looking for an illustrator program

[valke]

first off, i love flash animations. i love drawing and painting. i dislike the gimp very much. when i still had mac osx, i used photoshop and or illustrator. aside from macromedia (adobe) flash studio or whatever it's called, i only experimented with flash animations. this past december i made a 100% switch to ubuntu, and i love it, but now i do not know what to use for decent art programs. i have a budding portfolio on deviantart, and need to upload work, but most importantly i need to create art pieces. any information would be greatly appreciated.

[siciliancasanova]

I enjoy inkscape. It's for vector images, so if your coming from illustrator like me, I found it much easier than gimp.

[valke]

ok i'll try inkscape! um, any ideas for an animator?

[siciliancasanova]

Maybe try F4L. Although I must admit, I haven't used it myself.

[kopilo]

You could try Krita (not for animations), haven't used it myself but others seem to think it is easy to use.

For animation there is also KToon but once again I have not used it myself.

[P_Badger]

Possible avenues I'm trying/have tried, myself.

You can try out a program called "Synfig studio": http://www.synfig.com/ But it's in the early stages and kinda buggy. Used for making non-interactive 2D vector animations.

Get the demo of crossover office and run "Flash MX 6", specifically, on it.

"Moho 5", now called "Anime Studio". No Linux version has been released by the new owners, even though there was one during the time it was Moho. Like Synfig Studio, above, except it uses bones to animate the object. If you use your Google-foo, you can probably find a demo of Moho 5.4.

"F4l" has been canned, and the developer joined up with the "Uira" people: http://www.uira.org/ but I haven't been able to get the silly thing to work. I believe the project has dried up.

[efflux]

Anime Studio Pro 5 is now available for Linux. It's an excellent program if you want to do animations. Having this program running natively is a big boost for Linux in my opinion. Other than that, Inkscape is great and free for vector drawing. You can get drawings from Inkscape into Anime Studio via adobe Illustrator format. I can't say it works that great but you get your vectors from one to the other be it with colour problems. I will be testing this further.

By the way, Gimp is great in my opinion but it took me some time to get used to it. There are a few drawbacks but mainly I can do everything I need to do in Gimp rather than Photoshop which I have also used. I do all my 2D bitmap editing in Gimp. I use Gimp on Linux and on Mac in preference over Photoshop which is absurdly expensive.