Thanks for the great comment.
Yeah I've tried Inkscape. It's really good for a free and open-source program but it doesn't quite have the power of Illustrator or Designer. I just can't bring myself to pay the money for Illustrator. It's priced for big corporations and doesn't really fit in the individual hobby drawing budget for me. Even photoshop got too expensive when I really thought how much I will pay for it over a few years.
Affinity designer is only about $70 CAD (one time) so it's really only a few months of an Illustrator subscription. I did some more playing with it last night and there are a ton of powerful features hidden inside to make the workflow really fast. Plus the iPad version will be coming out soon and that looks just as amazing.
Oh cool! I didn't know any of that. I'll look into it for sure. Thanks again for your valuable info :)