Saturday, May 27, 2006

Envy, Pt Dieu

Envy. I'm over it!
Okay, here's the scoop. I've had my Wacom tablet since last Tuesday and I have been so busy at work that I haven't really felt much like playing with it when I get home. But I have fiddled with it just a little bit (about 30 - 45 minutes each the past two nights) and I have come to this conclusion....It's fun, it's interesting, and it can do a lot of neat things BUT....it can't replace a good old pencil and piece of paper. For free-hand drawing it's "clunky" and difficult. It is easy to put marks where you don't want them and I find myself backing up, un-doing, and erasing a lot more than I had anticipated that I would.

The Wacom tablet is a great tool for the graphic artist who wants to put together a design quickly using the pre-sets (pencils, brushes, and shape tools) in the various PhotoShop programs and it is really good for that but ( to Janet ) I think that it might actually hinder an already excellent pen and pencil artist. If you are really good at pencil sketching the wacom just ain't gonna make you better; probably the opposite.

I'm still going to use mine although probably not as an art tool very often. I've found that I can draw right into Excel spreadsheets and Word documents with it and even hand write notes on my computer amoung many other things.

To conclude my little impromptu product review:
The Wacom tablet........great artist tool? Nah, not really.
Neat graphics arts tool? Um, yeah.
Neato computer input device? Absolutely!
Just not (in my opinion) a tool for the creating realistic sketches.

Of course I reserve the right to change this review if, at any time, I do actually figure out how to be truly creative with the Wacom which I am sure will take some time and much patience.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I noticed that you found Kasim's blog. When Bart and I were checking in at the hotel (at the first show in Tunica), he walked through the lobby and when we went out to get our luggage, he was standing near our car waiting for the shuttle to the casino/concert hall. We spoke to him briefly and shook his hand. I would have gotten a picture with him, but after just having driven for five hours, I didn't think that i was looking my best. Very nice guy - he thanked us for coming to see the show.

Love, Lisa

SisToPencilMeIn&SimpleMusings said...

So, in other words, if I have mastered all the tools and tricks of PhotoShop yet, I probably don't need to waste my money on a Wacom tablet? Considering I'm not a good sketch artist and I'm definately not a graphics designer!

SisToPencilMeIn&SimpleMusings said...

oops....meant to say "have NOT" mastered!