Illustration in Affinity Photo

[Chloe]

This might be a stupid question, but then again I was taught that there are no stupid questions...

So, I am teaching myself illustrating. I have started to do so in Affinity Designer, but lately I've come across multiple artists using Affinity Photo for it and I just don't understand why/ how?!? Isn't Photo just for photo editing? How does one do illustration work in it? Is it better for that purpose than Designer? 

Can someone please enlighten me?
Thanks in advance.

[thomaso]

Hi Chloe,

Welcome to the Affinity forums,

good question, you are not the first who wonders (and asks) what the differences between Affinity apps would be.

For the illustrating process one major difference between APhoto and ADesigner is the selection possibilities in APhoto which allows to select in free form + with various automatic support. If one uses photos (or scans) it is helpful and sometimes necessary to be able to select a part as specific and individual as wanted.

APhoto offers more options to edit rasterized, pixelated content – whereas ADesigner supports more at creating vector content.

The preferred tool depends on a personal, individual way to work, there is no "best" tool. For an illustration with real live paint, canvas and brushes or with colored paper and scissors a computer can be felt irrelevant or useless – whereas for a 3D animated fantasy world a computer not only appears mandatory but even other software then APhoto or ADesigner would work more supporting. Though one also can do an impressive 3D animation with real objects, a torch and a simple photo camera, pic by pic – whereas each pic is an illustration.

If you are familiar with ADesigner, you can surprise and inform yourself by looking through the content menu of the richly illustrated help for APhoto, for example, to discover new tools, (live) effects or the persona of liquifying ...

https://affinity.help/

 

[SrPx]

Some of us illustrate by actually doing digital painting. This is faster and less cumbersome to do in raster programs (like Photoshop, Corel Painter, Clip Studio Paint, Photo, Rebelle 3, etc). Digital painting is easier, faster and more flexible in raster apps. Some illustrators are more vectors oriented, and then would use Designer. Photo is fine for digital painting, tho would quite need certain basic improvements (improving the core stuff,  not adding features, and nothing fancy). The illustrators, digital painters, comic artists, and a huge etc that have always used Photoshop (raster, very similar to Photo)...  " we are legion", you know...  , obviously will prefer Photo for this. Seriously, in all companies I worked at, game concept artists (extremely similar to illustration) would be using PS, 9 out of 10. Tons of other illustrators I know do use Photoshop. And those who don't, it's Corel Painter, which is also raster. And well, the vector oriented... yup, they are attached to Illustrator or Corel Draw. 

But yeah, it's quite 'usable' for it, too, not just for Photography.

Simple as that.