Tools of the Trade
Day Twenty-Four: Drawing Software
A few years ago, I spent each day in January writing about a different tool I use in my maskmaking. As I am currently redesigning my entire website in the new year, I thought it might be nice to revisit this project. Each day in January 2021, I’ll share a different item that I use in my studio. I hope some of these can help other people who are interested in making wrestling masks.
I’m a digital guy. I’m much better with a keyboard and a gigantic trackball than I am with a pencil and paper. So I draw most of my patterns on the computer and the iPad. On the computer, I use Adobe Illustrator. I rely heavily on some of the plugins made by Astute Graphics, especially MirrorMe, Inkscribe, and DynamicMeasure. MirrorMe is free, which rules, but most of their other plugins, which were on a “buy only the ones you need” plan, are now only available through the horrendous subscription scheme that so many developers are going with nowadays. But their tools are good, so I pay even though I think it’s a bad plan and quite expensive. If they insist on doing a subscription model, I wish I could just subscribe to only the tools I want. It sucks.
On the iPad, my tool of choice is Affinity Designer. Where Adobe and Astute Graphics make you pay over and over again every month for the right to use their tools (and you have to pay for ALL their tools), Affinity is a pay once and use the software model, which rocks. I’m sure at some point they’ll come out with a full version upgrade and I will have the option to pay an upgrade price at that point, but it will be my choice, and I’m predicting it will be well worth it. Affinity is a great company; at the time of this writing, Affinity is offering everything they make for 50% the normal price, and extending their try-before-you-buy period to 90 days, to help out creative people affected by the pandemic. Good people.
Affinity Designer is primarily a vector program (like Illustrator), but it also has quite a few bitmap (like Photoshop) abilities. This means I can freehand sketch my idea in the bitmap mode, and then switch to the vector mode to draw up nice clean graphics. I can then export this to the computer and get it all sized and printed out to use as patterns. I have an Epson WF-7510 printer, which can both print and scan up to 11×17. So I can print my patterns on 11×17 cardstock, cut them out, and if they need adjusting, I can sketch and make notes on the paper patterns, scan them back into the computer, and make the necessary changes.
Sometimes if I’m making a complex mask, I’ll draw it all out from different angles in Affinity Designer. With each plate as its own vector element, I can quickly test different colour combinations for the mask to see how it will look. I can even drop in photos or scans of the actual spandex, vinyl, and/or leather and mask them into the vector plates (as I did in the final photo here). This gives me a great way to preview how different materials will look in a mask before I ever start sewing.