A great big package arrived today. It’s something I hinted at and should have gotten a long time ago. After drawing with pencil and paper for more than 25 years, I finally make the move to digital and am now the proud owner of a Wacom Cintiq 12WX.
Until now, for most of my work, I’ve been drawing on paper, inking with transparent vellum and then scanning that into the computer for coloring. It’s been a usable method, but it has some drawbacks. For one I’m not very good at inking and using the transparent vellum costs a lot of money. I would also go through Micron inking pens pretty regularly. Even then I would still have to do a lot of post work in PhotoShop to clean up my work before coloring.
Many artists today work purely digitally on their computer with a Wacom tablet. Many (many) years ago I bought a very small entry level Wacom called a Graphire. It had a drawing area of about 4×3 inches. The problem for me was, as with most Wacoms, you have to look at the computer screen while you draw on the pad. That method was really hard for me to work with. Another problem was that I rotate my paper when drawing to get a better angle for curved lines, which you can’t really do with a Wacom. This was a big hindrance with the Wacom tablet. So I never used it and continued drawing on paper.
With my recent desire to draw again, I decided it was time to look into going digital… again. Fortunately, Wacom now sells a line of tablets that have a screen in them. This way you can draw right on the tablet and see what you’re drawing. It’s the closest thing to drawing on paper digitally. They have a 21 inch model, but it costs a small fortune and that size would also be pretty hard to deal with. I don’t have a large desk. So the 12 inch model seemed perfect for me.
After watching a ton of YouTube videos about it, I also bumped into speed drawing videos with a paint program I only heard of, Paint Tools SAI. It’s a Japaneses made paint program that a lot of manga artists use. It also has a great feature to let you rotate the canvas as you draw. I feel this will be a great and natural tool for me. With both these new tools I think I can comfortable move to completely digital artwork. I’ll make posts here showing my progress. Maybe I’ll throw in a couple cute girl pictures too!
