The journey to finding art peace (or bliss) has not been peaceful. I had all of these thoughts and notions of what I would do and what I would use to create the art assets for my game. However, essentially, everything I originally planned ended up in the trash. Some of that has to do with personal choices, and others have to do with trying to streamline a process to make it more efficient. The story below is the journey of my current art stack and how I got there. Hopefully, you can take something from it, if nothing else, other than everyone runs into issues while trying to get started.
So, to begin with, if we go back to my post in July 2023, you will note that I had a low-end (although still pricy) Wacom and was working in Photoshop. At the time, I was taking a class and learning pixel art. My expectation was that the game was going to be in a pixel art style, however that only lasted about six months. When doing the initial concept art for the game, I started using Aesprite (this part of the story may be known, so feel free to skip ahead). While using Aesprite, I realized I could use SideCar with my iPad and promptly sold the Wacom on eBay, looking to recoup some costs. Also, I dreaded using the Wacom because the non-pro version did not support USB-C to C and instead had an entire mangle of cords that I could not stand.
After working on the pixel art concepts, I slowly realized that I was struggling with the pixel concept in moving from physical to digital art. So, I pivoted and moved to 2D HD art instead. This was an excellent turning point in the process, as I felt more in control of what I was trying to draw. However, I only had my iPad, so I had to decide what platform to work on since Aesprite was off the table. Photoshop on the iPad was an absolute no-go; I have no idea who designed the UI, but not for me. I already owned Procreate, so I said why not and tried that. For reasons I honestly cannot explain, I struggled with Procreate and kept looking on YouTube for other alternatives. Eventually, I landed on Adobe Fresco.
While Fresco was working well for me, and I enjoyed its mechanism for frame-by-frame animation, which worked much better than Procreate’s layer mechanism, the file system, or lack thereof, killed it. I was trying to store my files in iCloud to easily access them on my computer without having to AirDrop things constantly. However, Adobe likes to keep you in their ecosystem (much like Apple does), and you had to save it to their cloud for the raw file, which meant eating up what little space I had of storage with them and possibly opening my artwork to be bot food.
This meant going back to the drawing board. This time, I found Krita after looking at probably three other competitors in the market. Krita, like Aesprite, supported SideCar, so I was very excited about that. It also has a complete animation section, eventually enabling me to kill two birds with one platform. Yay!
Well, almost. Yay…. I started working on Krita on my iPad, and all was going well. I was making sketches and working on frames for an animation I pulled from Fresco. Then I tried to switch to a pressure-based brush, which I needed since I am doing something in watercolor style. Honestly, if you work with digital art, you understand the pressure component of the pen. After digging around the internet, I discovered this was a limitation of SideCar with Krita.
So now I’m thinking I wish I hadn’t sold that Wacom, but not because of the cords. Back on YouTube, I saw what artists used with Krita and that they essentially partnered with XP Pen. And as one does, I ordered one. Did it work?? No, of course not, because you see how this story has been going and where it will end up. The XP Pen didn’t work because my computer refused to behave; the drivers would not allow the pen nib to align. I did all of the things: restarting, reinstalling, etc. Nothing worked. I returned it (thank goodness for Amazon). And then I did the thing I should have done probably four months earlier and bought a Wacom. However, this time, I bought one with much less of a cord issue (see the Pro line).
Now, it seems like I have finally landed on my stack.
Macbook Pro M4 with 48GB RAM (how I got here will be in another post for another day)
Krita for both drawing and animation
Wacom 16 in Pro version
iCloud for storage (although the transfer is no longer an issue)
I hope that ride wasn’t too dull, and hey, maybe it will help some other person from following these footsteps. Either way, the fun is in the journey, right?