VectorWhiz

Talent obviously is becoming less of a precondition that helps practitioners of the graphic design trade to make ends meet, which probaly applies to an increasing number of other crafts as well in today's world, that used to help people survive situations into which they had been plunged in by forces beyond their control. It's a sad global turn of events that hopefully will be directed in more beneficial directions soon.

This sounds like a bug indeed. It's amazing how the tinkering of users at times produces solutions or work arounds.

I was inspired by art that I encountered in my (analog) airbrush days by Boris Vallejo, which seems to have some level of similarity to Luis Royo's art. In particular Vallejo's painting below (Vampiric Tutor Kiss) intrigued me:

Thanks for the comment. Do you mean that the texture fill isn't applied or are you referring to stroke styles? This may be because the related bitmaps are not transferred to your computer. Personally I try to avoid using anything that is stock.

Found this on Youtube and it blew me away. Designer makes it possible to draw intricate mandalas with less effort, more precision and more quality than meets the eye. The bloke (don't know if the guy in the video actually invented it) that figured this out should be given a medal. I included the .afdesign file that I saved with history as well, so others can have a look at how it was drawn. Mandala Test 02 - Transparent BG.afdesign

At times, out of the blue, I become overwhelmed by poetic feelings. They urge me to step out of bed and write down what lingers in my mind. Here is an example of what such moods bring me to do.

@SrPx: Thank you for your comment. The explanation of the two arts is correct and I agree it is more Art Nouveau than Art Deco, even if some elements reflect the latter. I believe Gaudi was also influenced by Art Nouveau, which probably is the reason why the work on the Sagrada Familia is pain staking and time consuming. Mimicking the organic works of nature is a huge challenge.

Affinity Designer is the program I use most from the Affinity suit and I haven't yet done a lot with Affinity Photo. So I thought it was time to do a little experimenting. I found an image of an occult statue on line, that intrigued me and used it to retouch it to my personal preference. I narrowed its wings and changed its face somewhat (among other things). I have to practice more with Affinity Photo, which I will do when I have more time. Being a vector drawing aficionado this type of work is a little out of my comfort zone, but looking outside of it probably is a good thing to do in this life, bearing in mind that many matters obviously are intentionally induced and imposed, which of course has a certain purpose that does not necessarily concur with my intuition. More info about this in my portfolio blog: https://communicats.blogspot.com/2022/12/occult-image-retouching-experiment.html

I've always been attracted to Art Nouveau imagery, particularly that of the brilliant Alphonse Mucha, who is largely accredited for starting that appealing type of graphic art. I wanted to wrap my mind around the specific aspects of the craft of which this practice drawing is the first attempt. I plan to do more Art Nouveau all vector drawings in the future, unlike this image that contains both vector and bitmap embedded files. Technically this image is some sort of blend of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, the latter being the successor of the first art movement, I guess. More on Mucha and Art Nouveau in my portfolio blog: https://communicats.blogspot.com/2022/11/art-nouveau-practice-drawing-01.html

It neither is a picture or photo, it is 100% manually drawn from scratch vector, which is shown in the vector outline image at the bottom. I didn't even use vector brushes, which aren't real vectors. The balancing of areas is a thing that can only be done in the final stages - colours, colour intensity and level of blur require an oversight of the complete image to carry out the balancing properly and I haven't yet reached that stage.

Here's an interesting professional photographer's take on sharpness vs blurriness in realism: https://petapixel.com/2017/04/03/why-sharpness-is-overrated/

I'm sorry, did you not notice the depth of field aspect of this drawing? Furthermore, there also is no global blur in the image, since each object was given its own blur ratio, which is a function of this type of software, that requires values of shape properties to be set in order to render them. This is quite easily verifiable in the .afdesign-file of course. So, I'm not sure what may have caused your irritation.

@Michael S Harvey: Thank you for the most kind comment. Really looking forward to the new machine to arrive. It's a Minisforum HX90Gwith 64BG RAM and a dedicated GPU, so I think that should make a world of difference.

This filter kind of opens up a shedload of possibilities. Great tip.

This makes the artist's life a lot easier....