Well, not entirely new. I’d been eyeing one of these little budget Wacom tablets for awhile, with the intent of using it for some illustration projects that have been bumping around in my head over the past year. When Amazon dropped the price below $100 back in August, I couldn’t find a good reason to resist any longer and ordered one. It’s sat in my laptop bag mostly unused since then, but now that winter is here and I’ve been too busy during the limited daylight hours to do much (any) field sketching, I’ve been sating my artistic urges by playing around with some digital ink. I’ve never used a tablet before, and it takes some getting used to, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.
The device ships with Corel Painter Essentials 4 and Photoshop Elements 6.0, which by themselves would have covered the $100 price tag. I used the latter for the above colour sketch. The line work looks a bit rough here — freehanding smooth lines with a tablet takes some practice, and I have unsteady hands to begin with. Unfortunately Elements lacks line correction or bezier pen tools — for that you need to upgrade to the full Photoshop CS4 or find yourself a copy of Illustrator (not chump change) — so I started playing around with a trial version of Manga Studio instead. It’s awesome. I love this app.
I did the above character sketch with Manga Studio Debut 4. As the name indicates, this is comic software, and as such is well tailored to black and white line work. My Christmas gift to myself was the full version, and I spent a lazy Christmas day out at my folks’ place noodling around with it. The tools are pretty easy to use, though I find the documentation a bit haphazard in its organization, so it’s taking some time to go through it. Here’s the result of yesterday’s fooling around — I thought it appropriate to do something wintery (despite the mildness and steady rain we had to put up will all day). Still trying to figure out the settings on the fill tool, so some of the toning was done by hand.
Fun!
Looks like you got the hang of it pretty quickly! Great results. I’m borrowing my sister’s for work on the moth guide (mapping) and have putzed around with it a little. While I’ve certainly had fun playing with it, my stuff doesn’t look nearly that polished. ;)
I couldn’t be without mine for retouching work and, like you, I’m playing with it as an illustration tool too. Fun ain’t it!