Well, that didn’t last long…
You know how they say ‘you get what you pay for?’ - Well, my lovely little graphics tablet was a case in point.
On the third day of my ownership, I picked up the stylus and suddenly found the cursor jumping around on my screen like some kind of Mexican jumping bean! The little mouse thing started doing it too! I didn’t know what was going on. Nothing had changed, I didn’t have any kind of wifi interference (at least nothing that hadn’t been there the previous two days) and I hadn’t changed anything that I could figure out. I quickly rebooted, figuring something was amiss, but after a few minutes, the stylus and mouse started up again - this time also including long stretches where it wouldn’t respond at all. I then tried putting fresh batteries in, reinstalling the driver, and wiping the surface of the pad, but it was no use - my little pad was defective and would have to be returned.
*WAAAHHH*
I am nothing if not determined. After using the Genius pad for a couple of days, I learned several things; I liked having a stylus, but preferred one that worked. I didn’t need anything as large as a 9 x 12 surface area and the brand of tablet I had bought was not recommended by anyone. At this point I believe having it fail so soon after the purchase was probably a good thing. Anyway, armed with a little more knowledge and experience, I located a much smaller tablet from the top manufacturer for just a little more money and on Monday I went and bought it.
Tada! Here is the new tablet! This one is by Intuos4 and it’s the smallest they have. It is LIGHT YEARS better than the previous one and I’ve already been very creative with it.
While I’m learning these software packages, I’m also playing around with the functions of both Illustrator and Photoshop. (Toy! Toy!) This picture got into this condition by quite a circuitous route. First, I did a pencil sketch using a screenshot of the character as a rough guide. I then scanned the pencil sketch and played around with Adobe Illustrator’s live trace option which takes a rough sketch and turns it into a vector image. Using vector images is a way to make art or logos and stuff so that it they can be scaled up as big as you want without losing resolution as you would if you scaled up a regular picture. I scanned a couple of my pencil sketches and will hopefully do more, though it took me a while to clean them up even after I had the vector tracing settings optimized to pick up just my pencil marks and not everything I had erased to get them just where I wanted.
After I had the vector drawing done and cleaned up, I pulled the image over into Photoshop Elements for coloring in. It was like having a big coloring book! I played around in Elements for quite a while, making layers, finding images of sheets and surgical scrubs to base my sketches of them on. The background I just did freehand following a room that was in the original anime and I hope it’s not too obvious how much I hate doing backgrounds. LOL! At least with the computer, I don’t have to spend hours making them.
Ian modeled the pillow and head - and he LOVED being mommy’s model - and the hand and scrubs were sketched from a piece of clipart I found. I adore the way it came out - it really looks like a screen shot of the character - which was what I was going for - though it’s not a scene they produced. I’ve had a lot of fun figuring out how to get different looks from the different tools in Illustrator and Elements and though I haven’t really figured out what ‘my’ style is using them, I am having fun with the toys nonetheless.
On the third day of my ownership, I picked up the stylus and suddenly found the cursor jumping around on my screen like some kind of Mexican jumping bean! The little mouse thing started doing it too! I didn’t know what was going on. Nothing had changed, I didn’t have any kind of wifi interference (at least nothing that hadn’t been there the previous two days) and I hadn’t changed anything that I could figure out. I quickly rebooted, figuring something was amiss, but after a few minutes, the stylus and mouse started up again - this time also including long stretches where it wouldn’t respond at all. I then tried putting fresh batteries in, reinstalling the driver, and wiping the surface of the pad, but it was no use - my little pad was defective and would have to be returned.
*WAAAHHH*
I am nothing if not determined. After using the Genius pad for a couple of days, I learned several things; I liked having a stylus, but preferred one that worked. I didn’t need anything as large as a 9 x 12 surface area and the brand of tablet I had bought was not recommended by anyone. At this point I believe having it fail so soon after the purchase was probably a good thing. Anyway, armed with a little more knowledge and experience, I located a much smaller tablet from the top manufacturer for just a little more money and on Monday I went and bought it.
Tada! Here is the new tablet! This one is by Intuos4 and it’s the smallest they have. It is LIGHT YEARS better than the previous one and I’ve already been very creative with it.
While I’m learning these software packages, I’m also playing around with the functions of both Illustrator and Photoshop. (Toy! Toy!) This picture got into this condition by quite a circuitous route. First, I did a pencil sketch using a screenshot of the character as a rough guide. I then scanned the pencil sketch and played around with Adobe Illustrator’s live trace option which takes a rough sketch and turns it into a vector image. Using vector images is a way to make art or logos and stuff so that it they can be scaled up as big as you want without losing resolution as you would if you scaled up a regular picture. I scanned a couple of my pencil sketches and will hopefully do more, though it took me a while to clean them up even after I had the vector tracing settings optimized to pick up just my pencil marks and not everything I had erased to get them just where I wanted.
After I had the vector drawing done and cleaned up, I pulled the image over into Photoshop Elements for coloring in. It was like having a big coloring book! I played around in Elements for quite a while, making layers, finding images of sheets and surgical scrubs to base my sketches of them on. The background I just did freehand following a room that was in the original anime and I hope it’s not too obvious how much I hate doing backgrounds. LOL! At least with the computer, I don’t have to spend hours making them.
Ian modeled the pillow and head - and he LOVED being mommy’s model - and the hand and scrubs were sketched from a piece of clipart I found. I adore the way it came out - it really looks like a screen shot of the character - which was what I was going for - though it’s not a scene they produced. I’ve had a lot of fun figuring out how to get different looks from the different tools in Illustrator and Elements and though I haven’t really figured out what ‘my’ style is using them, I am having fun with the toys nonetheless.