Solly

Absolutely delightful! This grandpap fully appreciates the motivation to recover the youthful feelings of the grandads in the song. 

Another video!
When I lived on the Isle of Wight, we could hardly move without falling over a Morris Dancer. As a folksinger, I naturally met and made friends with a lot of dancers and musicians there. Some years ago, a lady name Helen Akitt wrote this funny song poking gentle fun at her Morris chums, a parody of the lovely song The Whitsun Dance, and I've been singing it ever since I discovered it. The assets in this still--the grass, trees and flowers--actually came from DrawPlus. I saved them as svg and imported them into AD. The unusual format with decorations down each side is because I made the 'pages' in A3 format with a view to printing them some time; YouTube resizes everything to 16:9, which would leave black bars at the sides.
And now I'm going to have a rest . . .
 

That was absolutely hilarious! In elementary school we had music class that taught elementary music theory and 'classic' US folk songs (though many of those were British in origin). One song that particularly stuck in my mind because of its sad melody and haunting theme is "The Streets of Laredo." I will now add your most delightful version to my memory of the greatest cowboy songs and never be sad about those Laredo streets again. Well done, Sir!

From Arkshuk, [John] Rae also learned about Inuit beliefs: It is said that many years ago, not long after the creation of the world, there was a mighty conjuror (Esquimaux of course) who gained so much power that at last he raised himself up into the heavens, taking with him his sister (a beautiful girl) and a fire. To the latter he added great quantities of fuel, which thus formed the sun. For some time he and his sister lived in great harmony, but at last they disagreed, and he, in addition to maltreating the lady In many ways, at last scorched one side of her face. She had suffered patiently all sorts of indignities, but the spoiling of her beauty was not to be borne; she therefore ran away from him and formed the moon, and continues so until this day. Her brother is still in chase of her, but although he sometimes gets near, he will never overtakes her. When it is new moon, the burnt side of the face is towards us; when full moon, the reverse is the case. (Quoted in Fatal Passage, Ken McGoogan)     John Rae ,FRS FRGS, (13 – 1893) was a Scottish surgeon who explored parts of northern Canada. (Wikipedia)

There is a big difference between selling something like software downloads and selling hardcopy books. The main reason for not having books reprinted, when the initial print run has sold out, is the costs involved. The workbooks are obviously quite expensive, quality books, so the printing costs are going to be high. The more copies you have printed at one time, the cheaper they are. Conversely, if you have a comparatively small number printed, each copy will be even more expensive pro rata. However, the more you have printed, the higher initial cost, and the longer to see a return on your investment. (It may be a long time before you sell enough just to cover the printing costs, let alone make a profit!) With the workbooks there are three different ones (one for each app). Three times the cost! Once you have them printed, they then have to be stored somewhere, and distributed. (More costs involved!) All this is well and good with something you expect to sell well, however, it’s reasonable to think that there will be a comparatively small market for books which are acknowledged to be slightly out of date and possibly now inaccurate with the latest version of the software they cover. Of course, it would be possible to rewrite and update the books, but again the costs would not be insignificant. At the end of the day, if you are considering either a second (updated) edition of a book, or simply printing more copies of an existing book, the initial investment will be high, and the returns may be very slow to come in. Many potential customers will already have bought copies. A lot of people will not want to buy an expensive book with out of date information. Others may not be happy not having the book in their own language (more costs, if you print them in more than one language!)  While it would be possible to save money by reducing the quality of the books, or, maybe, using print on demand, this may also impact on the potential number of sales. 
Putting it simply, there is a lot more to it than just saying: “Let’s have another print run, for the small number of people wanting to buy an expensive, out of date, workbook!” Very few company’s are going to be willing to invest a large amount of money having books printed that, at best, take a long time to sell and make a profit, and, at worst, they have them left on their hands and lose money! (Of course, there may well be other reasons why Serif decided not to have more copies of the workbooks printed. Maybe they will at some point. I'm just pointing out, from experience, some of the considerations involved in publishing/printing books generally: It’s not as simple as you may think!)
I’m sure decisions regarding reprinting the workbooks have nothing to do with books being “old fashioned” (which they definitely are not!), neither is it a case of “badly treating” customers!

Kasper, perhaps the app determined the photo had been taken on St. Patricks day and concluded that the Niagara River had been treated with a dye and was competing with the Chicago River that day.
 

Great work !
As everybody's loving steam locos, here's another one from my collection, a  British 2-8-0 Stanier 8F confiscated by the War Department ("W.D.") for the Desert War.
Cheers ! 
 

 

North Staffordshire Rly 0-4-4T No. 11, built 1907 at Stoke. Inspired by learning that 0-6-2T No.2 has been acquired by Foxfield Railway, just up the road; looking up details, I found this photo of a different loco and decided to have a go. (This engine no longer exists.)
For anyone not au fait with UK steam railway classification, 0-4-4 refers to the wheel configuration: no leading wheels, four driving wheel, four trailing wheels; T stands for tank, the rectangular shape alongside the boiler holding water.

 

What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?
Or make silly composite pictures from pure whimsy? I realise in the last couple of weeks I've been doing just that, and so why not share 'em with you folks!

 
I read that Roald Dahl's children's books are being made more 'suitable' for today's children; mention of reading Rudyard Kipling has been changed to Jane Austen. Cue old joke made new:

 
A long time ago on BBC TV, the late Michael Bentine had a sketch with a mad scientist who'd invented the next step up from painting by numbers: spray-on classic paintings. To demonstrate, Hals' Laughing Cavalier and da Vinci's Mona Lisa . . .
-- or you can spray them both at the same time to get The Laughing Lisa!

 
Serendipity! In the course of looking for something completely different (pace Mothy Python) I learned that Geiger is German for violinist; Stehgeiger is German for cafe violinist ('standing fiddler); and Geigerteller is German for Geiger counter. So there must e a German word for . . .

 
And finally Esther (British in-joke):

Please sir, may we have some me more railroad?
Enjoying your work,
-- Solly

Great Western Railway (GWR) locomotive City of Truro. I had the pleasure of riding a train drawn by her in the 80s, and when I came across my photos again I thought she'd make a good subject. For the front view I looked up some original drawings on a GWR archive website, which avoided the problem of perspective; for the wheel, I had to make adjustments by guesswork. The colours are authentic GWR colours I found online on a model-makers' web page. The signal gantry is inspired by a magazine photo of a scene on the Severn valley Railway at Bewdley, England. And after I'd made the small lamps, I decided to do a big one. (Lamps or discs were fixed on the front of a loco to indicate what it was pulling, if anything. I used to have a book that explained the code, but I've forgotten what they were.)

 
First draft, without shading.

 
Driving wheel and maker's plate

 


The small 'calling-on' signal, the lowest one, is upside-down! I have no idea why it was set up that way, nor why it's facing the wrong way (the track and turnout are to the left). And if you notice there are one or two small details missing . . . yes, they are! The 'distant' signals (yellow) are actually fixed at 'caution' (horizontal) and don't move. I thought I'd make them more interesting. 😊

Lovely work--thanks for sharing!
 

I've been photographing wheels on traction engines, vintage trucks, and railway engines for more years than I can remember. I find it's very useful practice, not to mention good fun, to recreate them in Affinity Designer. I'm sure I posted City of Truro recently, but I can't find it here (I know I posted it on some of the Affinity FaceBook pages). Anyway, this is mainly made in vectors with a limited palette of flat colours and limited use of gradients.. The rivets are symbols, which is a handy way of making lots of identical things that might require later editing, and the lettering is text-on-a-path, with a lot of fiddling with tracking and baselines, and pure luck in finding close matches for fonts.

 
These two wheels are from a showman's engine -- a steam traction engine highly decorated and adapted to provide electric power for a fairground ride. I think this particular one is The Iron Maiden, but I can't lay my hands on the original photos to be sure. (She was originally named Kitchener, but was renamed when she starred in the movie of the same name.) In the first one, the right-hand front wheel, I used gradients for shading and highlights, but in the second, the right-hand driving wheel, I used flat black or white shapes at 50% opacity clipped to the relevant areas.

 
The egg-shaped structure behind the wheel is the cover for the drive train and differential gears. I used multiple outlines for the coloured lining. The rivets -- symbols again (although they needn't have been in this instance) -- are flat colour, and the highlights are separate symbols. each set of four is a Group, with the centre moved to the wheel's centre; this allowed me to use Power Duplicate to space them around the rim at precise intervals. (I did the same with the spokes.)

Hey there guys at Serif affinity, it’s been sometime as an artist that I was on here, enjoying the use of Affinity Designer + Photo. Working with these 2 apps for hours a day creating posters, flyers, photo retouching, 3D wall art & murals. Affinity was my go to app every single time to produce the latter. I’d transitioned a few years back from adobe on OS and found Affinity to be the only App that gives Adobe a run for their money. It was early 2022 when I became frustrated with the team at Affinity because certain bugs & glitches weren’t being addressed, I was angry as the updates weren’t happening at all and left the forum. Although all of the latter had happened I still kept using the app as my primary source of software to release my creative juices. Today I though I’d check to see what was happening on the Affinity front and lo and behold there were Upgrades…..V2, and that’s not all…..the long awaited Affinity Publisher was also now available for the iPad. I hit the download for each Affinity Suite Member. I briefly checked out Publisher and was impressed…..so long Pages! I can’t wait to learn the updates to Affinity V2 by checking out the video, and definitely can’t wait to immerse myself into one of (I believe) the iPad’s greatest Design Suites of all time. 
P.S Affinity, I’ll try not to ‘yell’ at you guys when addressing issues in the future. Cheers Dunksy 

This is one of my favorite moths seen many times over more than 60 years of insect watching. Thank you for sharing!
—Joseph

My brother and I used to study butterflies and moths as kids. This one is the gorgeous Cecropia Moth (Hyalophora Cecropia) and has a wingspan of about 5–6 inches (13–15 cm). All done in the Designer Persona, with the exception of the fern background, which is a photo. Happy holidays everyone!

Just a quick look through the threads in the Feedback forum:
The print people want more/better print features (Adobe-class) The UI/UX people want features found in Sketch or Figma There are requests for advanced word processing features (thesaurus, grammar check) (Word) Photographs want better RAW processing features (Lightroom) A bunch of requests for exporting DXF files (3D, architecture etc.) Requests for creating PDF forms (Acrobat) Basically everyone wants the three Affinity apps to replace the Adobe suite and several other apps that cost many times more in total. Is that realistic? Good luck waiting for that. I'd be happy if they fixed the damn bugs.

I haven't been totally idle! Bit different than I normally do.

If you can't afford it don't buy it and go with freeware and stop whining.
Now I can be banned... I couldn't stand it anymore.

Just using new Brushes…making some Artwork.✌️

I'm guessing you, like me, may possess the vanishing skills needed to drive a stick shift, read (and fold!) a map and tell the time on an analog clock.

@sfriedberg will probably have more info for you, but I'll mention one thing: Those options under Typography work only for characters where the font itself supplies super- and/or subscript forms of the glyph. Most fonts are very limited in their support for those OpenType features. For those fonts, you need to use the super- or subscript options in Positioning and Transforms, instead. The option there creates a faux or false super- or subscript, by shrinking the character and moving it up or down, and this works with any character. Or, alternatively, you can manually shrink the character (perhaps to 80% of its size) and shift the baseline a bit up or down.

@md_berlin Much needed thank you message. The team is made up of real people, and a word of gratitude goes a long way to encouraging them. (I am not affiliated with Serif/Affinity, just trying to be respectful for their efforts.)

Dear Affinity Team,
At the beginning I was a bit disappointed by Affinity Suite 2.0, as everyone expected the implementation of their personal wishes. The changeover was not entirely smooth either, I had to make some presettings by hand and my workspace had completely disappeared. But: I created the first brochure and other things in versions 2.0 on the Mac and am thrilled by many functions, some of which are not documented at all. So a big THANK YOU for the great work and the good price. Keep it up!

I think everyone here has expressed the same opinions a number of times. I am locking this thread