VectorVonDoom

Feathers are complicated things when you look closely and so difficult to get to look right if you are aiming for realistic although some subjects are slightly less complicated than others. Perhaps one day I'll have a play trying to do an illustration of one of my parrots or part of. I'm guessing it wouldn't go well or be too much work but you don't know unless you try! I'm not sure there's a way of simplifying the process but it's interesting trying to. Not sure how masks would help but a number of detailed feathers then repeating them might at least in places. You would need to check references to see how they are layered/overlap and try and replicate. Also the direction of them isn't random which is partly why it looks like fur so you'd need to take that in to account too. The trouble is if you do one section detailed you have to do it everywhere or it looks odd and it's not just a few feathers. All in all not an easy thing to do but the same applies to most living things, at least for me.

That technique generally looks more like fur than feathers so perhaps try it on a furry animal? Also do it all over, the plain breast looks out of place. The eye area looks good. Having said that it's probably not something I'd try (except for the branch!) so well done for even attempting it.

I never use the pencil too, just the pen. That doesn't mean you can't though. You don't seem to have set a fill colour only the stroke. Set the fill colour too and it might be fine but not sure if that's one object of two. If it's one and messes up make the main shape with the path closed and then add the one going down the middle separately. If that is a single open path then closing it via the toolbar will make a mess of it as it will join the start and end nodes, not what you want here. Anther way is to outline and then draw the fills putting them behind the outlines.Then it doesn't matter if lines are closed or not as each thing is a separate object. Not something I do very often but I have seen others doing it that way.

I'll try and think of something simple.

Only that I break it down in to logical sections where I can. So for example on this an arm is split up in to the hand, the glove, the arm guard and then the "chain mail". I wouldn't try doing the whole thing as one huge group of objects as that would be a bit of a nightmare placing objects in the right place layer wise.

Perhaps make the wheel larger on the first one? if the output isn't as large then it might be a bit lost. Less space between the lettering and the circles would give you a bit more room for the centre part. If the background is always going to be black/dark then perhaps lighten the lighter grey bits so they stick out more too.

It is. I don't make tutorials. I think the majority are rather pointless, speed drawing even more so, except for the ones showing how to use a certain feature. The only way to really learn is by doing it yourself not by watching someone. But this is just the pen tool, gradients and blurs so there's not much to show anyway, you just do it. Of course it can make sense to start on something fairly simple, the more complicated it is the more likely you are to give up.

I thought I'd deleted the daily progress outputs but still had them hidden away so as a one off I thought I'd post them. The first was an evening and a day. Sort of interesting I guess but they uploaded sorted by day name, my fault it's the way i named them. i think I put them in order, or close enough. x

Hi, You can call me whatever you want lol. Is it only me who hates trying to think up user names? Ah ok, I was just guessing how you did the dew drops as the colours aren't obvious but when things are reduced to post on here you lose a lot of details. If you have a reference then they shouldn't be too difficult although it's surprising how a lot of fairly simple things ends up taking so long. It should look good when it's finished.

As dew drops are clear they show through both the colour and texture and also magnify it. So if this is imaginary rather than from a reference it's tricky to do until the underlying flower is done. If it's from a reference then you need to look at them and break them down, I'd imagine there are lots of them. You're unlikely to be able to get it to look right with just a gradient and another shape, but that depends how realistic you want it to be. The edge highlights and shadows make the petals look very thick, I think it's probably because they don't vary, or not by much. But it's hard to say if they are wrong as it's not finished.

I like the town, nicely detailed. But too many different styles for me, just pick one. For example the highlights on the sunglasses should be in the same style as the face imo, not blurs. Clouds should be cloud shaped and probably a bit more detail to match.

I'm working on a complicated drawing, 1000's of objects, and haven't noticed any noticeable difference in performance vs 1.8 with default settings other than I always turn off trackpad rotate as I don't want it. I have the minimum of panels open although even with the default ones it seemed fine. I'm not saying that in your situation it's not true but it's not something I've seen so far. The obvious difference is that I'm on a 15" 2019 i9 macbook pro, so I assume it's using the discreet GPU whereas the 13" only has the integrated GPU.

Looking good. If by cheatsheet you mean drawing shortcuts then there really isn't much. But I wrote this, something in there might be of use. I sometimes work on a body panel at at time especially if the shading and reflections are complicated but with this you can't really see them. It looks like you are breaking it down as much as you can. I do it the other way around, the details then the body (the details are more interesting) but it doesn't make any difference. I export with the photo in colour then you can see how well everything is blending in. Sometimes you decide you need to refine something or adjust a gradient a bit. With b&w it's more tricky. But you must have the colour version there too so perhaps you are doing that. It is always slow work so don't worry. Just looked at the file and you might want to put a tiny bit of blur over the whole thing. So group it all and add it to that group. If you don't it will look like it is cutout, edges never look perfectly sharp. Perhaps .1 or .2 pixel on that size, you'll have to see. Being picky but add some shadow to the yellow part under the bonnet as in the photo.

I hate pinterest with a passion, it basically spams your image searches. Fortunately there's an extension that hides it all, it's called "Unpinterested!". Someone said Behance is only for Adobe stuff. You can post whatever you want on there, even natural media like pencil drawings or paintings so Affinity stuff is fine. I post the odd bit of my AD scribbles, not that many look at it!

It's never a bad idea to hold off upgrading to a .0 release in any software, wait for bug fixes as there's aways something. It has been the same forever. Unless you really, really need a new feature, so it's worth the risk, then there's nothing to force you to upgrade straight away. That's an even better idea when the file format changes so you can't just go back to the older release assuming you've saved work in the new format. It's called using some common sense.