Darktiste Sketchbook

[Lunatique]

I once compared drawing with a mouse to cooking with a hammer and screwdriver instead of proper kitchen utensils. I had to do it for several months when I first started out on my very first game job (working as texture artist on Prince of Persia 3D), and it was manageable because textures is very different from sketching and illustration--it's a lot of photobashing with some additional painting on top. But I hated it because there isn't even pressure sensitivity so my left hand had to be on the numbers keys all the time to control the opacity level. (Fun fact: that's how Craig Mullins worked too in Photoshop. He started out using a mouse, then later when he got a tablet, he did not use pressure sensitivity with his Wacom stylus because he prefers to control opacity with the number keys. I don't know if he still works that way and I highly doubt it, since digital painting software has advanced a lot from those days, and he works a lot in Rebelle these days, and there's no way you'd get the most out of its brush engine without pressure sensitivity.)

When I finally got the Wacom tablet (1st gen), it was a huge relief and it felt infinitely more intuitive and I could draw and paint with far more intricacy and nuance and expressiveness.

I don't know why there's an insistence on not getting a graphics tablet, especially when they are dirt cheap in this day and age and choices are abundant. Even the entry-level tiny ones have at least over a thousand levels of pressure detection and will be far superior to using a mouse. I have students who used the cheapest entry-level stuff and when I tried them, they felt no different from my much more expensive professional-grade tablets, except with smaller footprints and fewer programmable buttons.