Digital artist

As I continue on my (long) journey to become a better photographer, I thought it might be interesting to work with a digital art tablet. Many people seem to think using a stylus is far easier than using a mouse when it comes to image editing and manipulation. Moreover, as I continue working on Hexteria, I feel like it might be fun to make some digital art (illustration kind of stuff) and a tablet is definitely superior for that sort of thing.

So, I bought one. It just arrived, and I’m having some fun messing with it.

There are a bunch of programmable buttons on the device, and of course for years I’ve already been all sorts of keyboard shortcuts to let me quickly change tools and modes. One hand holds the pen, the other taps some keys, and the magic happens. So far it’s been pretty slick.

One part of the process was calibrating the tablet to work with my three-monitor system. Technically the tablet is a fourth monitor– I can drag any windows over to it, and then manipulate them with the stylus. In order to “scale” the stylus’ drawing area to only the tablet, so it doesn’t bleed over to my other screens, I had to do a bit of linear algebra to compute a transformation matrix for the screen coordinates. Wow, that took me back. I remember absolutely loving linear algebra, although admittedly I had to brush up a bit to figure this one out.

In any case, it’s the start of yet another hobby. I’m curious to see how artistic I can be…