It’s Martini Time!

Setting up the new Mini and sorting out the Great Monitor Mystery was actually the fun, easy part; the real work started when it came time to start learning the software that would be replacing Adobe Creative Suite after 30+ years as an Illustrator and Photoshop ninja. I managed to faceplant a time or two on those proverbial stumbling blocks, but things ended up working out quite well, and I’m closer to getting back to producing cartoons than I thought I’d be at this point.

The source art for this exercise was the ink and graphite-stick drawing I used as the base art for a quick’n'dirty Illustrator tutorial I did about 8 or 10 years ago…

Installing and learning Affinity Photo and Designer went fairly well; they were pretty much equivalent to Photoshop and Illustrator — except without the onerous cloud-based, skull-crushingly expensive rental/subscription model. One purchase, one download, one product key, install on as many computers as I have in the house, no cloud bullshit.

The only issue was the lack of autotrace capability in Photo and Designer, which sent me scouring the Web for a utility which could convert my scanned ink and graphite-stick drawings into editable, scaleable “vector” or PostScript/SVG/EPS images. This keeps Affinity Photo/Designer from being 100% perfectly sweet; right now they’re only at about 98%, but I could still happily recommend them to any old Illustrator jocks or other Adobe refugees, with Inkscape filling the “autotrace gap” until Affinity incorporates it into Photo and/or Design — and you know they will, ‘cos the Affinity user forums are full of people asking “where’s autotrace?”.

And now, while this stoned old dog gets to work reinforcing all the cool new tricks he’s learned, it’s Martini Time!