After finding out I have been overpaying my tax all year (soon to be resolved yay!) I decided to treat myself to something new. I have been meaning to buy a Wacom tablet since my final year of university when it was recommended by my course tutor. I finally got around to purchasing this Intuos Pen & Touch Tablet and decided to have a play with it.
I started off by watching a large chunk of a "Wacom essential training" course on lynda.com, it is a subsciption site, but totally worth it if you want to learn new skills on all things design based! From this course I learnt about the history of tablets and how they work, and also how to set up useful shortcuts on the pen and tablet buttons so they work differently in different applications (through system preferences on a mac).
I set up my desk with the tablet to the right of my mac, the hope is that when I move house I can get a bigger desk and have a better set up with a wireless mouse and keyboard and the tablet in front of the mac! I started just playing around with colours and different types of line, drawing font seems to work quite well as you get a really smooth line.
Still in need of some practise I think.
While I didn't come up with anything super impressive it was good to just have a play and try out some things to get a feel for the tablet. I will likely use it mostly for colouring scanned in line-work rather than digital painting but I think using it for hand rendered type is definitely something I want to try more of.
What is your experience of Wacom tablets? Anyone have any tips?
