Cold weather and ink of the digital kind
As you may or may not know, I’ve got two tablets. One, my trusty five-year-old Wacom Intuos 2 6×8. The other, my brand-not-so-new-but-still-new-to-me IBM X41 Tablet PC. It was a trick to get the Intuos 2 to work on the X41 without interfering with the Wacom Penabled driver. But after multiple re-installations, multiple restarts (which prompted me to disable entering my password on startup), praying, and luck, they both work.
That’s all too much tech talk though. Let’s get back to the topic. I draw, right? I doodle cartoons just like any other 20-year old college-attending cartoon doodler. Most of the time, they don’t look too much different from scribbles in a notebook.
I use those 0.5mm BIC pens that you can buy a 12-pack of for under four dollars. I prefer the 0.7mm kind to 0.5mm, so those few and far in between times in which I find a 0.7mm pencil, I cherish it.
I’ve had a lot of drawing to do lately. Cartoons promoting our customer service survey. A cartoon for a shirt for the 2006 Cal-Stanford Big Game. Another for the USC-UCLA game. Some gifts and some long-overdue promises as well.
So I drew in warm Los Angeles while I was there for Thanksgiving. Turns out it wasn’t really so warm after all. That’s beside the point, though, because I’ve continued to be spoiled by the usual high 60s LA weather. Returning to a 20 degree cooler Berkeley wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time.
At this point, I think I’m just being uppity.
When I create digital drawings, I take my doodles - often done on the reverse side of misprinted paper, or the margins of my notes - and photograph them. I turn on macro mode. Turn off the flash. I take the shot. Lighting doesn’t matter and I could care less about the sharpness of the resulting image. Why? I’m hardly going to use this photo at all. The SD card is removed from my camera and stuck into the right side of my tablet. I import the graphic into Illustrator and start the cool part of the job.
To do the whole digital-ink thing, I trace over the scanned doodle with my tablet pen.
So you might have thought that this note would be an analysis on how cold environments affects my brain’s ability to implement the processes required for creating digital drawings. Or how the cold physically affects my hands and fingers and somehow alters my drawings in a typical way.
Sorry.
All I really wanted to say was that I can’t draw and wear my big gloves at the same time. My hands are cold.
Sounds attractive. I’m totally agree with you.