artist

From here to Affinity

After all these years, I am slowly moving over from all the Adobe products to Canva’s Affinity. I didn’t realize, but Affinity has been available for almost 10 years.

After Adobe kept cutting me off, claiming I was sharing my account with others, which I was not, I finally told them where to go. They made thousands of dollars from me over the years and now they aren’t getting a penny. And neither is Affinity since it is free.

Affinity is one program that works as all the other programs – it’s Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and everything else, all in one. No changing platforms, it’s all integrated into one thing.

I am now using it for my business and to color my daily cartoons.

I still use Clip Studio Paint to draw and create the cartoons, but I use Affinity for everything else – coloring, lettering, cutting and pasting and moving things around if necessary. I guess I could use Clip Studio Paint to do all that, but I’ve always used Photoshop for that. Now I use Affinity for that.

There was a learning curve, because a few things are different, but for the most part, it all operates the same.

I tested actual work and jobs before I cut Adobe off. Although there are new things to learn, on the whole, I find it easier and more intuitive than Photoshop and Illustrator. I was having problems setting the colors up properly with a PSD file and making layers, but interestingly enough, I don’t need a PSD file to separate the colors, I can do it right with a jpg and it does the same thing. It really makes life so much easier, it sort of upgrades every type of project and file. It cuts the extra work out.

It’s amazing how the Universe leads you where you need to be. I was getting so frustrated with Adobe and all the time I spent with them trying to fix the issues. But I was lead to Affinity when I needed to be.

I saw an article on Substack geared to cartoonists and the writer was asking people what programs they use to draw and work. And Affinity kept coming up and that of course lead me to them. Just when I needed them. I can’t find the article, or I would link it here. If I find it eventually, I will let you know.

But it’s amazing that at the right time, it all popped up in my universe. I could have used it years ago, but better now than never.

Affinity reads all old files from programs from vector art to jpgs, pngs, tiffs and everything else is all workable on the new platform. I can manipulate the files just as if I was using the old platforms.

I was concerned about creating and editing the work because some of it is a bit different than what I’m used to. But then I realized that it’s all about the finished product. It’s the end result that’s what’s important. And the end result is all the same as it always was.

As you are reading my cartoons (Ollie And Jacomo), see if you can tell which are the old colored cartoons and which are new. There isn’t much color in Ollie And Jacomo, so it may be hard to tell. And that’s a good thing.

Onward and upward and to Affinity.

Till next time . . .

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Enjoying making them happy

When I’m creating a cartoon, I usually have one or two people in mind. I wonder, “Will they think this is funny? Will they like it?”

I don’t know why them. Probably because they are more vocal about my work and they have sent me cartoon ideas over the years, so I feel they are paying attention, even thought I might use 1 in 100 of their ideas – but they are being involved.

When I was publishing the daily news, there is one person who I would think of, too. I would wonder if she thought I was doing a good job. I wondered if she thought the article I was writing made sense and wondered if she would approve. She was always in my head as I was writing.

This person is gone now, but I always admired her and cared how she felt about issues. I admired her as I was growing up, she was always saying what I was thinking she was a fighter and protester. She cared about life and history. One time I saw her in person and was so excited. I didn’t say anything to her, but it was like seeing one’s favorite movie star in person.

Years later, I ran into her at a protest, and she knew my name. She literally knew who I was, she approached me and introduced herself and said my name! We eventually became friendly over the years. She wrote a book on Miami history one time and included me!

Are there people who you try to impress? But I think impress is not the right word, I don’t know what the word would be. Make happy? Entertain? Not sure.

One of my favs from quarantine time. Via TomFalco.com

I think in my cases, I just admired these people and the way they felt about things, so I wanted to try to entertain them with my work and put a smile on their faces when they see my cartoons and writings. I don’t want to lose them as an audience.

To be honest, I don’t think I ever changed an article or cartoon because “they” wouldn’t approve, but I just hoped they would enjoy what I was doing.

Does any of this make sense?

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Sticking with Max

Miami Art Week during Art Basel can be daunting, hell, just the fact that I have to leave the Grove is a chore in itself. It’s a lot to digest – the noise, the art, the people, it’s a non-stop week that is a lot for the senses. Most of the art begins to look the same after a bit, there is a lot of pop art and a lot of classic, there are sculptures as well as collages and paintings and they all get jumbled together, but this year, one art style and one artist stuck out to me. Literally. That’s Max Zorn, Tape Artist, shown here.

Max’s work appears to be photographs, but the whole image is made from brown masking tape on acrylic glass sheets with light behind it! As I passed by his booth at the Spectrum Art Fair, I noticed that there was tape on one of the images he was working on, I couldn’t figure out what was going on at first, I thought he was putting tape on various areas of a photograph, then it dawned on me that the whole image was made from masking tape!

Max got the idea one night when he put tape on top of a street light, he then stared playing with the tape and as he added more layers, it changed coloring, getting darker as he added tape on top of tape. And his Tape Art was born from that.

“The European tape is different than American tape and I find it interesting and challenging at first when I change tapes in the different countries. The thickness is different,” said Max, who lives in Amsterdam and shows his work around the world.

One big tipping point for Max was when the famed artist Bansky shared a video of Max on his social media sites. The video went viral. It shows Max using the masking tape and a scalpel to create his art, as shown below. He calls it “street art,” but to me it is fine art that belongs in galleries.

Max will be at the Spectrum Art Show all weekend, until December 6, which is at 1700 NE 2nd Avenue (new location this year, along with the Red Dot Fair). There is parking across the street, it’s easy to get to and park.

A gallery of Max’s art can be seen here at his website.