Monday, April 11, 2011

"Fun" for Cintiq owners

The reason I bought my original Cintiq in 2007 was to use to use Manga Studio. Despite 7 years' prior daily use of a "trad" Wacom tablet, I couldn't master freehand drawing with it. The disconnect of eye and hand as you watch the cursor the screen was too much. I was far from accurate, and my shoulder would tense up in agony as I attempted pass after undone pass at long strokes.

I had a go at drawing with that same old Wacom tablet this evening as I had been using it for another job. And strangely, after years of using the Cintiq, I could now draw far more accurately than I could back in 2007. While I would never use an Intuos for all my daily drawing by choice (if the Cintiq broke and I couldn't replace it, I'd probably go back to pen and paper), I couldn't believe how much had improved.

Here's a little sketch I did, it wasn't as fluent as working on the Cintiq, but I got the sense that after a few weeks practice, I could probably get perfectly used to it.

I wonder if any other Cintiq users have had the same experience when they dug out their old tablet?

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I haven't really used a Cintiq much, bar noodling with friends ones, but waaaaay back in the day I bought a tiny a5 Intuos and found it really hard to get used to - in fact I never really did get used to it. Years later, after using a bigger Intuos at work and at home a lot I went back to the smaller one and found it super easy.

The advice I always give to anyone starting out is to buy the biggest tablet you can afford. I guess I should be saying "aim for a Cintiq". :D

Rob Cottingham said...

I had kind of the same experience - except in my case it was when I was on the road with my Cintiq and realized, just shy of midnight, that I had no adapter to connect it to my MacBook's display port.

I discovered that, if I powered it up and connected the USB cable, I could still use the Cintiq as a graphics tablet. And, six years after the last time I'd tried a tablet, I was far more comfortable and confident with it.

The chief difference, though, is that, comfortable as it might have been, I couldn't draw worth a damn on it, except very very carefully.

Dewey said...

My experience went the other way. I'd trained myself to deal with the weird shortcomings of drawing on an Intuos for four years, and all that has disappeared in the years since getting a Cintiq. I have a little Bamboo for traveling with my laptop, and it's almost hopeless trying to work on it.

Unknown said...

I never draw anything bigger than my own knuckle, so the Bamboo suits me fine. Sometimes I just use the touchpad on my laptop.