Process Blog Post

[Jason Ramasami]

Hey all I wrote a massive blog post documenting my progress with AD over the summer. I hope it's useful. 

[MKM Pottery Tools]

Hi Jason,

Thanks for your blog, and your artwork.  Really enjoyed it.  But something remains a mystery.  From my point of view, everything you did, including all the work in CSP or ProCreate (or Concepts), can so easily be done in the iPad Pro version of Affinity Designer.  For me, the iPad Pro version of AD just immediately made these other programs obsolete.  It is easy to import or create your own brush styles, and working with vectors is as easy as moving the Pencil across the screen.  And it very straightforward to organize objects into groups, and then more groups.  I don't really even think of layers anymore, I just group things to keep the overall drawing organized, and then of course organize objects (brushstrokes, shapes, etc) into what goes on top and what goes below.  But this group 'layering' is group specific.  So when you mentioned how difficult it was to manage layers on the iPad, I wondered if I am just missing something.  I, too, deal with thousands of individual objects.  And I guess I wonder why you are still working with several different programs, each of which seems to me to be just a small part of AD?  Please don't think I am criticizing your work method - I am not.  This is a real question rooted in my own experience with AD and other iPad design programs. Thanks,  Rick

[Jason Ramasami]

10 hours ago, MKM Pottery Tools said:

Hi Jason,

Thanks for your blog, and your artwork.  Really enjoyed it.  But something remains a mystery.  From my point of view, everything you did, including all the work in CSP or ProCreate (or Concepts), can so easily be done in the iPad Pro version of Affinity Designer.  For me, the iPad Pro version of AD just immediately made these other programs obsolete.  It is easy to import or create your own brush styles, and working with vectors is as easy as moving the Pencil across the screen.  And it very straightforward to organize objects into groups, and then more groups.  I don't really even think of layers anymore, I just group things to keep the overall drawing organized, and then of course organize objects (brushstrokes, shapes, etc) into what goes on top and what goes below.  But this group 'layering' is group specific.  So when you mentioned how difficult it was to manage layers on the iPad, I wondered if I am just missing something.  I, too, deal with thousands of individual objects.  And I guess I wonder why you are still working with several different programs, each of which seems to me to be just a small part of AD?  Please don't think I am criticizing your work method - I am not.  This is a real question rooted in my own experience with AD and other iPad design programs. Thanks,  Rick

Great comment. Here are my (probably unconvincing) thoughts:

1. The CSP pencil drawing and then editing/changing tools feel quicker and more intuitive to me. Some of this is because I have set up my iPad version in a very specific way and partly because I think they work better. I went back to AD just now and tried to do some pencil drawing to see if I was mistaken and after a bit of tweaking I realised that you can do a lot of the same things but it feels somehow a bit quicker and looser in CSP. Anyways - it's probably just a personal feeling. 

2. The layers issue I think is still relevant I think. Yes - the pinch-to-group gesture is brilliant and yes you can group automatically by drawing within a blank layer, but the several pieces I have produced this summer all became utterly unwieldy at times. To select and arrange individual stray lines into specific groups is at times impossible within iPad AD partly because scrolling endlessly becomes a joke. My point in the post is that these sorts of organisation tweaks and fixes are far better suited to the Mac version where control is different and more tuned into this sort of action. I think my point was that the dance between both platforms is where the power really kicks in. Nothing beats the vector brush work of AD on iPad. 

I was so glad you commented - take care.