New artwork: I Am a Child of God V. A reference to the Primary song. The rectangles represent (bottom to top), a child, its mortal parents, and our Heavenly Parents. (Figured it was time to do a more abstract version of this idea. It ended up also alluding to Hearts of the Children IV and Hearts of the Children V.)
My process for this style, for what it’s worth: mock up the design in Figma, export an SVG, open it in Inkscape, use the roughen and simplify filters, export a PNG, open it in Procreate, select the rectangles, paint the streaks within the rectangles, export a PNG, texture in Affinity Photo as usual.
I’ve occasionally used ImageMagick’s erode and dilate filters to make art look a little less digital. Turns out those filters are also available in Photoshop and Affinity Photo, just under different names: minimum blur and maximum blur. I had no idea. (I should mention that there might still be subtle differences between the algorithms. I didn’t do a deep dive. But from my limited testing they seem to do the same thing.)
I’m experimenting with a slightly new style here, masking the notes (after adding noise to the outlines with SVG filters and then eroding/dilating with Imagemagick) and painting inside the mask in Procreate. (And then texturing it in Affinity Photo as usual.)
A new experimental nerdy thing, for people who like hymns, sheet music, and textures:
How I make these hymn prints (as I’m calling them):
Typeset the first phrase (or so) in MuseScore using the Bravura font, with the spacing trimmed to within an inch of its life
Play it out loud to make sure I entered it right (cough) and export an SVG
Drag the SVG into a frame in Figma and use the SkewDat plugin to skew it -4°, center it, then export a 4,000px-wide PNG
Use ImageMagick to do some erosion and dilation (to simulate age and ink spread): convert input.png -morphology erode disk:18 -morphology dilate disk:16 output.png
Texture the image in Affinity Photo and export the PNG
Upscale with Real-ESRGAN to 12,000px-wide
Downscale a little in Affinity Photo, add 8% monochrome noise, and export the final PNG
I’m still figuring out how I want to do these (full bleed or not, barlines, clefs and key signatures or not, etc.). Also thinking about possibly doing some abstract versions as well, to avoid all these music typesetting issues entirely.
A short followup to what I wrote last year about Press, my abandoned typesetting engine project: I’m now fully convinced that the web platform is where I want to do typesetting. It’s open, programmatic, and capable. Source files are plain text, easy to version control, and fairly future-proof. And even though it’s not WYSIWYG — at least not the way I’m using it — it’s much more comfortable for me as a working environment.
For non-book work (charts, some kinds of documents), I’ve found that browsers already support everything I need (like @page). That’s how I’ve done all my recent genealogy design work, and it’s how I’ll do any language charts I make going forward. And for things like books where browser support isn’t quite there yet, Paged.js works well (and will presumably be phased out once browser support gets better).
Not to mention how nice it is for both print and digital workflows (EPUB, web) to all use the same technologies. I also love that the web is cross-platform. Something I ran into when I was making charts with PlotDevice (which is Mac-only) was that people on Windows couldn’t modify the charts even when I gave them the source. That’s not a problem with the web.
I’ve even started using the web platform for less webby things like making wallpaper for my phone:
Here’s the HTML (the 375×812px size is the CSS resolution of my iPhone 12 Mini — RIP — and also keep in mind that this was for a one-off never to see the light of day, so I took the liberty of cutting a few corners):
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div class="background">
<svg id="darknoise" viewBox="0 0 375 812" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<filter id="noiseFilter">
<feTurbulence baseFrequency="0.5" numOctaves="8" />
</filter>
<rect width="100%" height="100%" filter="url(#noiseFilter)" />
</svg>
<svg id="lightnoise" viewBox="0 0 375 812" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<filter id="noiseFilter2">
<feTurbulence seed="485" baseFrequency="0.005" numOctaves="12" />
</filter>
<rect width="100%" height="100%" filter="url(#noiseFilter2)" />
</svg>
</div>
<div class="quote">Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.</div>
<div class="reference">Matthew 11:28</div>
</body>
</html>
It’s not the world’s most amazing wallpaper or anything, but I’m still pleased that I was able to make something I’m reasonably happy with using technologies I love. (I could have also used WebGL shaders or Canvas. Lots of options!)
New artwork: Heart, Might, Mind, and Strength. This is the first piece I’ve painted in Procreate with my new iPad Air and Apple Pencil. Also of note, I used one or two brushes from Matthew Baldwin’s oil masterset. And a touch of chromatic aberration and lens distortion in Affinity Photo.
I’ve decided to ditch Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps — Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, mainly. I never thought I’d say that, but they’re too expensive. Instead, I’ll be using Affinity Photo, Affinity Publisher, and Affinity Designer. It’s a fairly small one-time cost instead of a dreary, never-ending, money-sucking subscription.
(If/when I need to do motion graphics or video editing in place of After Effects and Premiere, by the way, I’m planning to use the free version of DaVinci Resolve.)
So far I’ve only actually used Affinity Photo, to texture the piece I released yesterday. Worked like a charm. The live split-screen preview when applying a filter is brilliant, and the file sizes are much smaller, too. (In Photoshop I’d regularly end up with a 1–2 GB PSB file. With Affinity Photo, it’s closer to 300 MB.)
As far as typesetting goes, I still expect to use TeX (Tectonic) on projects where it makes sense — it’s what I used on the wide margin study editions since typesetting each language individually would have taken much more time — but it’s nice to have Affinity Publisher for other projects. I’m planning to use it for the book of narrative poems I’m (slowly) working on. (I’ll be setting it with Hinte, a new typeface I’m designing in FontForge. More on that soon.)
With Figma doing most of what I used to use Illustrator for, I don’t expect to use Affinity Designer all that much initially. But the raster brush textures are intriguing. We’ll see.
