Line Art
My new Intuos4
This isn’t going to be a very in-depth look at this tool, but I wanted to make a couple comments. First off, the Intuos4 Tablet is a graphic tablet designed by Wacom. I am testing out a graphic tablet mainly to decide if using a Cintiq would be something I am interested in doing. Unlike a graphic tablet, which you draw on and watch the results on the monitor, the Cintiq is a monitor which you draw on O_O. As you can expect, it is fairly expensive, so I wasn’t sure if I would even want to spend the money on one.
I bought the Intuos this weekend, out of the 4 sizes; I picked the smallest, which has a workspace of about 4x7inches. They do range to much larger, but I have limited realestate on my desk, since I share it, so the larger tablet would probably be more of a nuisance. I do currently work with a dual monitor, but after configuring the drawing area, I was able to get the tablet to only work with monitor 1. At first I was only getting use of 50% of the tablet drawing area. After I figured out that setting, I played around with button options, changing the first of the 2 pen buttons to Pan/Scroll, and the second to erase. I have not determined if the other tip of the pen is an eraser. I haven’t found it to be that way, but I may not have been on the correct layer.
After a couple spaced out hours of practice I did finally get the hang of the tablet. I found that drawing slowly and carefully got the best results. I normally sketch pretty quickly, not always to be a benefit, but it certainly didn’t work at all on the tablet. At first I only tried drawing circles, which were all sorts of oblong shapes, and then I tried to draw a simple face… Things were a little discouraging at first, but like I said, slowing down, and carefully planning out the placement of the strokes really made the difference for me. I actually got a very nice character study out of it, I was pretty surprised about it too.
The pen has awesome sensitivity, and it really does feel like I am drawing on paper. I really enjoy it, but I did run into a snag. After I created a decent sketch, it was time to make use of Photoshop, which was the entire reason I decided to get a drawing tablet. You see, my biggest issue with doing anything on the computer, when the origin is a sketch, is the problems I have getting a clean line art out of it. I thought that using a drawing tablet would 1. Save time on scanning, 2. Make for a cleaner image, since I don’t have eraser marks, and 3. Make creating a line art much more attainable.
I do remember creating some decent line art from sketches, but what I found with the tablet is that when I would draw on a transparent background, the filters didn’t work as they would normally. They would only work if I had a white background, at least with the fine lines I am used to creating. Anyways, I was pretty upset; it seemed that the tablet wasn’t really working how I expected it to. Even more discouraging, I found that many artists would just trace entire sketches. That is daunting, considering the amount of artwork I am expecting to put out in the next couple of months. I don’t want to spend hours upon hours tracing the images I draw. Totally defeats the purpose of the drawing tablet.
I digress… the point is, after a bit of research I did find a wonderful tutorial which quickly, and easily creates a line art based off of my sketch (virtual or hardcopy). I am pleased to say that I will be able to keep my tablet without guilt, since it wasn’t cheap. I would have felt guilty to keep it, only to do sketches and then still need to spend so much time tracing them. All in all I am very happy with this tablet; hopefully I can show off some of my work soon.