devvyn

I neglected to mention in other exciting news, I picked up my Cintiq and set it up, which was so exciting I didn't bother to post about it, lol. This thing is a display and a drawing tablet in one comfortable device. It uses a pen stylus with pressure & tilt sensitivity, an eraser and programmable rocker switches. The tablet itself features a 1280x800 LCD display with a great viewing angle and colour accuracy. It also has two sets of buttons and touch strips which are also programmable. It's so immensely more intuitive to control the cursor on the viewing surface I can honestly say it is fully worth the money. I wish I could demonstrate this for more people because it is really thrilling to sit in front of one and try it out.

The picture below is of the Cintiq being used in PhotoShop to colour in a line drawing someone posted to dA. If you want to see what I was working on, check the original here and the finished piece here.

My drawing tablet is sitting at a Purolator station in the middle of nowhere by the highway between two neighbouring towns, and about 10 km from here. I'm not looking forward to figuring out how to get this thing considering I'm traveling by bike these days and working until 16:30 each day this week. The location it's being held at is open until 19:00 so I suppose I could bike there, but it's a gamble because I really don't know if this package will fit in a backpack. Maybe I'll try after work.

I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve.  Okay, well, having said that, I have to admit I'm like a kid every time I go shopping, and when you have a credit card and an Internet connection any day can feel like Christmas Eve.

Well, I'd like to admit that I'm the type of person who tries to be creative and do music and draw and so forth but gets discouraged and makes excuses for not keeping up with it. The news now is I've done my best to eliminate those reasons for excuses and I'll soon know if I was feeding myself total BS or if I was right (to a certain degree of lameness) in thinking what I believed would be the answer. So, to elaborate, I blamed the tools I had. I stopped making music for ages now, and I blamed the fact that I didn't have a music keyboard like I used to be able to improvise and experiment on before composing a song. I also blamed my frustration about drawing on the fact that I hate drawing on paper because it's harder to correct my mistakes and complicated to add finishing touches to, not to mention that I'd then have to scan the finished work and I don't have a scanner.

So when I was in Saskatoon a couple weeks ago I bought M-Audio's KeyStudio, and yesterday I ordered one of the most extravagant digital artist tools on the market: Wacom's Cintiq 12WX. Long have I been frustrated about the trouble I have coordinating tablet movements into on-screen actions. The Cintiq has a WXGA display built into the digitizer board, so I can draw on the screen! It's a bit on the pricey end but I've been thinking about this thing day after day for over a month. I think it will accomplish one of two things: either it will make my dreams come true and give me the freedom to go full-blown creative in a digital world with all the magic of a software canvas but with the intuitive interface of pen and paper, or it will make me feel like a foolish ass for spending a thousand dollars to alleviate my sense of inadequacy.

M-Audio KeyStudio




Wacom Cintiq 12WX