Affinity Designer Free Trial
I am not an artist.
I enjoy playing around painting miniatures and I bumble along creating some functional 3D models and 2D art for my play programming projects.
Using Inkscape and Gimp (because they are free-free), and Paint.NET (because it is free) has got me where I am today. Which, to be honest, is a fair way. Inkscape and GIMP are really powerful tools, and Paint.NET is much more powerful than it looks at first glance.
For me, the niggle has always been that I want to combine vector operations (because I cannot draw the shapes I want freehand), with pixel operations (because I want to hide my horrible lack of vector skills behind big, fat pixels), and I've always found the interfaces and workflow for doing that to be really clunky.
This could easily be a lack of knowledge/skill on my part. If I invested some time in learning how Inkscape and Gimp do these things, maybe I'd find better, easier ways to do them.
And that's where my situation has stayed for a long time, because I don't have the time/patience to sit and learn the intricacies of an interface, and I can't afford Corel or Adobe products. Part of my job was teaching people the very basics of Photoshop, and I find its interface grotesque and annoying. I especially don't want to give Adobe money with the stories I've heard about how they treat their paying customers.
Yesterday, I came across Affinity Designer by Serif (I was actually searching up PagePlus, the DTP package they used to do - you used to be able to get the out-of-support version for free). There is a free 10-day trial of Designer (grey link at the bottom of the page). These are my first impressions based on playing around with it for about 90 minutes.
I got stuff drawn very, very quickly. The features like Gaussian blur and Outlines worked exactly as I wanted them to, and I learned a lot just by playing about with the interface. That's exactly how interfaces should be.
A quick sketch-stroke, and I'm looking at an editable spline of what I've just drawn. One more click, and I'm viewing a pixellated version of my work. To me, that's impressive.
Then I started pushing my boundaries a bit: what about creating a custom brush for a line stroke? Well, educated-guess-clicking didn't quite get me there, so I needed to search. I found the YouTube tutorials, and a quick skim-watch showed me the button I'd missed. Within 20 minutes, I'd learned the gradient editing interface from playing around with it, created a custom brush image and applied it to a bunch of shapes.
I enjoy playing around painting miniatures and I bumble along creating some functional 3D models and 2D art for my play programming projects.
Using Inkscape and Gimp (because they are free-free), and Paint.NET (because it is free) has got me where I am today. Which, to be honest, is a fair way. Inkscape and GIMP are really powerful tools, and Paint.NET is much more powerful than it looks at first glance.
For me, the niggle has always been that I want to combine vector operations (because I cannot draw the shapes I want freehand), with pixel operations (because I want to hide my horrible lack of vector skills behind big, fat pixels), and I've always found the interfaces and workflow for doing that to be really clunky.
This could easily be a lack of knowledge/skill on my part. If I invested some time in learning how Inkscape and Gimp do these things, maybe I'd find better, easier ways to do them.
And that's where my situation has stayed for a long time, because I don't have the time/patience to sit and learn the intricacies of an interface, and I can't afford Corel or Adobe products. Part of my job was teaching people the very basics of Photoshop, and I find its interface grotesque and annoying. I especially don't want to give Adobe money with the stories I've heard about how they treat their paying customers.
Yesterday, I came across Affinity Designer by Serif (I was actually searching up PagePlus, the DTP package they used to do - you used to be able to get the out-of-support version for free). There is a free 10-day trial of Designer (grey link at the bottom of the page). These are my first impressions based on playing around with it for about 90 minutes.
I got stuff drawn very, very quickly. The features like Gaussian blur and Outlines worked exactly as I wanted them to, and I learned a lot just by playing about with the interface. That's exactly how interfaces should be.
A quick sketch-stroke, and I'm looking at an editable spline of what I've just drawn. One more click, and I'm viewing a pixellated version of my work. To me, that's impressive.
Then I started pushing my boundaries a bit: what about creating a custom brush for a line stroke? Well, educated-guess-clicking didn't quite get me there, so I needed to search. I found the YouTube tutorials, and a quick skim-watch showed me the button I'd missed. Within 20 minutes, I'd learned the gradient editing interface from playing around with it, created a custom brush image and applied it to a bunch of shapes.
Remember: I'm not an artist, and this was just a test border - don't judge me!
So the first impressions of this amateur-art-monkey are that Designer seems like a really powerful piece of professional-level software with an incredibly intuitive interface. And the best thing? It's sold for a flat fee of £48.99 (no subscription).
Whilst it now feels like I've just written a sales pitch for Serif (sorry), I am currently really excited about actually being able to afford a decent art package!
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