrisk said:

^ Made me smile, not 'LOL' pisstake 

That's alright; I'd already considered the possibility that someone might make a sarcastic comment, and I was all ready to fire up the "She's only 11" line. All good

She's considerably better than me!

skullfunkerry

monquixote said:

skullfunkerry said:

Kittyfrisk said:

^ Made me smile, not 'LOL' pisstake 

That's alright; I'd already considered the possibility that someone might make a sarcastic comment, and I was all ready to fire up the "She's only 11" line. All good

She's considerably better than me!

And me! And she's started writing music too now, which she's getting really good at... then she creates animations to go with her songs. She's super talented

hollywoodrox

strumjoughlamps said:

I use Affinity, I'm not very skilled but I do enjoy it, it's very calming and like most things I do now it really helps my Parkinson's.

That’s a great blue tit ,awesome job

stickyfiddle

Some annoyance this morning as Affinity has just been bought by Canva. I assume we have 18 months until it switches to a subscription model, thus continuing the enshittification of everything  

monquixote

stickyfiddle said:

Some annoyance this morning as Affinity has just been bought by Canva. I assume we have 18 months until it switches to a subscription model, thus continuing the enshittification of everything  

Oh well balls to that. 

They will get a shock if that's the route they go because every review says "It's not as good as Illustrator, but it's the best one that isn't a subscription"

sev112

I’ve been using Noteflow (and before Inkflow) by Qrayon, for over 10 years now.  mainly for writing notes and sketches at work, and for producing sketches to use in PPT engineering presentations .  It’s vector based rather than pixels I think.  It always like like it’s not being supported and the exports seem to get harder and harder hence I am always looking for something different.

I am old school and grew up drawing engineering drawings on drawing boards with pens and pencils of varying thickness.  I never got into 2D CAd, the out out by experts was appalling compared to a good drawing.  I am finding half of 3d users’ drawings and models poor too. Some are very good,

a year or so back I got a CAD expert to draw 4 cross sections of river walls that we had cored,  it took him >>40 hours (maybe 6!) to get black and white all same line thickness poor shading etc !?  I just used my Noteflow drawings and each week gave the client a PPT presentation using these coloured hand drawn things and they loved them, could understand them so much easier.

I have yet to find an Apple or MS or similar app/ software that will allow me to sketch and then translate that hand sketch into an approximate engineering sketch - if anyone has any ideas I would appreciate it