How I draw digital art
For digital drawing and painting, I use a Wacom Graphire 4x5 pen tablet, which has now been renamed to the Bamboo tablet, and costs around $50-60 new. I really love the tablet's small drawing area, so much so that I don't really have a desire to upgrade to a bigger tablet. You might have just said, "Wha?" Well this is because it's easy to move around on the small space, and it can get tiring moving your arms across a huge space. Plus, smaller is cheaper and easier to store away.
The tablet comes with an awesome pressure-sensitive pen. You can have stuff on top of the tablet as long as it isn't too thick. I put my mousepad with a wrist cushion on top of my tablet to give it some texture for the pen to grip. This also allows me to draw for long periods and not hurt my wrist or hand bones. If your tablet comes with a mouse, you probably won't like it much, as you'll hear most everyone say. I just use my regular mouse on top of the tablet and it works perfect. You can have both your mouse and the tablet plugged in (USB) at once and use them interchangeably with no problems.
I use the tablet with Adobe Photoshop, as well as Corel Painter, which mimics natural media very well.
My workflow for Photoshop makes use of a lot of keyboard shortcuts. When drawing, I press B for brush tool and E for eraser rather than turning the pen over to use the built in pen eraser. I find it's faster this way. I also of course love Ctrl+Z, and I set up Ctrl+Z to step backward in the history rather than Undo. You can do this under Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts then select "Edit" and then "Step backward" and press Ctrl+Z and accept.
Also, I make sure to use the pen's pressure sensitivity by turning on "Shape Dynamics" under the brush options in Photoshop.
This way I can have my brush set on about 20 to 40 pixels in a 1024x768px document and can either barely press down with my pen to get a very thin line or press down hard for a thick line. This makes the experience seem much more intuitive like traditional painting or drawing, and prevents you from having to stop to switch the brush all the time. Also you can make cool lines that start off very thin and become thicker as you press down harder. In short, it just looks better. :)
I also like to use a low opacity brush and layer on color like watercolor. It ends up making the drawing look very artistic that way.
Subscribe to updates feed