Spin-off comic page 5

Page 5 of the Spin-off comic, presenting how the faeries imagine humans to be.

Unlike the previous ones, this page was made in GIMP after a brief excursion to Pixelmator. I had to reinstall OS X and because the root of my recent computer troubles is a defect in the hard drive, I will have to do so again one I get around to buying a hard drive (based on previous experience, the MacBook will function correctly for two months or so and will then start playing up again). Under those conditions, I don't want to reinstall Photoshop and use up my activations. So I'm experimenting with alternatives.

GIMP, which I used to use for everything until I switched first to Paint Shop Pro and then to Photoshop, is notorious for its clunky interface, not just in terms of the actual windows, buttons and menu items it shows and how they look, but in how entire tasks are modeled - you'll understand that if you ever have to switch from Photoshop to GIMP. However, it can get the job done and the Mac version has really improved a lot in the last five years. Localisation now works and is pretty good; paths and texts have become much more usable. This page took me a long time to make, but with some practise I should be able to speed up the process to something that is close to how I do it in Photoshop.