Affinity Designer and Inkscape have over taken Adobe Illustrator

Impressive acting by Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut in 'Breaking Bad'. I am in the process of creating a realistic vector portrait of Banks in Affinity Designer after which an other portrait of Banks will be made in recently revamped Inkscape to see what the differences may be. Both programs seriously challenge Adobe Illustrator and many would say they have already passed the former king of the graphical world. Designer's and Inkscapes development advances faster most likely because Illustrator's devs struggle with legacy code that makes it bloated and forces them to invent work arounds which makes it even more bloated and as a result slower, requiring more clicks of the users to get things done.

Vector portrait of Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut in 'Breaking Bad'

Above is a screenshot of the 8th stage of the creation of the vector portrait of Mike Ehrentraut in Affinity Designer. It is a work in progress at this point ((May 7 2020). So far I have been working 4 or 5 hours at it. The principle is the same as in my airbrush days - determine the average colour of an area and later add the darker and lighter parts and finally the details. Only difference is that Designer offers me countless undo levels and a history function that allows to go back to a certain point and from there design into a different direction, which was not possible in the old airbrush days. I will post all stages in my portfolio blog once the portrait has advanced to a reasonable stage. Stay tuned.

Hasta luego online virtual folks.

Inkscape 1.0 has been released!

The open source communities of Blender and Inkscape have made huge progress recently in terms of improving the user interface of their programs. After Blender had 'normalized' its UI in version 2.8 Inkscape did something similar in version 1.0. These are huge efforts, since open source programs depend on a large community of individual developers whose input has to be coordinated meticulously. That in itself is a major achievement - improving functionality and the program's look and feel is an other. The Inkscape developers took the program towards the users instead of forcing users to adept to the program's peculiarities. Kudos to the devs! One of Inkscape (and GIMP) skilled users has explained the program's innovative updates in a coherent way in a Youtube video.

Inkscape logo

I think I will give Inkscape an other try in the near future. I have scarcely used it in the past years, because I had trouble getting used to its UI. What spiked my interest is that Inkscape is said to have improved its Gaussian blur function. This function is imperative when creating realistic vector portraits (which is what I love to do), especially for artists that dislike the mesh-fill tool and the hard edges typical for many of the 'realistic' vector portraits drawn in Adobe Illustrator. If from this last sentence you conclude that I am not a fan of Adobe Illustrator you may not be far off the mark. I have worked with the program professionally for decades, using it to create technical illustrations for instruction manuals and educational purposes and for that purpose it is adequately equipped, but it sucks when attempting to create realistic portraits with it. That said, I may do a portrait of the same person in both Inkscape and in Affinity Designer, just to compare the results. To my knowledge this hasn't been done before, so stay tuned. You do not want to miss this.

Hasta luego online virtual folks.