I miss making artwork

Photoshop it's pretty damn expensive nowadays so I had to cancel my subscription a year and half ago due to specific circumstances I was in. For as much as I like to lie to myself about it, nothing gets close to how good it is. Photopea is kinda good but 20 layers in and the whole machine starts begging for mercy, gimp plain sucks, tried few open source/selfhostable alternatives and nothing takes the cake.

Anyone know of any valid alternative? I may need to start giving my money back to Adobe after all.

All images were made by myself, from the ground up, using various pixabay/envato elements images, there's a layer by layer video of the first one, some layers are grouped so it feels like an image is being dumped in, I just made it a while back to explain the process to somebody and it's still on my channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQWMuSFkTOQ

There's also similar videos on my instagram page fccview it's not very active, no need for follows, just giving as much info as possible to understand the process ♥️

Hope you like them :)