I’ve been mostly working with digital these days. I’ve always dabble in digital painting, even as a young high schooler (so, so many years ago). Now that I’ve invested in a tablet that can work with the Apple Pencil and use the art programs, it’s been a fun return to focus mainly on digital drawing and painting. I still think my first love is Clip Studio Paint (perhaps I will focus on a post around that program in the near future), but I’ve also been delving into Adobe Sketch and Draw.
Since I have the Creative Cloud and also been learning the many programs on the Adobe Education Exchange, I wanted to test out Sketch and Draw and see if they compared to Procreate and CSP. While Procreate and CSP have so many features and can work perfectly on their own, I do appreciate Sketch and Draw’s stripped down simplicity. Sometimes CSP has too much crowding their interface and I’m still trying to sit down and learn Procreate (watched a ton of tutorial videos today!). Both of those programs have a learning curve, but it’s really easy to jump into Sketch/Draw. I also feel like for all my complaints about learning Illustrator, Draw is analog alternative I really want for creating vector-based graphics for logos/graphics.
I think the biggest advantage that Sketch has is that you can import all the CC/Kyle Webster brushes onto the brush library. I kept uploading my entire brush files, but you can easily import 1-2 at a time to the assets library and it will pop up instantly. Sketch has a little more flexibility with their brushes than Draw.
The simplicity is really meant to start something simple and either share that image or provide the finishing touches on Photoshop or Illustrator. However, I wish it has some essential features, like masking tools. Whenever I got stuck wanting to fix something, I usually had to resort to importing it to my desktop, which is…fine I suppose. Does stop productivity if I’m off site though. I also had a huge issue with it never opening if I sent it to be open directly in Photoshop/Illustrator. No amount of troubleshooting seemed to fix this, I always had to save it in the CC Cloud and then open it. Ugh.
I keep watching for the release of Project Gemini, which appears to be their answer to Procreate and looks to combine the programs of Draw and Sketch with all the additional features that Procreate has already. There’s also suppose to be a full Photoshop for the iPad as well, but I’m not counting on that beating out Clip Studio Paint in its usefulness. In the meantime I guess I will learn Procreate because it has all the features necessary for me to finish a drawing from start to completion.
Art Nouveau Moth available on my Society6 storeOutside of that, I have posted the Art Nouveau Moth design onto Society6, available with and without a solid black background.
Megan Frauenhoffer 