On Tuesday, January 14, 2003, at 08:41 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi Marnie,
A mouse is simply too bulky. So I've never been able to digitally draw/paint very well -- very frustrating.
Nothing beats holding a pencil for drawing, or a pencil-sized object. Nothing.
Doe aka Marnie This has been a very informative thread.
As a long time holder of crayons, pencils, Rapidographs, airbrushes and graphical tablets (Calcomp and Wacom), I find myself doing most of my work in Photoshop with a mouse instead of my current stylus and tablet.
With Photoshop, most of what I do is just easier to do with a mouse than a stylus. Being able to simply take my hand off the mouse and use the keyboard is a lot quicker than having to set the stylus down, type, and then pick up the stylus again. It sounds trivial, but if you do it a lot, you'll probably find yourself using the mouse more and tablet less. Using a stylus as a mouse substitute for accessing tool pallets and menus isn't much fun, either.
My mouse takes a lot less effort to access any of those due to the difference in mouse tracking software versus stylus tracking software�mousing software is speed sensitive and click sensitive whereas stylus tracking software is much more oriented to tracking path, pressure, and angle. Moving a mouse with a quick flip of the wrist will get you from one side of your screen to the other almost instantaneously�you're going to find yourself moving your whole arm to cover the same territory with a stylus. Again, it sounds small, but it grows old quick.
The other drawback of a tablet is the feel. Instead of the tactile feedback you get with a pen, pencil, paintbrush or crayon, with a stylus you have only the feel of a tiny point of plastic sliding on flat smooth plastic�featureless and unresponsive�dead. Sucks a lot of the positive tactile energy you get from wielding the tool right out of the experience.
My tablet gets most of its use with Illustrator and Painter, places where I want to use expressive strokes or quickly sketch out an idea for further development. If I really want to brainstorm visually, I usually pick up the old analog tools�if I need to get any of what I do with them into into the computer, I can scan it on my old lowrez scanner. It works fine.
Just my $0.02,
Dan Scott
