Graphics tablet

osfameron on 2005-01-11T11:03:46

I've lusted after a graphics tablet since my teens, but because

1. I was too stingy
2. I couldn't draw

I never got around to getting one. Now, because

1. I have disposable income
2. Technology is cheaper and better
3. I've learned to draw just enough to convince myself that it's worth spending the money

I ended up getting a Wacom Graphire 3 Classic. 75GBP from PC World (would have been slightly cheaper ordering online). It's only A6 (the price goes up rapidly the larger they get, and I guess I'm still pretty stingy).

Doddle to set up, but the pen isn't as easy to use as you'd think: you can either use global positioning, which is kind of fiddly, or relative, which involves hovering the pen above the surface of the tablet to move it. (Will be so much easier when everything's done through a Tablet PC style interface) Though it's a bugger to do Windows point-and-click stuff, drawing with it is fun, though you have to hold the pen at a more upright angle than usual for it to register.

The classic version comes bundled with Procreate's Painter (not the latest version) which is very nice (watercolour, chalk, oil, basically emulating analogue art media), though I also came across ArtRage, a free tool which is similar but has a much more pared-down interface (it opens up a piece of paper full screen, you have a list of tools in one corner and a colour palette in another and you draw. No hovering over tiny menu options and clicking on scroll bars by accident like with Painter).