Latest Work:
Just finished this latest portrait in the Loona series. I’ve done most of the members, but still have a few left to do (Choerry, Yves, Chuu, Olivia Hye). 
It was done mainly in Photoshop on the desktop, with a little bit of Artstudio Pro on the iPad Pro.
WEBLOG:
I’ve recently upgraded my 6th gen iPad to an iPad Pro 12.9″, and I’ve been testing several art apps with it. In the past, I’ve used Adobe Sketch, Infinite Painter, Procreate, Sketchbook Pro, and many free ones as well. I was never happy with any of them, as they all seemed to have glaring issues (but I could say the same thing about Photoshop on the desktop, which is my main art tool). Since it’s been a few years since I tried newer art apps, I went on a shopping spree and bought a bunch, as well as some brush sets that will expand my toolset beyond the default brushes and my own custom brushes.
Photoshop could be the perfect art software if Adobe only fixed the long-standing bugs, such as the panels disappearing behind the image, or the panels resizing themselves vertically when docked in the same vertical strip. And a more robust and flexible brush manager would be much appreciated too, especially when there are multiple third-party plugins out there trying to do just that. Speaking of which, I’ve used MagicSquire, which was always a buggy mess, and I ended up giving up on it, despite having spent money on upgrades over the years. I wanted to try Brush Gordon, but it never installed properly and the developer never returned my email. Now I’m using Brusherator, which is a little buggy (the buttons/icons I created keep moving out of place even when they’re locked and not in edit mode), but it does pretty much what I need without bugs I can’t live with.
Outside of Photoshop on the desktop, I use Procreate the most, but only because it’s the most well-known among my students. I used to have a lot of gripes about it, but most of them have been addressed by updates or me discovering a better way to perform a particular task. The only ones that remain is the brush engine, which is lacking in some areas when it comes to customizing scattering and texture orientation parameters, how annoying the perspective grid setup is, and a few other things.
Artstudio Pro is new to me, and I quite like it so far. Being able to import Photoshop brushes and have them work as expected is a huge advantage, because most professional artists use Photoshop and many have a vast collection of brushes they love and rely on. Trying to customize brushes in other apps to match the look and behavior of those brushes would be very time-consuming. Almost all the other art apps cannot import Photoshop brushes correctly, as their brush engines aren’t compatible and will alter the look and behavior of those brushes. I’m still new to Artstudio, so there are still many things I don’t know about it yet, but the one thing I really don’t like about it, is how the brush tools on the top of the GUI don’t simply open up the contents, and you’d have to do an additional tap to open up the actual brushes contained within the tool. Every other art app I’ve tried, you just tap on the brush icon and it’ll open up the brush choices inside. While you can pin the brush window, it’s not the same because then you’d have to manually close it.
The other art app I like a lot is Infinite Painter, which I had some experience with from years ago. The current version has improved a lot—especially in the brushes. It has far more features than Procreate, and I think maybe that’s why it’s not as popular, since the vast toolset might be overwhelming for some, as they are all put in the same tool menu, so when you tap open the menu, you’re bombarded with dozens of tools. Procreate hides those tools in separate menus, which makes it feel less overwhelming. Another issue I have with Infinite Painter, is how you cannot zoom the image within the reference image window, and the zoom level is always tied to the reference window size. It baffles me how anyone could think that is a better approach. Those two are the main ones I’m using on the iPad outside of Procreate, but there are others like Painstorm Studio, Fresco, and HEAVYPAINT.
I have used Paintstorm Studio on the PC, and it’s not bad, but doesn’t really give me anything I can’t do in Photoshop. The iOS version of it is terrible though, because they went with a bizarre GUI that shrinks tool panels down to a tiny version that you can’t make out the details of, which you tap on to enlarge to normal size, instead of neatly arranged tool icons like other art apps. And all the panels are not neatly docked or arranged–you’d have to manually move them around, and you can adjust their sizes or close them—basically like a desktop software, but this is NOT how you approach GUI on a small-screen device like an iPad when screen real estate is so precious. I don’t know what the developers were smoking when they went with that approach, but I can’t imagine anyone would actually prefer it to the intuitive and easy to use GUI in most other art apps.
Fresco is a great idea, but Adobe’s ridiculous subscription pricing when used in the iOS ecosystem just seems laughably greedy when you consider the pricing of equally featured and capable professional art apps in the iOS ecosystem. I can’t tell you how much I hate Adobe for having led the way in the subscription model and how it has prompted many other companies to do the same. I will always choose a different non-subscription option if they are available. The app itself is good, although still missing some important tools. It’s supposed to replace Adobe Sketch, and if that’s the case, they better bring the amazing perspective tool from Sketch to Fresco, because it is still one of the best designed perspective drawing guide I’ve ever seen, and it actually explains how perspective works in 3D visualization so intuitively that I used it to teach students about perspective.
HEAVYPAINT is kind of an odd one out of the bunch, as its distinctly unique approach to brushes takes time to get used to. I’ve seen some very nice work done with it, and they tend to be more on the experimental side. I guess that’s what artists gravitate to when they play around with its brush engine. I’ll need to work with it some more to get a better grasp on its unique features.
There are some art software I’m testing on PC too. Corel Painter, Artrage I have used in the past, but haven’t in years. Rebelle is new to me.
I used to be a heavy Corel Painter user, to the point that the Corel team actually bought a print of my work done with Painter and hung it in their office as inspiration. But the software never improved in ways that mattered to me, and it’s almost as cumbersome, unintuitive, and sluggish as I remembered (though with some updates and improvements). I had given the Corel team lots of feedback back in the day, but it seems like they didn’t address many of them. I had warned them back then that if they didn’t heed my advice, as soon as Photoshop’s brush engine caught up and could do wet-on-wet brushes, they would be left in the dust. And I was right because nowadays you don’t hear about Corel Painter nearly as much, since plenty of other art software’s brush engines can match or outdo Corel’s, while Corel’s GUI, brush engine, and feature set are lagging behind both the leading art software on the market and newly arrived challengers.
Artrage was always this fun diversion from actual serious professional work, since its feature set was sparse, but its brushes were expressive (although it’s got some stiff competition now). It has evolved since the early days, but as fun as the brushes are, I find the oil brushes a bit blunt and require a lot of tweaking to get them to behave the way I like. And I also wish there were more brush varieties (but I understand its main focus is on emulation of traditional medium, so a lot of the more digital-centric brushes wouldn’t be included). Back when realistic emulations of traditional art tools weren’t abundant, Artrage was something special, but nowadays a number of art apps can do traditional emulation very well, including newer apps that have already eclipsed Artrage in popularity.
Rebelle is the promising new kid on the block. and I’ve only played around with it a little bit. But so far I like what I see, and I’ll be spending more time with it. Rebelle seems to take the best qualities of existing art software and put them into one, without the irrelevant and frivolous bloat.
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In the last couple of years, I’ve had two graphics tablets fail on me—one was a Wacom Intuos Medium Pro, and the other was an XP-PEN Deco Pro Small. The Wacom always had buggy driver and with strange problems like moving things would have no effect (sliders, layers), and you’d have to move the stylus about a few inches away from the original position for the movement to register, and then it’ll suddenly snap to the new position. And then the USB connector failed, forcing me to buy the wireless kit, which then failed after a couple of years. The XP-PEN Deco Pro’s USB connector failed after just one year (and past the warranty period), forcing me to buy the wireless version, which worked okay, but had some issues with losing pressure sensitivity. I also tried a Huion Inspiroy Dial, which worked fine but also had a bit of an issue with the software, and I didn’t like the dial on top with the programmable keys below in a long row, since that makes it much harder to find the correct key by using muscle memory. The XP-PEN’s dial being in the middle and the keys are in two groups above and below it, makes finding the correct key much easier.
The one I ended up going with was Xencelabs, which is a new company the ex-employees from Wacom, and under the same parent company as XP-PEN, but aimed at the higher-end market and has much more polished design and higher quality materials (and the only real competitor to Wacom in terms of overall look and feel). I got the kit, which includes Quick Keys, and it’s the main factor that won me over. Having an OLED screen with displayed text makes the programmable keys so much more usable, as you don’t have to memorize anything. Even Wacom’s remote keys don’t have that. I would have liked to have the Quick Key simply being part of the tablet, but I can see why they separated the two, since those who don’t need the remote keys can just buy the tablet without the added cost, and they don’t have to produce two different versions to cater to the two groups. The kit also comes with two styli, which is something I’ve never seen before. One is a thinner two-buttoned stylus, and the other is the thicker three-buttoned one, which I use. You can even program the two styli’s buttons differently and then switch between them for different tasks (although that’s probably too inconvenient for some). But Xencelabs has its own problems too, such as the tablet in wireless mode going haywire every once in a while and suddenly executing a bunch of movements and clicks on its own for a few seconds, and you’d have to undo all that. There’s also no stand for the styli (the carrying case that’s included is nice, but not a replacement for a stand), and the nibs wear down really quickly. The company is sending me a replacement to see if it’s just my unit that’s malfunctioning, or their wireless system simply doesn’t work well in my studio, which has lots of electronic gear that might be causing EMI (electro-magnetic interference). But none of the other wireless tablets I’ve used in my studio ever had that problem, so I have to assume it’s just my unit. I guess I’ll find out when the replacement arrives.
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I finally finished the first draft of Wings of Promise and sent it out to beta-readers. I wrote about it in detail in the previous blog post, including the blurb and its background story. This is the second novel I have finished, and I’m not sure which to work on next. I can either rewrite Dreamdiver (the first novel I finished) based on the feedback I got, or completely rewrite Darkness Falls (I stopped at 75K words because it got too complicated and needed streamlining), or finish Silent Storm (which I started more than twenty years ago, but never got further than the first few chapters). There are also a few sci-fi epics I’ve been plotting for years but never had the time to work on. So many ideas, so little time. And it’s much worse when I have to divide my time between art, music, photography, writing, and teaching.
