I hate that. I ordered some stuff from Malaysia, never turned up. Contacted seller, they said they'd resend it. I fell for it, never turned up and the time to dispute on eBay expired :(

I'm sure I've got a 99p packaged stuck at Heathrow from months back. I think I chased it twice then just didn't bother wasting my time.

I found another ebayer who was selling the same Intuos tablet for ~£35 but had negative feedback on his one and only item as a seller, which seemed suspicious, so I passed on that one. I've been checking his feedback, just to confirm my apprehensions and though the person who did win the tablet hasn't posted anything, another item he's sold hasn't turned up. Dodged a bullet there.

I found a more reputable dude and got a tablet from him and I've been having a play over the last few days. It's nice. The pressure sensitivity works really well, I'm just getting used to the way the pen works with the cursor, using absolute positioning.

It's a pretty cool device. I have mine mapped to a 1080p + 21" CRT dual display ( used primarily as a mouse substitute) so as you can imagine it's a total distortion of the 4x5 tablet area. I found absolute positioning to be too annoying with having to constantly reposition the pen for different parts of the display. It's really, really good for the pen tool and stamp in Adobe CS and gimp. Not so much for bitmap drawing tools IME.

Not tried the pen and clone stamp as yet, but I'll give that a go tonight maybe.

I've been using it for shading in Photoshop so far and the pressure sensor works nicely for that.

Best analogy I can think of for the graphire is an eraser on a big chalkboard, whereas a mouse is more like a cement block on an ice rink.  I've only used the pressure sensitivity effectively on really big, soft-edge brushes (100-300 px), to selectively burn/dodge, where edge precision is (obviously) unnecessary, but you want to control the intensity depending on area. Otherwise I keep it turned off.

> Dodged a bullet there

Sounds more like you walked away from a trundling ball.

Like the boulder thing in Indiana Jones? I would say that would be significantly worse than a bullet. I'd much rather be shot and have it all over in one go rather than be running away in terror, just delaying the inevitable crush.

Surely you're not adverse to a little hyperbole?

I found the application specific menu last night, so can change sensitivity, pen 'feeling' (hard or soft touch) depending on whether I'm in Photoshop or not.

Drawing and shading isn't quite intuitive yet, but it's a fairly shallow learning curve.

Can you stump teh with a tablet turing test? Post two drawings, one tablet and one scanned from pencil.

That's a nice idea, though at the moment I think it'd be fairly obvious which was which.

I've not actually tried the pencil tool in Photoshop with the tablet yet.  :-$

I've been doing more cartoony stuff in a Jim'll Paint It style.

Cocking hell, the thread even has the same name. I'm a buffoon LOL

You muffin.

I drew the picture in my wife's wedding anniversary card (which is tomorrow, so don't tell her that I'm showing you now) with it.

The wording goes something along the lines of:

You're so awesome, I'd totally get the Pope to beatify the remains of Mr. Motivator in your honour.



 

Lovely.

What's your thoughts on it now you've had a chance to play (No, john)?

I really like it, for drawing. I'm not going to use it as a mouse replacement any time soon.

The pressure sensitivity is good and works well in Photoshop. It's not really analogous to using a pen or pencil, even though it's as immediate as those, it obviously doesn't have the tactile feedback of working on paper. I've changed my mind, it's not great for shading (at least for my style, which is quite linear with crosshatching etc.), but for creating the simple comic art type stuff, it's really nice. :)

 

I've heard you can put paper on the tablet for a more tactile feel, but I reckon it would wear out the tip pretty fast.

I'll try that and see what it's like. The tablet's surface feels too slippery for my style of drawing. I'm sure it's possible though, I've just not used it enough to get the technique.

I've got better results using a large (A2 or A3) canvas at a high res with really small brushes.

Hmm. I tried courting in a scan with my mouse yesterday. Results weren't great, was wondering if a tablet would be better. I see some of the wacom tablets have a tilt sensor too, so you can vary brush /pencil angle...

Then I saw the Cintiq (?) tablet and screen things - wow! Want!

What's 'courting in a scan' ? If you mean retouching yeah, even a cheap wacom is way better than a mouse.

TBH I don't think tablets hold any real advantage over real media for creating original pencil/pen/brush artwork, even factoring in all the layering, erasing, undo etc. shit. Principle drawback is that you aren't looking at your drawing implement, lack of tactile feedback etc. Plus maybe it's too easy to get caught up in the layering, erasing, undo etc. shit and wind up with really overworked, but conceptually undisciplined results. Maybe the best of both worlds is to use real media, scan it, then digitally manipulate it in various ways.

Aye, the Cintiq range looks ace.

Again, I think it'd be hard to get used to something like a tilt sensitivity without the tactile feedback. If they could shoehorn a series of shifting weights in the pen for some mega-haptic shenanigans, I'd be all for it.