Affinity Designer does most things that Photo can do. It has a bitmap mode. I have Photo as well, but only use it once in a blue moon for warping bitmap images.

To get comparable functionality from PS I would have to pay that much every month for as long as I continue being an artist.

Affinity used to be a British app, but Remy tells me it's been bought out by an Australian company. I won't post a link here because it's paid-for software, but you will find it easily enough by search engine. When you do find it, compare the cost of that one time purchase with a lifetime of paying for PS.

A lot of people regard it as an affordable alternative to PS. I wouldn't know for sure. By the time I could afford to buy PS it was just going rental, so I never bothered with it.

I never got on with Inkscape because it's outlandishly complicated and clunky compared to Affinity.

Thanks :)

I made a small set of different shapes. Being vector symbols it should be easy enough for people to edit them or make their own versions.

Thanks :)

Yes, that's a good one. I was just a bit too tired to go looking for it after a day of gradually coming to the conclusion that bitmap symbols weren't going to make the grade.

I spent the day being distracted by structure symbols. I went through all kinds of overcomplicated bitmap variations, but eventually came back to simple varicolour vector ones. How do these look?

I might put a black line around them, but I think this is probably a case of more is less. Simple and clear looks a lot better than complicated.

Thank you, Remy, for the clear and concise instructions in the Tome. I had long forgotten how to make shaded varicolour vector symbols.