Drawing Update

Here are some pages from the latest Chuffin' Billy episode I am working on. Drawn in Affinity Photo 2 and lettered in Affinity Designer 2. The only other lettering packages I have used before are Clip Studio and PhotoShop and compared to them Affinity Designer is a pleasure to letter comics with. There are controls for merging ellipses and tails and the whole typography task is very intuitive.

I still struggle slightly with drawing in Affinity Photo, some of the simplest of things like brush tool selection can be annoying, layers seem to select themselves too so it's a constant monitoring of the layers panel to see where I am at. Saying that though I do like drawing digitally. I altered a basic bush to give a more calligraphic chisel effect and the speed and lack of any drag make it nice to use for sketching and inking. There's also a dry bristle brush which is saving me a lot of overworking with the pen tool. The brush stabiliser function gives nice smooth curves which feels like cheating but then I can draw traditionally with smooth curves, its drawing long curves with a graphic tablet that's jittery at the best of times.

Chuffin' Billy Episode four 'The Embuggerance Engine' Part 1 written by Noel Hannan.

© John Welding and Noel Hannan 2025