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Wow... an online ad actually worked
5 months ago
Unthinkable.
So, I broke down and bought one of those Huion display tablets touted in the FA May 7th Community Announcement. (Don't click the link if your PC is slow, as the number of comments is ridiculous). If you care about the Huion affiliate link for FA, which gives this site a cut of the proceeds, the Huion Store link is here. There's a decent Mother's Day sale going on throughout Sunday, so I really do recommend checking it out.
My niece has one of those, and I have to admit it looked really impressive. I'm still kicking myself for not asking to try it out myself, but... now I'll finally have one of my own, shortly. I've got money these days, so I'm not sure why I'm always so damn frugal. 8)
You know, I've been using Wacom tablets for a long, long time. I started with a tiny Graphire in the mid 2000's, and currently own a Wacom One, which is well over a decade old. While I've gotten used to using it for coloring and (believe it or not) even playing games, I've never really felt comfortable using it for inking. When I try to ink with it, I can't follow my sketch lines very closely and my lines are all wiggly, so inking easily takes two or more times longer on the PC than on paper. That's why I do all my art traditionally. Sketching is a nightmare on paper, but inking is WAY easier.
The consequence is that my production is virtually nil. Composition is really hard on paper and I hate sketching, but I love inking. On the PC, it's the opposite. Plus, I only draw when I'm at my work desk downstairs, and I can't really draw on my computer desk upstairs.
Since I'm allergic to any portable technology I don't really "own", like phones and touch tablets, I figure I'd try one of these display drawing tablets. Maybe that'll encourage me to squeeze one off every now and then between compiles. It certainly can't make my productivity any worse. Surprisingly, the model I bought has a MUCH bigger drawing area than my trusty old Wacom, despite having a built-in screen with a real glass surface, and ended up costing less than what I paid for my regular tablet over a decade ago. Man, technology really has come a long way.
Mind you, I just ordered it, so I have to wait for it to show up. But, I'm actually pretty excited. I didn't realize these things were so cheap, or that they finally have IPS displays as standard. I'm pretty lazy with technology these days, so it's been a long time since I've bought any hardware. I figure since I'm finally moving my main workstation from Win7 to Linux this summer, it's time to start fresh and build a new workflow from scratch. New rig, new software, new workflow... new everything. I'm long overdue. Heck, I still do everything with Photoshop 5.5, which is literally the same 25+ year-old copy I've used since college. I'm thinking of moving over to Krita.
I've been so deeply depressed and worried over the last month for a number of reasons, and have been getting almost no sleep for weeks. As such, work on my comic and everything else artistic has stalled. If I have a new toy to play with, and it works as I expect, I'm hoping to have a few little doodles out for your amusement. I haven't done any stuff like that since my oekaki days, back when I first got a Wacom tablet. I miss those days. The wiggly lines didn't bother me so much when I was doing pixel art on a 300x300 canvas. Time to get up to date.
Now I just have to find out if the tablet actually does support Win7, or if that was just a typo on the specs sheet. I don't want to surf the web with my main workstation, so I have several computers, including a Win10 "beater" (because I always want to beat the $#1! out of it). I'll sort it out.
Anyway, in the meantime, I've got some more writing to do. Art is a pain in the ass, but I always get back to it eventually.
So, I broke down and bought one of those Huion display tablets touted in the FA May 7th Community Announcement. (Don't click the link if your PC is slow, as the number of comments is ridiculous). If you care about the Huion affiliate link for FA, which gives this site a cut of the proceeds, the Huion Store link is here. There's a decent Mother's Day sale going on throughout Sunday, so I really do recommend checking it out.
My niece has one of those, and I have to admit it looked really impressive. I'm still kicking myself for not asking to try it out myself, but... now I'll finally have one of my own, shortly. I've got money these days, so I'm not sure why I'm always so damn frugal. 8)
You know, I've been using Wacom tablets for a long, long time. I started with a tiny Graphire in the mid 2000's, and currently own a Wacom One, which is well over a decade old. While I've gotten used to using it for coloring and (believe it or not) even playing games, I've never really felt comfortable using it for inking. When I try to ink with it, I can't follow my sketch lines very closely and my lines are all wiggly, so inking easily takes two or more times longer on the PC than on paper. That's why I do all my art traditionally. Sketching is a nightmare on paper, but inking is WAY easier.
The consequence is that my production is virtually nil. Composition is really hard on paper and I hate sketching, but I love inking. On the PC, it's the opposite. Plus, I only draw when I'm at my work desk downstairs, and I can't really draw on my computer desk upstairs.
Since I'm allergic to any portable technology I don't really "own", like phones and touch tablets, I figure I'd try one of these display drawing tablets. Maybe that'll encourage me to squeeze one off every now and then between compiles. It certainly can't make my productivity any worse. Surprisingly, the model I bought has a MUCH bigger drawing area than my trusty old Wacom, despite having a built-in screen with a real glass surface, and ended up costing less than what I paid for my regular tablet over a decade ago. Man, technology really has come a long way.
Mind you, I just ordered it, so I have to wait for it to show up. But, I'm actually pretty excited. I didn't realize these things were so cheap, or that they finally have IPS displays as standard. I'm pretty lazy with technology these days, so it's been a long time since I've bought any hardware. I figure since I'm finally moving my main workstation from Win7 to Linux this summer, it's time to start fresh and build a new workflow from scratch. New rig, new software, new workflow... new everything. I'm long overdue. Heck, I still do everything with Photoshop 5.5, which is literally the same 25+ year-old copy I've used since college. I'm thinking of moving over to Krita.
I've been so deeply depressed and worried over the last month for a number of reasons, and have been getting almost no sleep for weeks. As such, work on my comic and everything else artistic has stalled. If I have a new toy to play with, and it works as I expect, I'm hoping to have a few little doodles out for your amusement. I haven't done any stuff like that since my oekaki days, back when I first got a Wacom tablet. I miss those days. The wiggly lines didn't bother me so much when I was doing pixel art on a 300x300 canvas. Time to get up to date.
Now I just have to find out if the tablet actually does support Win7, or if that was just a typo on the specs sheet. I don't want to surf the web with my main workstation, so I have several computers, including a Win10 "beater" (because I always want to beat the $#1! out of it). I'll sort it out.
Anyway, in the meantime, I've got some more writing to do. Art is a pain in the ass, but I always get back to it eventually.
The issue right now is... well, first of all, I don't know for sure if I'd enjoy drawing on a screen. These aren't the sort of thing you can try out at the store, because they're only sold online as far as I'm aware. Also, I like working small. Sometimes really small. But generally about an inch per head. Which to me says I'm going to want something with a dot pitch approaching Apple Retina screen levels. Unfortunately that prices me out of pretty much anything above 13 inches, and means any drawing app that doesn't support GUI scaling (like my old-ass copy of Photoshop) is going to be a pain to read and anything that does is going to hog too much of the screen to be productive. *sigh* Remember when 1080p seemed like way more screen than any one person could possibly need?
And, yes, drawing the same line 100 times is infuriating. I have NO idea how other artists draw digitally and it makes me insanely envious to watch drawing tutorials on YouTube. Though to be fair, I've never upgraded to software that supports any form of line smoothing.
Still using my CTE-650 (Bamboo Medium) that I bought as a refurb unit in 2009. It took a fair bit of driver juggling and forum searching to get it working when I had to upgrade my main laptop from Win7 to Win10 late last year, but it's been near-flawless ever since. My away-from-home laptop hosts an Intuos 4 Medium.
I've experimented with "display tablets" by way of a couple of Lenovo 2-in-one laptops and a pair of Android tablets (Galaxy S6 lite and S7 FE, both with the S-Pen included), but I never stuck with them for drawing long enough to do a complete color pic beginning to end. Plenty of sketches though.
I assume you know this already but it bears repeating...Wacom drivers don't play nice with anyone else's (this might be a characteristic of tablet drivers in general, but I haven't tested it). If installing the Huion on a system that previously hosted a Wacom tablet, you need to completely wipe all its drivers before installing your new tablet. My little bumpy road with reinstalling the aforementioned Bamboo on a W10-upgraded laptop is described -->here
I've been using tablets since Windows 3.1 was still viable (Wacom ArtPad II...a serial port device), but mostly as a pointing device since my first few years of PC computing were spent on a 486SX (later DX) laptop parked at one end of my folks' dining-room table, and I had very limited room for a conventional mouse. For that reason I actually got used to drawing off to the side while my eyes were trained on the screen. I didn't even know I was "supposed" to have difficulty looking somewhere other than where my pen/cil was) before trying out screen-drawing by way of the aforementioned 2-in-1 laptop ('cause all the "cool" artists were doing it that way). My biggest obstacle there was with maintaining a comfortable on-desk tilt that allowed me to see what I was drawing without inducing some kind of bad-posture fatigue.
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"I also haven't forgiven them for breaking the Wacom pen driver for my tablet. The official Win7 driver has telemetry that causes huge amounts of lag, rendering it unusable, so right now I'm using a driver written for XP that just happens to work on Win7. The Win10 driver doesn't even support my tablet anymore, because of course it's impossible to offer legacy support to what is essentially a glorified joystick."
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Yeah, you don't have to tell me how crappy Wacom's drivers are. I bought the thing just when I switched from Win2K to XP (as a late adopter), and just getting it to work on Win7 was a real struggle. My tablet isn't even supported under WIn10 at all.
Ironically, it works perfectly under Linux, thanks to the FOSS community writing better 3rd-party drivers than the manufacturers ever could. At least I know my new rig will support the old Wacom should I break the Huion.
Also what the heck kind of compiler still takes that long to work these days?