The Interface of a Digital Artist

      I want to talk about some more open source programs, but before I do that, I would first like to talk about a wonderful piece of hardware that I personally own a unit of. This periferal is a graphics tablet; it's a way to interface with your computer as an artist.

      Have you ever tried to draw or paint digitally with a mouse? It's frustrating and difficult, and some (many?) would say even impossible. Now imagine drawing and painting digitally into almost any creative program with a pen stylus and a small to large tablet similar to the mouse pad on your laptop.

      This hardware has a name, and it is called Wacom and works natively on a Windows or Mac OS X machine. There's even a driver maintained for Linux.

Yay Linux!

The unit I currently own...

      The Wacom Company is headquartered in Japan, and others in the United States and Germany. The tablet comes in different sizes, versions, prices, and features, ranging from $50 US to $2,000 US. Regardless of only the few headquarters around the world, they still ship to just about anywhere, if not everywhere.

      Some of their newer units offer touch capabilities, tilt sensing, and more, all very impressive, especially concidering the price. If your are a digital artist of any industry of medium, be it 3D modeling and sculpting to sketching to digital painting to just writing down notes or even writing a paper inside of Microsoft Word, then you should seriously concider a graphics tablet from Wacom.

... and the unit I will eventually own!

                 

      But you may be asking me “Are you being paid to say such things good sir?” and to that I would reply with “Good God no!” and then show you for yourself. So here it goes.

      If you have any interest in digital sculpting in a program like Zbrush, Mudbox, or even using the sculpting tools inside of Blender, you will probably already know that it can be done with just mouse and keyboard, but that like all other forms of digital art, it would just be so much simpiler using your own two hands. Using a graphics tablet means you can directly influence and work with your sculpture. Draw lines on it, cut into it, sculpt features, all more simply with a graphics tablet.

      Digital painting shouldn't even be attempted without a tablet. Get full control over your brush and paint with pressure and tilt sensitivity.

      Wacom does what Nintendon't... wait...