I would have torn my hair out with a touch pad. And I would recommend an actual mouse over a touch-pad. Other than this though, I didn’t really feel the need to have one – the mouse and keyboard did the job just fine. There’s probably ways round this but if you’re super keen, then it might be a sensible investment. A normal mouse isn’t pressure-sensitive so having a graphics pad was essential to get the leaf tapered blade effects. This is due to the fact it can detect pen pressure so it works well with the ‘Min’ and ‘Max’ functions of the pencil tool. I did find this super useful for creating the plant leaves. I must make a disclaimer before I start though I do have a graphics pad (-> H950P by Huion). Essential for producing large graphics for A0 size posters. It means that you can scale up and down as needed without a loss of quality. It works by using SVG files – also known as scalable vector graphs – which are a much better way to create images than a JPG or PNG for example. If occasional dabbling is what you’re after, and an upgrade from Paint, then Inkscape is perfect. Inkscape will probably do everything I (and you) will need to do for the purposes of research illustration. It is an incredibly powerful graphics editor, most of which is well beyond my understanding. Don’t let the ‘free’ bit give you an indication that it’s any less capable. Inkscape is a completely free graphics program in a similar league of the paid for alternative Adobe Illustrator. By doing it myself I found some cool techniques that really look great for plants and roots. There isn’t that many options in BioRender for plants and roots. This is for you if you need more than the free version of BioRender, which is amazing but is limited in output quality (dpi) and with what you can do in the images. I’m definitely not an expert, not by any stretch of the imagination, but from one novice to another this is how I approached it. I thought it might be useful if shared some of the things I learnt on how to create a diagram in Inkscape, so if you fancied using Inkscape too, you’ve got somewhere to start from. I decided to use Inkscape create my images. Not going to lie, it took me a while to put them together but I’m glad I took on the learning curve. Over the last week I had some fun making a couple of diagrams for our World Congress of Soil Science 2022 poster.
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