@xin-li if you do go the photo route. Don't forget to get a linear polariser for your lights/flash and a circular polariser for your camera. That'll solve any unwanted reflections, glare and improve contrast.

Hi @Daisy-Muradyan I'm also not currently on a children's book path and would love to make my own comic book. This forum is a melting pot for art.

@Amanda-Bancroft yes that's a good idea. It would be good to get Stephen Wiltshire on the podcast. He's phenomenal.

@Lee-White I think illustrating another culture helps me to embrace and understand that culture. Imagine if learning a language was seen as a bad thing. Isn't drawing like a visual language? I practice Falun Gong meditation, which is from China. It's great to learn this beautiful meditation from Chinese people. I've heard some amazing ancient stories from Chinese culture about Dragons and Sun Wukong the Monkey King and the Chinese Zodiac - how all the animals met Buddha. Learning all this makes me want to draw it, as a visual explosion of ideas goes off in my head. It would be a shame if that wasn't appropriate to draw because my skin suit is the wrong colour.

@jdubz yes I had the feeling I'd need to learn Adobe to get a job in a team. I've got skills in photoshop, premiere pro and some in illustrator. But haven't learnt indesign yet. I'm learning that next. Adobe do dominate the market.

I've been looking at artworker design jobs and they all ask for photoshop, indesign and illustrator skills. Is procreate, affinity, artstudio, clip studio paint classed as professional software? Do design studios accept them on a CV/resume?

@Phil-Cullen Have you changed your scratch disk to another drive?
Turned off brush smoothing?
or try changing the memory setting in the preferences-performance tab and give photoshop more juice? 16GB+ of memory would help a lot with performance but rarely affects brush lag. Tends to be your cpu more than memory.

you can also try changing the performance setting on your graphics card - basic, normal and advanced. Other than that what CPU are you using?

I've been testing Adobe Fresco for a while now. It's definitely getting better all the time, I love all the different brushes and it syncs well with photoshop. The developers keep adding stuff and updating it. Users suggest what they want added and there is a forum voting to bump up the most urgent features. Like they are just about to add a ruler for drawing straight lines in the next update.
With regards to the subscription model, this hasn't been decided yet as a lot of users complained about charging extra for those that have the photography sub. I'm hoping they will also have an option for people to buy it as a standalone app.
I've barely used procreate so I can't compare the two.

If like me, you do like bird illustrations, there's some epic free hi-res bird illustrations here -

Article on Colossal:
All 435 Illustrations from John J Audubon’s ‘Birds of America’ Are Available for Free Download

John James Audubon's Birds of America is a portal into the natural world. Printed between 1827 and 1838, it contains 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds all reproduced from hand-engraved plates
Birds of America website

@Heather-Boyd yes I was quite impressed with the breakdown of what £150 a day is actually worth to a freelancer!