My Wacom Intuos 3

Posted On March 6, 2009

After a touch of begging to my parents, I convinced them to plop down a pretty penny for a tablet as an early birthday present. Since I have a 30 disc DVD backlog, and would never ask anyone to buy me figures for my birthday, this tablet was more or less all I wanted.

Boy, am I happy with it! My past tablet experience isn’t much to be impressed with, it being limited to a cheap one that I borrowed from my school library a year ago. I couldn’t produce much of quality with that one–my lines turned out very squiggly, and I generally couldn’t make anything too clean looking. My early experiences with this new tablet were similar, but after just a day of practice, I became a lot better.

The tablet is liberating–colouring, which once felt like a long and arduous task is now as fun as sketching out the picture itself. In addition to making the process a lot more fun, it’s also been expedited. Being able to shade using a stylus produces more natural and faster results.

One thing that’s still rather time consuming with the tablet is cleaning up sketch work to produce clean lineart. I usually use a lightbox for this, but since I have a tablet now, I make clean lineart by drawing over the sketch on the computer, as opposed to over a lightbox. At this point, tracing over using the lighbox is quicker, since I’m still not that great with precision work with the tablet, but with practice I’ll get better. The tablet certainly produces cleaner lineart, so I’ll be using it for my individual pieces of art. Comics will still be cleaned using the lightbox until I get better with the tablet.

My technique with the tablet is still rather rough, but I suspect that within a month or so I’ll get a good hang over it, and get better and better. It hasn’t turned me into an artistic genius, but what it has done is cut down on some once time consuming processes, making room for me to practice on other things.