I did it

by Posted on

One thing that’s been frus­trat­ing me is that ever since I switched over to the Mac I haven’t been able to do any­thing cre­ative with the com­put­er. iron­ic, I know. Per­haps some­time I’ll write out my screed about how the mouse is the sin­gle shit­ti­est user inter­face tool that’s ever been foist­ed upon graph­ic artists, but for now I’ll just say that on my PC, the Wacom tablet was a ser­i­al mod­el and that even with an adapter it would­n’t work with the OS X Mac. So I’ve been using the Mac for all my tech­ni­cal work, and I’m hap­py with it and all, but I haven’t been able to do any of the draw­ing stuff I’ve done on the com­put­er in the past, and part of the point of switch­ing to Mac was to give me a bet­ter plat­form for the cre­ative work.

Yes, I can draw on paper, but I have some meth­ods that go faster on the com­put­er. Call me a cheater if you will, but I’ve been want­i­ng to ham­mer out a few draw­ings with the dig­i­tiz­er and i’ve felt pret­ty stymied about it.

Well, I might not eat for the rest of the week, but I ordered the replacement:

It’s back­o­rdered, but I should have it in a week, and it’s over a hun­dred bucks less than if I walked into Com­pUSA. It’s actu­al­ly a slight down­grade from the mod­el I had on the PC… I had the 5 but­ton mouse with my old 6×8 Intu­os, but I think I can live with it. The Intuos2 isn’t actu­al­ly any bet­ter than the orig­i­nal Intu­os, as far as I can tell.

Nev­er­the­less, I’ll be very pleased to be back in the dig­i­tiz­ing camp. Maybe I’ll get some more George Bush draw­ings out so I can final­ly get a decent car­i­ca­ture out. More like­ly I’d real­ly like to get some por­traits out of some of the love­ly ladies I’ve met online in the last few months.

Of course, then there’s all the soft­ware I’ve got­ta buy, but I have some old soft­ware that works in Clas­sic, and I can use some of the Win­dows ver­sion of things in Vir­tu­alPC. The soft­ware pur­chas­es can come in time. I’d rather have MS-Paint from 1988 and a pen tablet than the newest Pho­to­shop and a rodent.

(Just to give the dev­il his due, I’m not anti-mouse. It’s good for lots of things. But not any­thing graph­ic design ori­ent­ed, and cer­tain­ly not for illus­tra­tion. Draw­ing with a mouse is like swim­ming in a wheelchair)

Published by splicer

6 Replies to “I did it”

  1. it’s not cheating
    no more so
    it’s not cheating
    no more so than using an air­brush was cheat­ing for painting
    or a tech­ni­cal pen or felt tip pen cheat­ed the quill or bam­boo shoot

    the only dif­fer­ence between dig­i­tal­ly cre­at­ed works is the fact that it’s not a one-of-a-kind

  3. I dun­no. If I want to
    I dun­no. If I want to strength­en my fun­da­men­tal skills, the only way to do that is with a pen and paper. 

    But if I want to get stuff knocked out rea­son­ably quick­ly and have some­thing tight to impress oth­er peo­ple with, the com­put­er is the way to do it.

    I gen­er­al­ly think you’re right, but doing it dig­i­tal is what I do when I care more about imme­di­ate results and less about improv­ing my skills.

    Hey did/do you take class­es at CCC?

  4. CCC what’s that?
    i guess
    CCC what’s that?
    i guess not

    but yeah, I’m pri­mar­i­ly a dig­i­tal artist, but I make it a point to make time to draw with real tools as well.…I believe you cant take the short­cuts until you learn the basics

  5. CCC == Colum­bia Col­lege
    CCC == Colum­bia Col­lege Chicago

    I thought I saw some­thing about that in your pro­file, but maybe I’m misremembering.

    I went there for a year.

Leave a Reply