The Silver Ocean

Vector art certainly isn't everyone's cup of tea and I get it. It took me a long time until I found my love for it.Found may not be the right word for it. It was more the constant exposure to manga and anime which my hubby loves.

At one point he started to dabble in vector illustrations for a game he was working on. Then I started watching/listening to a vector artist on Twitch while I was doing my art. Yet there is something about the clean lines and simplification of vector art that kept fascinating me. But I was never going to spend the money on Adobe Illustrator and I just didn't like Inkscape, the free software my hubby is using.

Along came Affinity Designer bundled with a 50 % off sale. That's when I got Designer and started working with it - a little. Most of my time was still spent with pixel art either the traditional way or on my iPad Pro in Procreate.

The two really great things about Designer - well, there are more than two but a) it comes as a desktop version AND an iPad version and b) within Affinity you can seemlessly switch between vector and pixel art, they call it personas. Okay, okay, I'll give you a third and fourth reason - Affinity's programs are really great and very affordable one time payments, no subscriptions - yay! Maybe I'll do a more in-depth tutorial about Designer and vector art...

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Back to this post's image. So, after I finished the cover for hubby's latest book I wanted to draw some more in Designer, especially at night after work to relax. Yup, that's right, there is something very soothing almost like zen-doodling about adjusting lines and nodes in vector art - we call it node-wrangling. You wouldn't believe how adjustable nodes are and how tempting it is to just get that perfect line or curvature - addicting almost LOL.

And what better subject to illustrate than a nice ocean sunset scene - aaah. No matter when and where that is always a beautiful sight I can't ever get enough of. And I'd kill two birds with one stone because recently I joined the Silver Bloggers community and got my requested community name of Silver Ocean. What other silver name could I have chosen? None, exactly.

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