Digital Art / Painting programs

[Blind Owl]

Hello my fellow TESTies,

I have just begun my foray into digital art, after a small hiatus (1999). I have got myself a pen tablet, and some tutorials for getting started. What I need is to find a program to learn on and continue to use. I don;t want to learn program A, then jump to B, then on to C, etc etc. I just want to draw and paint. I see Photoshop popping up everywhere as the industry standard, which blows my mind, as Illustrator seems to be the better program for drawing. But aside from rater vs vector, I have no idea the differences. There is also Affinity, Krita, Autodesk Sketchbook, and on and on.

I would prefer a program I can pay for once, and be done with, rather than a subscription based program. That being said, if the recommendation is to use Photoshop or something sub based, I will do that. I want to end this constant "what's the best program" and get started drawing. There are too many programs and too many "best of" lists out there.

I do a lot of character art and landscapes, if that helps narrow it down. I would love someone who either does this professionally or has a shit ton of experience to tell me what program to use and why I should choose it.

Thanks all. Much love,

Owl

 

[stockish]

Affinity is one time purchase and cheap enough to try, Blender is free and I think allows you to draw art in the same style.

 

[Vavrik]

Affinity is one time purchase and cheap enough to try, Blender is free and I think allows you to draw art in the same style.

Yep. I used to use Blender a lot, and GIMP for textures. You can do some amazing art with that pair - and they're totally free so no harm done to the bank account if you find you need to switch to $$... (I mean a full version of Photoshop or Illustrator)

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Second on GIMP, at zero money it's something to play with while you are waiting to work out what other program you want to use.

 

[Lorddarthvik]

I take it we are mainly talking 2D here right?

If you wanna do it at a semi-serious level, I'd still go with PS. Learning it will give you a skill that will be useful for long, and it's the industry standard. Back in the day I had a copy and thought myself to use CorellDraw and despised PS, but I had to adapt over time, hadn't seen a corell product in like 18 years (we use Substance Painter+Designer for texturing along with PS). If you go the PS route, be sure to check out all packages on the adobe page, cos currently you can grab the PS+Lightroom pack subscription for Half the price of just getting PS alone!

Gimp is as it's name suggests. Far from good enough for a production environment, might be good enough for hobby needs if you can get used to the god awful UI, bugs and limitations.
Give it a try cos it's free, you might actually find it good enough for your use case!


Blender is mainly 3D, but it does posses 2d capabilities I think. I don't think it's the software you are looking for though. Personally I never got along with it as I didn't need to, it's "logic" and UI is way too convoluted compared to mainstream programs like Maya/C4D/Max, and it's tools are still limited or just bloody inconvenient to use.
If you want to get into 3D sculpting, where traditional 2D drawing experience is actually very useful and mainly done with a tablet, you could give it a try as it's free, I heard some good things about it's sculpting capabilities but never tried it myself.
If you want to get into 3D sculpting, ZBrush is the way to go though. You can get the ZBrushCoreMini version for free, no ads, no bs. It is very very limited to the most basic tools, but you can take a picture of what you did and export for 3d printing (and general use as it's a .obj). The really awful limitation is that you can't really go above 500k polys, it will prompt you to reduce automagically, or buy a proper zbrush licence :(

 

[Blind Owl]

Wonderful gents! Thank you. I shall look into these programs. Y'all rock.