I gotses me a tablet. What should I draw on?Project Dpgwaffle? Paint? Photoshop? Flash? Opencanvas? A good oekaki board thing? Paint.net? Gimp? Opencanvas? Adobe Illustrator? Macromedia fireworks?

Well you can use any program you want to.

Different people have different preferences.. it depends on what you want to do and what you feel comfortable with.

I find myself working more naturally with Painter, but I use Photoshop for working with line art.

Oekaki was what got me proficient in using my tablet.

It all depends on what options you want and what you want your art to look like.

I say look for something free first. You don't want to be dropping that kind of money on those software packages to simply find out what you like. The Gimp is free, for instance. And odds are good your tablet came with some software, like Photoshop LE or some other popular piece, just limited in its nature.

Then, once you're willing to pony up hundreds of dollars, start looking at those better pieces of software.

I think a person can't go wrong getting Photoshop, but that's because I know a lot more about it than any other art program and I can get it to do what I want. Also, I like to ink in Flash, but you can get the same effect from Illustrator, Painter, and other programs.

Find places to try these programs out! Colleges, for instance.

Open Canvas and Gimp are the two most popular free programs I know of, and people produce brilliant results with them using tablets.

Hawk
I say look for something free first. You don't want to be dropping that kind of money on those software packages to simply find out what you like. The Gimp is free, for instance. And odds are good your tablet came with some software, like Photoshop LE or some other popular piece, just limited in its nature.

Then, once you're willing to pony up hundreds of dollars, start looking at those better pieces of software.

I think a person can't go wrong getting Photoshop, but that's because I know a lot more about it than any other art program and I can get it to do what I want. Also, I like to ink in Flash, but you can get the same effect from Illustrator, Painter, and other programs.

Find places to try these programs out! Colleges, for instance.

My dad works in a college, techy stuff, he can get stuff for me.

The adobe software doubles as a Job skill, so by all means, learn and use Photoshop and Illustrator if you have access to them.

Pro software checklisht for graphic design (order of prominence):

Quark Xpress / Adobe Indesign : Page layout softwae used by anyone who publishes anything. Not great for drawing, but great for assembling magazines, books, brochures.... Lear this and it can help you find employment.

Photoshop : learn to edit and touch up photos, so the look good when printed from Quark or InDesign

Illustrator : Professionally, it's place is in creating resolution independant images for logos. Also doubles as a page layout program for single page or image advertisments.

FLASH: knowing how to animate and program actionscript is not common and always in demand by ambitious websites. (I myself need to learn actionscript).


It's very hard to make a living from comics. This is the software than can help you out.

For Drawing Comics, if you have the HARDWARE - the latest version of Painter may be better than anything else (it allows you to prototype custom perspective grids!).

Otherwise, really, GIMP is about as good as anything else.

mykill
The adobe software doubles as a Job skill, so by all means, learn and use Photoshop and Illustrator if you have access to them.

Pro software checklisht for graphic design (order of prominence):

Quark Xpress / Adobe Indesign : Page layout softwae used by anyone who publishes anything. Not great for drawing, but great for assembling magazines, books, brochures.... Lear this and it can help you find employment.

Photoshop : learn to edit and touch up photos, so the look good when printed from Quark or InDesign

Illustrator : Professionally, it's place is in creating resolution independant images for logos. Also doubles as a page layout program for single page or image advertisments.

FLASH: knowing how to animate and program actionscript is not common and always in demand by ambitious websites. (I myself need to learn actionscript).


It's very hard to make a living from comics. This is the software than can help you out.

For Drawing Comics, if you have the HARDWARE - the latest version of Painter may be better than anything else (it allows you to prototype custom perspective grids!).

Otherwise, really, GIMP is about as good as anything else.

:D Photoshop: Know
Illsutrator: Know :D

Flash: Know :DDDDDD

Okay. Im going with painter or opencanvas or maybe PDW, cuz i want more natural shtiff.

Just to add a note, Flash + tablet = a remarkably powerful tool for comics inking.

My Girl & Harp is drawn entirely in Flash and tweaked line by line to achieve the line "weight" (Ugh. Painful.) before I discovered that Flash brushes accomodates pressure sensitive tablet pens. Just for comparison, Girl Racing (WIP) is done freehand via the tablet pen with the basic Flash brush tool. (That's the good thing about freehand drawing... it speeds up things _alot_. )

Throw in the fact that Flash is a vector drawing tool... all your resolution and scaling issues basically gets tossed out of the window. Useful if you ever want to translate your work from web to print in the future. And the best part for me is... no more huge RAM crunches whenever I feel like drawing something really big ... like an AO size Godzilla in a tutu, for example... :D

Having learned Illustrator first, Flash's defaults of "erasing" below an object placed above it irks me to no end. You have to constantly "group" drawing elements to interrupt this.

What am I speaking of? Say you draw a color face, but you want to move the left eyebrow down a little - it leaves a HOLE in the skincolor where it was moved from.

I respect flash as an animation and development platform, but I'll draw my vector art in anything else first. Personal preferance.

I like to "ink" in photoshop myself - gives me the flexability and precision of an actual brush, something the 'autosmoothing' of flash and illustrator deny me.

FLash has pressure sensitivty? If i wouldve know nthat! Im ignarant, damn!

Illustrator does some annoying things too, like linking lines together when you don't want them that way. You constantly have to rechoose the pencil/pen tool to stop this from happening...

ccs1989
Illustrator does some annoying things too, like linking lines together when you don't want them that way. You constantly have to rechoose the pencil/pen tool to stop this from happening...

Ah, press "option" and the tool turns from 'brush' to pointer, clik once to deselect last line. release 'option' and continue with next line.

Command "k" to access preferances for tools, I believe you can set the program to automatically DESELECT a line once you're done with it.

Illustrator does some annoying things too, like linking lines together when you don't want them that way. You constantly have to rechoose the pencil/pen tool to stop this from happening...

I never have that problem and I use Illustrator for everything. Don't know about macs, but in the PC version, you can also use ctrl+shift+A to deselect. Quite honestly, though, the problem you mention only comes up when you start drawing a new line close to the previously drawn line. I've actually found it incredibly useful for fine tuning lines without having to redraw them, something that flash has no function for apart from moving individual points which can be time consuming and very annoying.

.: isukun :.

mykill
Having learned Illustrator first, Flash's defaults of "erasing" below an object placed above it irks me to no end. You have to constantly "group" drawing elements to interrupt this.

What am I speaking of? Say you draw a color face, but you want to move the left eyebrow down a little - it leaves a HOLE in the skincolor where it was moved from.

I used layers to get around the problem.

Flash 5 with a basic wal marts mouse.

Listen, kids. I don't want to go all lock-happy, and I most certainly don't want to ruin everybody's fun. But did you happen to notice the thread called "Any tips for drawing tablets?" I've got a link right here if you want it.

http://www.drunkduck.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=325