Failing Creatively: Apps to Avoid AI
Sharing the apps I prefer to use when creating digital art.
Starting with art from the archive:
Sharing an old inktober piece today. The prompt was stand and it felt appropriate to draw a small little hermit crab trying to protest people not doing their part to stop climate change. I still feel pretty strongly about it, and wish the world would do more to make the transitions we need to make. Probably why this feels appropriate to share today.
Hope you all had a great week…
On to my bi-weekly ramble:
Procreate made an announcement recently that made me so happy to be an artist. Seeing this made me want to take a closer look at the apps I use to create and do a little “check up 🩺“ While many artists still create traditionally, the best thing that could ever happen for me as an artist was for iPads and tablets to exist. The additional introduction of the apple pencil was a godsend for me because I found creating art more comfortable when the tool I was holding was familiar to my most common medium up to that point (my sketchbook and pencil).
AI however is the tech du jour and while I do feel like machine learning* is good for sifting through mass amounts of data that may be necessary to save lives and find patterns that advance humanity. AI in the creative space is just a tool created by people who don’t want to pay for creativity. This still makes me wonder where do we go from here? Does AI mean that creating digitally is to dangerous? Are we destined to have generators built into every tool we use to create with more and more clients turning to Midjourney or some other Chat GPT instead of working with creatives?
*I won’t call it AI because it seems far from really being intelligent
I do not have an answer for those questions. What I do have are apps I prefer to use, solely because they do not require me to be dependent on magic technology that may or may not prove to be the downfall of creativity. The apps I use as daily creative drivers usually do not have ai elements as far as I know. If they do I certainly do not use them. I create things in a very slow manner. This is purposeful on my part because I find by doing things the “slow” way get ideas flowing more freely and I feel my work is better for it.
So without further ado here are my daily drivers:
Linea Sketch
This is honestly my go to. I use it more than any other. There are just enough layers that I can separate things if need be, they have masking capabilities, and even textures and text. While there are not as many crazy fancy extra features, as an artist who grew up with nothing more than a sketchbook and no real traditional painting skills to speak of it has always been my favorite since its first inception. Full disclosure the app has a subscripiton to remove watermarks and such but it is not super expensive for the power it has packed in it. I do all my illustration in this app first and rarely have to move on to others to achieve the look I am going for. It is an app that has helped me make the illustrations for at least 3 childrens books to date along with countless other projects. I would say that is pretty powerful for an app that leans on the simple side.
Affinity Creative Suite
Affinity has been my daily driver for all graphics related things. What started out as an annoyance that Adobe charges so much per month/year turned into a haven because I was out of the ecosystem long before they started adopting their cringy AI policies that had the internet up in arms a few months back. As a graphic designer/ illustrator Affinity covers all of my needs for my professional work. I make ads, book layouts, and more using publisher, their version of InDesign, and they have full versions of their entire suite of apps for any device you want to put it on with one liscence. They were bought by Canva and I am not sure what that will mean for this ecosystem going forward but for the time being I am extremely happy and have no intention of changing.
Inkscape
I use inkscape on my mac for two things only and it is auto trace and to check my work will open for a client. As great as affinity designer is for vector design there are occasions where work I started with Linea Sketch needs to be vectorized for one reason or another and the only decent autotrace I have found that doesn’t require a subscription or isn’t pushing some AI tool that I do not need. I need to shout out my local library workshop for introducing me to this app because it certainly serves my needs most days. I also use it to make patch designs for my kids, that may or may not be something I sell the patterns for someday.
There are plenty of honorable mention apps that I have tried over the years. The primary one being procreate*, which I still use a bunch. However while procreate packs a ton of power into it’s app I constantly switch out of it becasue their smudge brush does not ever work the way I want it to which then frustrates me. I also randomly go back to Paper (formerly paper 53 now of wetransfer), mostly out of nostalgia because for a long time it was the best watercolor brush I could find and was one of the first sketchbook apps prior to ipad pro that worked the way you wanted it to when sketching digially. I also want to get into basic animation for fun (I am no animator 🤣) and have toon squid downloaded and plan to try procreate dreams as well at some point.
*Procreates stance on AI and the plethora of brushes are what keeps me around despite my furstrations with it at times see their statement at this link:
All the apps that I have pointed out are the main apps that I use pretty much all the time and I highly reccomend them to anyone who is willing to listen (ask my family their face constantly looks like this 🙄). Hopefully, they all serve me well, I have definitly seen my style develop as I have used them more and more over the years. Most of all I hope this helps people see what I am using when it comes to technology in the aid of artistic creation. I would love to hear what your favorites are so please comment or reply to share an app you think I should try.
A note for the future:
I am thinking that failing creatively is going to transition from here into skill developing projects going forward. I am hoping that we can use these art weeks when I am not talking about good news as a way to all develop our illustration skills together. I will still pop in with brain tangents when they seem relevant to share. Mostly though I want to continue to fail creatively and I firmly believe we don’t do that without trying to learn new skills. So…
Till next time keep failing creatively, and see you next week with some good news.
Thank you so much for joining me on my journey.
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