Ok, I will give my perspective.
First some background: When I was a teenager I had to decide if I wanted to be an Artist or go into a Technical career. I chose the technical career because I just didn't want to be a "starving artist". I still did some art from time to time throughout my life but never really went wild with it. I was busy writing software for "Corporate America".
I recently decided I wanted to go back to my artistic side because I missed it and was sick of the whole bust your hump for a paycheck. Weird how we feel about things over time, eh? The only reason I tell you this is that I had never done a single thing artistically in the digital realm until I joined the Cartographer's Guild. I still consider myself more artist than software user when it comes to this. Some folks here say they can't draw to save their lives but they still put out awesome work. It seems to me that CC is more of a stamp tool but I don't know anything at all about it. I think if you plan to paint your own stuff you would want something like PS or Gimp instead of CC but that's just my impression.
I wasn't making money from my art and I wasn't going to blow several hundred dollars on PS so I downloaded GIMP. Torstan (one of our members here) does amazing work and he had written several tutorials for Gimp and I figured if he as one of the best around here was using that it must be pretty good. He mainly uses PS now I believe but it seemed to me that he used Gimp for a while before moving over to PS. (maybe he can answer but perhaps he switched because of client needs more than anything else?). At any rate, Gimp is free so what's to complain about?
I would say it was very frustrating not being able to create what I could draw with a pencil and it took me probably about a year in my off time working with Gimp until I got to a point where I was pretty satisfied with my results. I think that might have been sped up if I had a tablet instead of a mouse but seeing as I still don't have one of those I don't know. I still have moments where I'm irritated with not being able to get what I see in my mind's eye. Drawing with a mouse blows chunks!
Perhaps one day I will pay the coin for PS but before I come close to doing that I will buy a tablet. I'm working on getting a Cintiq so that's a couple grand and that means PS is a ways off.
Intuitive? I don't think so.
My work flow in the simplest of forms is:
1. Rough sketch on paper
2. scan in at 300dpi
3. Gimp clean up and touch up
4. Gimp coloring/painting/etc
So I guess it depends on what you want to be able to do. If you want to paint things from scratch then I don't think CC is going to be what you want but that may be just my admittedly UN-knowledgeable thoughts about the program. If you are like me then you just have to suck it up and learn Gimp or PS depending on your cash flow and that's a easy one to answer for yourself.
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Originally Posted by Jaxilon
