Procreate & Affinity Designer 2
When I began this journey, I had stumbled upon Procreate, and had begun taking classes to learn how to use it. It’s a powerful app especially suited to those artists who want to make art that resembles paintings - oils and watercolors for example. James Julier is an artist that uses Procreate masterfully. Typically, James creates landscapes, but not exclusively. He shares how he creates his artwork on YouTube.
Landscape by James Julier (Click on one of the pictures to go to his You Tube channel.)
Painted by James Julier in Procreate
Jennifer Nichols is a Procreate artist who teaches not only the app itself, but specific art techniques. She can teach you how to make an oil painting or a watercolor painting in Procreate I also learned one of my favorite techniques from her: Negative painting. And she was the first one to introduce me to how to make a seamless pattern design, which is my particular interest.
The amazing thing about Jennifer is the breadth of her interests and abilities. The following art work was pinched from her Instagram page (with her permission of course).
Jennifer Nichols - oils in Procreate (Click on picture to be taken to her Instagram.)
Jennifer Nichols - watercolor in Procreate. (Click on picture to be taken to her YouTube channel.)
Jennifer Nichols - illustration in Procreate. (Click on picture to be taken to her website.)
Jennifer Nichols- seamless repeat design
As you can see Procreate is an amazing app with a large repertoire of possibilities for artists. There is just one issue that has made me stray from Procreate to Affinity Designer 2. Since Procreate is a raster program, meaning that it uses pixels, the designs cannot be enlarged because they become blurry.
Some places like Spoonflower, take your designs just as you create them without the possibility of enlargement. But Spoonflower is just a conduit for your art work. If someone orders from you, they will print the item and ship it, but you still have to do all of the marketing. And while this is lovely, and something I am doing, it’s not my ultimate goal.
Affinity Designer 2
In order to submit to fabric companies, you usually have to submit art work in vector files; not raster. This is because vectors are solid lines capable of being resized (enlarged) with no degradation in quality. Adobe Illustrator is the best known vector program. But, I found the testimonials about Affinity Designer 2 compelling, and the price much more reasonable. (Apparently, Affinity Designer 1 was an excellent program too, but I have no experience with it.)
On my main page, you can see examples of both my Affinity Designer 2 repeat designs and my Procreate raster, repeat designs. The raster images are a bit more detailed.
It is my hope, that I will be able to develop some vector based fabric collections that I can submit to art directors. But it’s a steep learning curve, both in terms of the art itself and utilization of the apps.
For those who use these two apps, I’d love to hear your thoughts. And if there are other art apps that are helpful to your work, please share!
