Vector drawing on iPad

jvartandillustration

Hello, everyone. I’m looking into doing more vector art using my iPad. Right now I’m using Procreate mostly, but I want to create artwork with smoother lines that I can scale up.

Those who have used different vectoring apps (Adobe Fresco/Affinity/Vectornator?) what is your impression on how they handle hand-drawn vectoring? Which app would you say is the best to use for vector illustration?

TIA

Melissa_Bailey

@jvartandillustration I've used Adobe Fresco's vector brush for hand-drawn vector lines, and really liked how intuitive it is. However, it creates A LOT of anchor points, so it's something to be aware of if that would an issue for you.

Do you have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription? The Adobe Illustrator app is very similar to the desktop version. Though I haven't tried it, Affinity Draw is also supposed to be the same in the desktop and app versions.

jvartandillustration

@Melissa_Bailey Thank you for the response. No, I don’t have a CC subscription. I thought about just doing the $10 per month with Fresco, but I wanted to get a feel for how others liked it first.

danielerossi

@jvartandillustration I’ve been playing around with Fresco’s vector brushes. Not bad! I enjoy being able to just paint and colour in things just like a bitmap brush. The only thing I couldn’t figure out is if there was a way to import other vector brushes. Fresco has a very limited number of brushes but they are very good.

Miriam

I have the Affinity programs & I've been very happy with them. I've also used Adobe Illustrator, but that was decades ago, so I can't offer a comparison.

By "hand-drawn vectoring" it sounds like you want to draw like you would with pencil & paper & let the program place the nodes. In Affinity, this would be the Pencil tool. (I'm not sure if the name is the same in other programs or not.)

I agree with what @Melissa_Bailey said about this kind of tool creating a lot of node points. But it's pretty easy to delete the ones you don't want & adjust the curve. Also, when looking for a demo video to share, I saw that there are different settings that can reduce the number of nodes created. I'll have to try them out.

Here's a video demo that explains the various settings of the Pencil tool in Affinity Designer 2 for iPad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEdznUOm3Gk&list=PL1t9c--IJQQ_iYzBFRLdJD1u7EHQhYZtv&index=7

This one shows how to use the Pen & Node tools (I think these are pretty much the same in the various vector programs.):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtvVEv5udVA&list=PL1t9c--IJQQ_iYzBFRLdJD1u7EHQhYZtv&index=8

Affinity has a 30-day free trial, so you can give it a try & see if you like it. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/ (Scroll down to the bottom of the page.)

Good luck with your decision!