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Improving workflow with brush and pencil - ink style illustration


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I am working on this bunny illustration and I want it in inky, comic style. I have never worked this way before - i've done a lot of vector work in Affinity, but never with brush tool and I really wanted to give it a try. But the way I'm doing this is either wrong, or it just doesn't work in Affinity Designer.

Below is a wip, still needs some work but you can see the style I want to achieve. This illustration is made by using almost entirely small to medium sized brush in draw persona.

My workflow is similiar to using marker on paper - i make a stroke, if it is too thin I make another stroke to make it thicker and so on. I don't edit my strokes since it seems too time consuming. But then, when I was in the middle of work, the software started crashing. I figured that's because of too many strokes, so I expanded them all and merged my layers. But it didn't really solve the problem - the path just has so many nodes in it, the app still crashes all the time.

Is there anything I can do to improve my workflow to produce fewer nodes so the app doesn't crash? How do you work on this type of illustrations?

And I don't really want to change the way I work entirely - right now I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't draw it in vector software at all...

bunny_inky.jpg

Edited by Bilq
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The app should not be crashing, even when the document has thousands of path nodes. At least on my Mac, which is an older & lower performance one, redraws can take longer when there are toms of nodes, but the app does not crash.

As for not creating an excessive number of nodes to begin with, have you tried experimenting with the Stabilizer options? Also, are you using a pressure sensitive pen tablet like a Wacom?

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Yes I am using a wacom tablet, and I don't use stabilizer cause i want it to look a bit rougher.

Now that you've mentioned this, it  might indeed be unusual for the app to crash because of the amount of nodes/strokes. I've seen a lot of more complex illustrations made in affinity... I might look into that. Has anyone else had similiar issues? Especially while using brush tool.

I run Affinity Designer on a laptop with i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and NVIDIA GTX870 graphics card. It may not be the latest device, but I think it should be fine.

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