saturn return to sender

part of a series. maybe.

So I splurged recently and got myself a Wacom tablet. It will take a lot of practice to make it and Photoshop do what I want, but it is pretty damn fun. I picked this photo as a subject and have started playing with it. Not sure if it will turn into anything interesting or not, but working with the tools is what it’s about at this point. Pictured here is a rough “pencil” drawing and here are the beginnings of some “paint.”

Pretending the tablet and Photoshop are a pencil, pen, or marker and paper mostly works for me. I am not at all convinced, though, when they’re supposed to be painting media. Mostly, I miss the color mixing of real watercolors or acrylics. So far opacity is the best simulation I’ve found for watercolor mixing in Photoshop, but it’s not the same at all. And of course there’s no water area bleeding, no dry-brushing, no finger-rubbing across soft lead or kneaded erasers. I miss all those, and I’m surprised to admit, actually, that aside from their usefulness as techniques, I miss the physicality of the real thing. I would not think I’d have romantic notions about the immediacy of touching paper, its texture on your fingertips, the little accidental color stains on your shirt, and all that, but I do.

I also really want the image on the screen to rotate with the tablet. I guess there’s always the Cintiq. Next time I have a spare two grand to toss on something, I’ll have to check it out.

But, as with many now-computer-mediated crafts, you as creator are relieved of a lot of the hard work and risk-taking. You can shortcut the time, patience, and skill that have historically been required to get a basic drawing going. And then you can re-use that framework for different experiments without having to start over. I don’t have a perfect eye for proportions, but that’s not a problem because I can trace. I don’t have to worry about committing something to paper I’m not sure about because I can use a layer or just undo it. It’s really liberating—especially for the sake of experimentation—and I don’t think I should feel like I’m cheating, but … I kinda do.

Then there’s the wonder of downsampling. If you work in a high resolution, you can slop stuff around and it will look masterfully crafted when you zoom out. Now that is cheating! =)

Anyway. If I’m feeling motivated I’ll post more pics as that painting comes along.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.