Time Drawn: June 2009
Has it really been nearly four years since I bought my Wacom Bamboo tablet? Even just glancing at that site I can see they’ve done some major redesigns since then. But my little tablet keeps going strong.
I’d really prefer something more along the lines of what most people think of when they hear “tablet” today. Aka an iPad style thingamabobber, with a touch screen and all that. My tablet doesn’t have a screen. It’s just a fancy input device with a large drawing surface and a specialized pen-stylus to tell how much pressure you’re applying to the surface. You still have to look at your computer monitor to see what you’re drawing. So while it’s much better than trying to draw with a mouse, I’d still prefer to draw on a screen. But iPad-style tablets don’t really support styluses that well, much less pressure-sensitive ones.
So for now, I’m living with the disconnect that drawing on one surface and looking at another for the results brings. It’s somewhat like trying to draw something by looking at the reflection of the paper in a mirror, now that I think about it. It’s possible, but it takes a lot of getting used to it to do well.
So that’s where this daffodil came from. This was my first attempt to get used to the tablet.
It’s blurry, but that’s how I drew it, since I used only one brush pattern and it was a blurry one. The colors are a bit odd, but I hadn’t a clue how to properly shade and shift colors with the tablet. And it’s not fully accurate, because I wasn’t used to having a reference up while I drew.
Still, for all those newbie mistakes, it’s recognizably a daffodil. So there’s at least that.
