I did it - I bought clip studio paint. One of the cool things about it is that there are two interfaces - the one you draw with, and one about news and how to do things - and with the one about how to do things there are a lot of tutorials, but the tutorials seem to be written by anyone who wants to write one. I think there are some 'official' ones made by the clip studio paint team, but then there are others that are posted by just anyone who wants to share how to do something. It's like a collaborative blog....there's a 'New Post' button that you can press and then you can create one of these tutorials....they're about things like how to draw different things - food, robots /// actually, there are so many about food and robots (and humanoids) /// and there are others about different tools, like different kinds of layers and gradient maps and how to achieve certain effects - e.g. how to make your work look like an oil painting.
I did one of the official tutorials called 'Making your first illustration'. I skipped a lot of it and my drawing was really bad but I learnt the one thing I've been wanting to learn, which is how to use layers. I already knew it basically, but I thought it was more complicated than it actually is. There is a lot more that you can do with layers than what I now know, but I've done it now - I've drawn something with layers. It's basically a lot of transparencies on top of each other and you draw different aspects of the image on the different layers. It helps with things like, for example, say if you were using a watercolour brush and you were interspersing two colours, but you didn't want them to mix, you would put them on different layers, and, even though, in the image, they're touching, because they're on different layers, they aren't, and so they can't leak together. Or another use is that you can draw an initial sketch (which is something I've discovered is a standard thing when you do a painting), and then you reduce the opacity on that layer, so it's really faint ||| then you do the line art, which is where you convert the rough sketch, with all its sketchy lines, into clear lines (another thing that I've learnt artists do). Then once you have the lines, you can actually make the layer with the sketch on completely disappear. Then you add colour and shading, and, like I said, you (can) do the different parts on different layers. There's also a technique called (I think) layer clipping, which makes it really easy to add colour because, somehow, the only part of the layer you can add colour to is the part inside the shape your colouring....so you don't have to worry about carefully staying inside the lines.
Anyway, I've been working on my third abstract painting in fire alpaca, and I've done my first, extremely bad but enlightening, picture in clip studio paint, so I'm making progress. I haven't done much with Krita yet.
One of the reasons I decided to buy clip studio paint, besides the fact that it's a really good program used by professional level artists, and I'm keen to make good art, is that it's really reasonably priced. Also, it's a one off payment, so now I have it for life. Adobe have converted to a subscription scheme where you have to pay every year and it's quite expensive. It's probably better - it's the industry standard - but for my purposes, there's pretty much a cheap or free alternative for everything.
For example, Krita, Gimp and Inkscape are all free and are really good. Apparently, over time, Krita has become more and more like photoshop. It even looks like photoshop. When I key in the words 'is Krita' into the youtube search bar, the first auto-complete that comes up is 'is Krita as good as photoshop?' Interestingly, the video that comes up was made by someone who uses photoshop all the time for work, and she wanted to compare it with Krita (which she hadn't used before). something else interesting, she uses a wacom intuos (which is the one I have - not the one where you draw on the actual screen - you draw on the tablet and it appears on your computer screen). That's encouraging because she's a professional level artist, so it shows that the step 'up' to the tablets where you're actually drawing on the screen is not all that important. She talks about how photoshop is the industry standard - like, if you work at Disney or something like that, you would use photoshop. Her overall assessment was that Krita compares very well with photoshop...it's lacking some of the more fancy features that photoshop has, but even she tends not to use those more advanced features.
I mentioned Gimp and Inkscape as well as Krita because I think you can regard them as a kind of suite. Gimp isn't actually that good for art (at least, some people think that, and I agree) - it's more useful for editing photos and creating special effects, so that corresponds to one of the main functions of photoshop. And Inkscape corresponds to Adobe illustrator. Like Illustrator it's used for vector art, which basically means that when you zoom in, the shapes and images retain their definition and don't become pixelated. So, it's good for creating bright, colourful, cartoony type images, logos and things like that.
For video editing, Adobe has Premier Pro, and a free alternative to that, which is extremely good, is Blender. Blender does a lot more besides. It's an awesome program used by professional animators, film editors, game developers, and lots of other creative people. It's so good and has so much technical capacity that it's a bit daunting. I'm pretty sure that, if you wanted to, you could probably do everything that all the programs I've mentioned so far can do, and more - much more - with blender.
For music and sound production, there are a number of great, free DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) like Audacity, LMMS, etc
For animation, Adobe has Flash and Animate, but most of the art programs I already mentioned can do animation as well - Blender, Krita, Fire Alpaca, Gimp, Inkscape and Clip Studio Paint, can all do animation. I've heard that Clip Studio Paint is particularly good for animation. And of course Blender is awesome at animation because animation (especially in games) is one of the main things it was designed for. There are also some very good free programs that specialise in animation, like Open Toonz. Open Toonz used to be a paid service (and it was called just Toonz) and it's been used to create some really great animations. For example, it was used extensively (and further developed and customised) by Studio Ghibli, the famous Japanese animation studio responsible for some of the greatest anime films ever produced - like, Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle.
but I wonder whether I will ever be good at art. Maybe it doesn't matter. I like this quote from Andy Warhol:
“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”
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