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Meet Blue Bunny, he's a happy little fellow... :) Continuing the Bunny series from some client concept sketches that never got beyond the proof phase. Thought I'd try something different on this one and play with some pixel painting texturing and also attempt at adding fur to this little guy. The fur is made up of repeating individual groups of "fur shapes" copying, rotating, skewing, repeat... each with transparent gradients and blur to add softness and hide some of the edges and yes it was a lot of work... ;) Really loving the ease of vector and pixel workflow!

So... I wanted to see how Affinity Designer's pixel painting feature set stacked up to Photoshop's with a little experiment. I had created this Bunny illustration in Photoshop CS4 (yes I know I'm a little behind the curve) and decided to take a crack at it in AD. I was excited with some earlier attempts at painting in AD so I thought a back to back comparison would really reveal it's strengths and/or weaknesses. The original image on the left is PS the recreated AD image is on the right. The other two images are from AD with a background added. Years ago I used to be an airbrush artist and I worked out a workflow in PS where I used the paths as "frisket" to created selections to "airbrush" inside of. The AD piece at right is done in a similar fashion. I created paths of the various objects, arranged them on layers and painted inside them using the great selection of brushes available. But with AD I was finding I could work a little more flexible and more "un-destructive" allowing for more freedom to experiment and play with ideas... for instance the whiskers are strokes that I can continue to tweak if needed, the high lights on the ears are also strokes that could be further refined and a lot of the "painting" are actually effects and not painted at all, so those would be adjustable after the fact as well... ...all in all I was very pleased with the outcome and more importantly the "workflow" exceeded my expectations. For me, truly this is the perfect workflow that I have been wanting for years, a real balance of vector and pixel that delivers on what it promises - finally! Now I'm not dis'ing Photoshop, and I don't want to start an Adobe bashing thread... I just thought a comparison of what I discovered in my working method might benefit others and also I wanted to thank the Serif team for offering all of us a solid choice!