Inspiration

Just to be clear, I did some things on Trump back in the day as well… Was just too lazy to post it (well, actually, got a new computer and lost it;  Did him as a Bear with a Russian hat.  Long story, fried hard drive, for another day).

Just been annoyed lately at some of the antics of our “commander in chief”.

Feeling much better now.

Process

This one was a combo of different things.  Main painting was done in clip paint, “wig” was actually a zbrush mesh I did.  Did one of Biden as well, but it was a bit too distorted, so took the slackage approach and meshified a news photo.

Was a bit of an exercise in kit bashing and dealing with text and effects in clip.

Takeaways

Clip is fairly decent, can handle some fairly intricate creations.  BUT, vector, though  nice to have is lacking quite a bit in  the product.

At this version, you don’t have any sort of “handle” on nodes in vector layers, also lacking is anything resembling a vector fill with gradients.  So, other than maybe creating an “inking” layer, it’s a bit on the pointless side (to me).

Conclusion

Learned a lot, some serious limitations on doing anything serious with text (putting text to a curve, of sorts, can be done) but clunky and anything resembling putting text on an actual curve (say a circle), is according to the internet a challenging and arcane task at best.

From another source:  The program has a lot of functionality, but the mindset of how things are implemented is non-intuitive to say the least.  In many cases the root functionality winds up being wandering around menus and trying to figure out how to glom together multiple functions to accomplish what in like adobe products is a 1-2 keystroke function.

That being said, Adobe… Hard to see how they can see with their current anatomical configuration, let alone breath (head… arse…).  And considering the pricing, if you can get your head around the bizarreness of some of the functionality, it’s hard to beat the price.