I've been using them for years and love them. Got a Intuos 2 at work and an Intuos 1 at home. I use it all the time and only go back to the mouse when I need to move things with great control, moving pixel by pixel. I find you have to experiment to see how fast you can draw. Too fast and the pad can't keep up, too slow and everything is all bumpy. If you're not used to the feel, try putting a piece of paper on top to make it feel like you're drawing on paper.
The experience of drawing on a tablet can be pretty jarring at first: slow strokes create the feeling of a lumpy canvas that pushes your pen nib around without letting you feel it happening. The Intuos has a MUCH easier-to-live-with finish than the Graphire, which basically feels like writing on teflon with, um, TEFLON.
DO train yourself to zoom in at the slightest provocation; it helps a lot. Also, now that you're drawing on a computer screen don't hesitate to use layers, which will give you all kinds of joy.
One tip I've learned recently: using multiple layers, do your "pencils" in BLACK, then turn the transparency of the layer they're on so that they look light grey. This sounds pointless but it isn't: later, when you go over them on a separate layer, accidentially inking on your sketch layer will be blatantly obvious.
Draw HUGE. Like at least 1200x800 per panel at 300 dpi. I've started my next strip at 2000x1300 to try to get more details in. The wacom drivers are excellent, so very little cpu is used, at least with my graphire4 compared to my old genius mouspen, which would peg 100% when I drew.
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Sorry about ressurrecting an old thread, but my question I think is relevant to this topic.
I have a Wacom Intuos4, 6x9 size.
One thing I've discovered about trying to use it that I find frustrating is that the texture is very slippery compared to the pencil & paper I'm used to, and that leads to wiggly lines. If I stroke a pencil across a paper, there's a degree of friction there that actually helps smooth the line out, and gives me something to "push against". This nullifies minor jitteryness. But on the tablet, the smooth slippery connection between stylus and tablet makes it so that I have to hold my hand still with conscious deliberate fine muscle control to keep the jitter down. When I do that, my hand gets tired and numb after only about 20 minutes of work, whereas on paper I could work for hours quite comfortably.
for the texture issue, perhaps you could put a piece of course paper between the tablet and the stylus?
I have a bit of trouble drawing for an extended amount of time with the tablet. I usually just use natural mediums as much as I can, and take as many breaks as needed.
The way I do my drawing on a graphire is one layer is a sketch layer I use some obnoxious color like the nuke green. this is a pretty sloppy layer no fine lines that type of stuff. on a finish layer I blow up the pic to 200 X normal size that way with black creates a nice fine line. if you are having trouble drawing while looking at the screen, train your self by tracing a picture. You will catch on quickly. good luck and have fun.
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I don't know about yours, but when I bought my Tablet it came with a set of different nibs, including some additional plastic ones, a bouncy one that feels more like a brush, and a slightly coarser one that feels similar to a felt pen when you use it. If you're looking for more friction trying a different nib might help. To change them, just tug one out with needlenose pliers and put the new one in.
Drawing big does help, as does zooming way in when doing details, they come out a lot smoother that way. Also, you could look into using OpenCanvas to draw with, which I find is a lot more responsive than Photoshop, and has a nicer line quality.
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I remeber the tablet came with different nibs but I didn't look at them closely and thought they were the same - just replacements in case I lost or broke the tip. I didn't realize they were actually different types - i'll have to try them now. Thanks.
I tried taping a bit of paper to the surface (I actually already had that idea), but it seemed to put the tablet into a broken mode and I had to reboot to fix it. (I'm not sure why, but it did something that made it now think all the buttons were pressed when they weren't. I wonder if the paper had any magnetic or electrical conductive properties to it? That scared me enough to make me reluctant to try again - I don't want to break the expensive tablet.)
I already hit upon the zooming and the sketch layer thing - most of my pages end up being several layers, like so:
(ordered from top to bottom)
Floating Text layers (one per word balloon)
Word ballon layer (contains the white clouds around the floating words.
Shading layer (contains nothing but black-and-white areas somewhere between 20 and 50 % opacity - to darken or lighten the hue that's underneath it)
Flat color layer (contains mostly bucket-fills of the outlined areas, with no gradients to the color, with the exception of the eyes, which I have to do by hand at the zoomed-in pixel level)
Outlines layer (black sharp outlines around the areas, no fuzziness to the brush.)
sketchy layer (my prelim circles-and-lines figure layout, done zoomed-out so that I can see the whole page and get the proportions right) This layer is turned invisibile once I have the outline layer done I no longer want it showing.
background - a layer of all-white underneath it all.
I usually do the text layers first, then the sketchy layer, then the outlines, flat color, and shading in that order. Only the sketchy layer is done at the fullly zoomed-out level.
I'm a lLinux freeware junkie, so I usueally use GIMP for all of this, not Photoshop.
Part of the reason I like OpenCanvast for drawing is that it's A) more responsive than Photoshop (I think) and B) you can find OpenCanvas1.1 as a freeware download. Which makes it made of awesome.
It's about fluff, angst, drama, comedy, gaming. Come play in our world.
Having a thumb button on my Intuos set to "step back undo" has rendered me so hopelessly dependant that when I use traditional media and I draw a line wrong my left thumb twitches, trying to find a back button that isn't there, and then my brain starts going "where's the damn undo button on this-- oh RIGHT, there ISN'T one here..."
