Article: To Draw and Paint Maps, Revisited [2018]

[Neyasha]

I'm not sure if I like Pixelmator (for me the interface is very confusing), but I'm now playing around with the trials of both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer and so far I'm pretty impressed. I like the intuitive interface and compared to Gimp it runs so fast and smoothly on my Macbook! Also the tablet seems to be working a lot better than with Gimp. Not sure if I'm going to buy one of them (and if: which one), but I'm glad the article made me aware of all the alternatives. Thanks a lot!

[ChickPea]

Neyasha, I have Affinity Designer, and it's very good (though I find there are still many things that Inkscape does better), but I've no regrets about buying it. I don't own Affinity Photo, but I'd second Kacey's comments about it. I don't think Affinity intends it as a drawing app, and any painting tools it has are meant for photo touch-ups, and not really for the creation of original art from scratch. I'm sure it could be used for painting if you really wanted to, but I think there are much better tools available. I'd take a look at Clip Studio Paint for drawing/painting, or try Krita (it's free, so you've nothing to lose!) I think many people have found Krita to have much better tablet support than Gimp.

[onez]

Wow, I had no Idea there was so much good stuff out there!
Thank you John!

[Aristotle]

Nice rundown. I've been messing with Affinity Designer for mapping recently, as I can't justify the Adobe price-tag. I'd love to see examples of maps others have made with some of these alternatives.

[Straf]

I've only just found this. Very nicely done J.Edward. I'm going to have to check some of these out. I'm particularly interested in Milton.

[JhekieJ]

Hmn, I didn't know that Clipstudio can be used for mapping but I am not surprised. I think I'll try it and see the difference from photoshop. Thanks for the list, I found some that I could recommend to some artists in my Discord Server (it's a general art society tho) who would like to try their hand in digital graphics software.

[Tom Solo]

What if you want to hand draw a map what tools would you need

[Dom de Mattos]

I thought I'd give Medibang a try and have just downloaded it. I have had some experience of Coreldraw (showing my age) and CS2 (not much better), so thought I ought to be able to follow the tutorials. First one: how to draw a square and a circle. As far as I can tell, I followed their instructions, but I could not get it to draw the outline of a square. Solid square yes, outline no. If I can't even manage to follow the most basic tutorial, what hope is there? Does anyone here use Medibang? Is it more user friendly than appears at first?