Cheaper (much, I hope) substitute for Illustrator?

Factual Questions
21

I’m finding this all very educational, thank you all. :slight_smile:

Last night I found and looked at three freeware/shareware paint programs, as well as that Corel Painter I mentioned – and it looks like all of them do that pixel by pixel thing (is that what you all mean by raster? vs. vector?) that doesn’t enlarge well.

So now I’m confused about what my sister said my niece needs. As in, the description of how she paints sounds like a paint program, but she definitely suggested Illustrator… Why do I suspect she might be as ignorant as I about what is needed? :wink: This evening I will call them and speak to my niece directly, and see what she has to say. And tell her about using that inches X 300 size thing, so she can try that out.

I’ll ask her about the tablet, too. If she is using one now, maybe she can just bring it with her and we’ll install it here.

22

I’d like to throw in my €0.02 worth and say it’s all about the weakest link. If you’re gonna produce a print add, blown up to billboard size, you’d better use Illustrator, because scaling up something rasterized from 17" to 17’ is obviously not gonna survive very well in the process.
However, if you have a cheapo Epson ink jet printer, the sophistication of Illustrator would be lost anyway. So you need to ask yourself - or her in this case - what she aims to do? Is this a very serious interest? Is she thinking of publishing some fanzine and is this something she might pursue later in school - then yes, forking up the money for Illustrator (at least a used version) might be an idea. Then again - why are you doing this and not her parents (not my business, just think it’s strange that you’re stuck with this). If it’s just that she want to print out some invitations and the images she used was swiped off some website and poor graphics /resolution to start with, and everything turned ut smudged and crappy - well, Illustrator is not gonna be able to make that stolen graphic better and will be overkill for the purpose in any case.

23

StarvingButStrong, does your niece understand the difference between vector and raster programs and the relationship between bitmaps and print size? Either type of program can make images that work at large print sizes if you understand how to use them. I think a serious graphic artists needs both but needs to know the best ways to use them.

I suggest you find out if a vector program is what she really wants. You can download a working demo of Corel Draw that will function I think for 60 days. The drawback is that it has so many features it can be really intimidating and difficult to use at first but the vector drawing tools are fairly accessable. Honestly for me I find I prefer the cut down version of Draw because it only has the essentials that I need but alas there is no free demo.

The Gaspode actually vector programs can be an excellent way to turn sow’s ear grainy clipart into sikly, scalable graphics. That’s how I learned to use Corel Draw back in '89 at a desktop publishing sweatshop. Customers would bring in letterhead which we would scan. Small letterhead graphics at 300dpi B&W (not grayscale) scanning resulted in pretty rough looking images but I could quickly trace the outline with Draw’s vector tools, tweak the spline curves and end up with scalable graphic that printed razor sharp on a laser or a 5400dpi LInotronic imagesetter. That’s simple stuff but I said I am no graphic artist, my background is in drafting and photography. More skilled artists can make vector art that doesn’t look like line drawings and combine vector and raster graphics in ways that look completely natural.

24

Before investing in a new product, you may want to have the little sprout simply use (as suggested) a larger canvas or zoom out before beginning to draw.

I use Paint Shop Pro… 8? I think. I produce fantasy-world maps, and when I print to my ordinary inkjet, I get results that don’t show the pixel edges.

25

Graphic designer checking in.

You’re looking at $50-100 for decent software. If that’s acceptable, I’d recommend visiting Adobe’s website and downloading the “tryout” versions of Illustrator CS2 and Photoshop Elements 3.

Vector: If your niece likes Illustrator, you’re gonna be out $100 for the academic version. It’s much better than Corel, and well worth the $20 difference. I’d recommend downloading the tryout version of Macromedia Freehand, as well. Also an excellent product, but possibly not long for this world.

Raster: If it’s Photoshop Elements she likes, you’re in business. Here’s a secret: Photoshop Elements is Photoshop. Well, not really. But it has almost all the capabilities of the full version. A set of strategic functions are missing (namely CMYK support and alpha channels) to keep it from cannibalizing the professional market, and everything has a wizardy coating to make it more palatable to the amateur user. It’s a great product. Retails somewhere in the $80-100 range, but it can often be found around $50 or less through a rebate. I know Costco usually carries it, as well.

Two birds: the Wacom Graphire tablet ($100) is a great drawing tool, and an amazing value–easily good enough for a pro. It comes with Photoshop Elements 2.0 and a limited version of Corel Painter. Might be everything you need in one box.

26

So many helpful replies! Let’s see if I can answer everything:

What my neice wants to produce. Well, right now she’s into painting horses and unicorns and dragons and fairy princesses and such. A friend of hers is apparently writing a ‘fantasy novel’ and she will illustrate it, and they’ll self-publish and outsell Harry Potter. :wink: The big disappointment that mostly kicked this off was that she’d designed an apparently killer logo for her soccer team (“The Dragons” – her suggestion, I believe) and the plan was to have it put on team t-shirts. But the actual printout was a horrible disappointment to her. I don’t know if she’ll end up pursuing a career in art of some sort, but she’s been drawing (colored pencils) for several years now, and she created the family Christmas cards (screen printed) this last Christmas.

Why I’m involved: long story. My mother has mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease, and my father has been caring for her at home. Last week he was in a car accident and along with other injuries, he broke a hip. We don’t know how long he’ll have to be in the hospital, and certainly won’t be able to take care of himself and mother and run the household and all even when released for a good long while.
We had a family conference, and my sister was the ‘logical’ candidate to move back home and be caretaker for the interim (she’s single now, and between jobs, as they say.) My niece is understandably unhappy: not being around her friends PLUS her mom has her hands full so no time to do things with her PLUS let’s face it, being around a cranky AD patient isn’t fun for anyone, let alone a 12 year old. So the plan is that she will spend the summer with us. Getting her a decent art program was my idea, something to cheer her up.
I don’t know if my neice understands the raster/vector difference (its’s not impossible) but I’ll ask tonight when I speak with her. The idea of letting her try both is a good one.

CandidGamera, could you explain a little about how you go about creating fantasy maps? Or do you know of any websites that explain? That sounds like something my niece would be very interested in.
Initech: I will definitely look into that table deal! If she doesn’t already have a tablet to bring, well, Aunts are supposed to buy Birthday and Christmas presents or whatever anyway, right?

27

If your niece is into drawing unicorns, fairies, etc., I would second everyone else’s reply and say that Photoshop or a comparable program is the way to go. I used Paint Shop Pro for many years before I switched to Photoshop, and I’d say that it’s an excellent substitute for Photoshop. So your niece might want to stay with that program for now and try the larger canvas suggestion. It might bog the computer down a bit, but it’s verrryyyyy hard to reproduce the true “look” of a digital painting in Illustrator.

However…if what drove her away from Paint Shop Pro was the logo she created, then that’s a different problem. Logos are usually in vector form, as they must be adapted easily for use in print, on clothing, on the product, etc. I remember that when I made the switch to Photoshop back in 1999, Jasc (the maker of Paint Shop Pro) came out with a version of PSP that allowed you to create vector graphics that can be resized up or down with no loss of quality. I remember this tutorial I saw years ago that showed you how to do a cartoon cat in vector form with PSP. Lemme google for it…

Ahh…here it is - Vector Graphics in Paint Shop Pro 7. The tutorial also has a good explanation of the differences between vector and raster images. I’m not sure if the current version of PSP still has the vector graphics capabity and if they do, I don’t know how sophisticated they are. But it’s worth it for your niece to go back to PSP, look at the cat tutorial, and think about the possibility of redoing the logo with that method.

In the end, it will help her to know how to do both raster and vector images. I go to an art college, and everyone in the design department - graphic designers, architects, etc., knows Photoshop and Illustrator. Not one or the other, but both. Photoshop is often used for treaking the properties of photos, photoshopping our 3d models of buildings into pictures of building sites (for us architects)…lots of different applications. Illustrator is used for making logos, laying out our presentation boards, touching up line weights in a floor plan…lots of applications for Illustrator as well. In designing and presenting a building, I’ll often have to go back and forth between those two programs.

It seems like a lots of computer savvy kids and teens these days have a firm grasp of Photoshop, but very few know Illustrator well. If your niece becomes familiar with doing vector based graphics, not only will she gain a new useful skill, she’ll also be well ahead of her peers in terms of computer graphics.

28

And oh…I second the tablet suggestion as well. If your niece plans on doing a lot of illustrating in the future (especially with the novel on the way), she will absolutely LOVE to be able to draw naturally on the computer. Many graphic programs will detect how much pressure is being put onto the tablet by the pen, and adjust the size of the brush according. It’s a great feature that comes in useful for doing realistic shading.

Aiptek makes very affordable tablets- a 4.5" x 6" tablet is only 30 bucks, according to their website. I have a 9" x 12" Aiptek tablet that only set me back $150, compared to the $400-500 for a Wacom tablet of a similar size. Wacoms are great in terms of quality- but don’t rule out Aiptek as a possibility.

29

No. I’m a professional artist who works extensively in both applications. Neither is geared more toward professionals or amateurs. It’s like saying violins are played by professional musicians, but pianos can be played by amateurs or pros. Not true.

I will say this though: If she hasn’t ever used either of these programs, she will be **extremely **frustrated at first, unable to do even simple tasks, unless she has a proper manual for the application, and unless she has a great deal of patience. It’ll be a **long **time before she’s producing dragons and fairy princesses.

And meanwhile, encourage her to keep doing non-computerized art, regardless of what she does on a computer.

30

Actually, that statement sounds fairly accurate to me, albeit oversimplified. The piano is much easier to learn than the violin and requires less practice and experience to make coherent music with.

Anyhow, I won’t argue with your point, but I will observe that as a non-artist I have been able to accomplish much more with raster applications than with vector applications. I figured that my experience might extend to the OP’s niece, but after hearing more details I know it probably doesn’t.

31

Doesn’t seem like anyone has mentioned Alias SketchBook yet. That does exactly what you’re looking for: It recreates the pen/crayon/brush/whatever-and-paper experience, digitally. I think it’s raster-based, but it should be okay with a high enough resolution. It works great with a tablet (or a tablet PC) too.

About.com has a list of other similar programs. IMHO, these type of things are slightly different from Photoshop, PSP, Illustrator, etc. and are generally easier to use because they were designed for the task. It’s true that all graphics programs have some degree of overlap, but they can still be better at different things…

32

(Posted too soon)

Basically, what sets SketchBook apart is its utter ease of use. It’s just like picking up a pen and drawing. I was looking for a program like that a few years back and SketchBook was the only one I really liked. There’s a fully-functional ree trial that you can try and also an image gallery if you want to see what it can do.

Sorry for the long post. I just love that product to death… if only I had the artistic talent to go with it :smiley:

33

Well, I started out with what turned out to be a very poor tactic. I’d drawn the map by hand, as was my wont, and that might’ve been fine, except I somehow got it in my head that coloring it with pencil before scanning would help speed the colorization process. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Still, the idea of scanning a line drawing has some merit, by itself. It’s relatively quick, and cheaper than buying a WACOM tablet.

But then, I began the process of coloring the map digitally, and cleaning up things… instead of irregular little hand-drawn dots for cities, I created a small city ‘icon’ in Paint Shop, one which I could copy and paste onto the map over and over again, for consistency. Hand drawn mountains? Those’re the worst. I created three or four different mountain icons, and used copy and paste to layer them in, creating a pretty nice-looking effect.

The other big advantage apart from the icons for repeatable terrain features is PSP’s layering capabilities. I can put the map on one layer… the cities on a layer above that, and all the labels on the layer above that. If I want to print a map without labels, I just turn off the label layer. Easy peasy.

34

I’m not an artist (I’m rather quite the anti-artist), but I am a pretty good technical illustrator. As a non-artist, I find vector programs, much, much easier to use to get good results with quickly. Yeah, I use Photoshop quite regularly for photoshopping existing artwork (vector and bitmap), but for producing original, non-photographic work vector programs are my own preference.

It used to be that we called things like Photoshop and MacPaint “paint” programs, and things like MacDraw and CricketDraw and Illustrator “drawing” programs. This early experience is probably what biased me towards drawing programs and away from paint programs – CricketDraw was able to do PostScript effects that would blow your mind away, and it took very little effort!