A quick study done on a Cintiq, based on a live model I photographed during a drawing session at the 2010 CTN Expo. Looking at it again its pretty obvious I made the hands too big and the legs too short, but oh well. What's the point of keeping a sketchbook if you never make mistakes? Happy New Year one and...
It's been a while since I took the time to answer reader questions. These posts take longer to write, and with life getting crazy and my blog moving from a daily to semi-daily format, they fell by the wayside. I decided it's time to try to weave this feature back into the mix. To make up for lost time I'll answer...
I'm slowly working on a post (or series of posts) about digital inking. In my research and in talking to other artists I've been hearing a lot of great things about a drawing program called Sketchbook Pro. Apparently it's super fantastically awesome, rivaling Photoshop and Painter at a significantly lower price. When it comes to inking with a Cintiq, Sketchbook...
Since I started the "As Mr. Artist Guy" feature a couple of weeks ago, two people have written me asking for a follow-up review of the new portable "sketchbook" Cintiq 12wx. I wrote my first review after having played around with the Cintiq for only a day or two. Overall I'm still very happy with it, but now that I've logged a few dozen hours with it I've got some additional thoughts.
What do you use to ink your art? These are cool rabbit illos!I thought his question would make a good blog post, so here goes. Earlier this year I bought a Cintiq and started inking everything digitally (more on that below), but for many years I experimented with various inking methods on paper. Pen and Ink. I first learned how to ink by using a dip pen with Hunt 102 nibs and a bottle of good-old India Ink, and inked my drawings on smooth bristol board. This was back in the late 80's, before computers, when cartoonists were still using rubber cement and x-acto knives to create layouts, and inkers used white-out to fix their goofs. I used the Hunt pen tips for many years, and with them I was able to get a clean, cartoony line.
My portable "sketchbook" Cintiq arrived on Tuesday. After my first few hours with it, here are my initial impressions:
Beauty and Brawn. Like other Cintiq's, this is a quality product with an elegant design. It's thin but sturdy (although a tad heavier than I thought it would be). You almost think that you could knock it off a table top without doing any damage...although I wouldn't recommend trying.
Drawing on it feels smooth and natural, just like a regular Cintiq.
Screen Specs. The high-resolution screen displays a crisp image with rich color. It has a wider viewing angle than my laptop screen, which means I can tilt it at different angles and the color shifts just slightly, if at all. Laptop screens are notorious for their shifting color, so this was a pleasant surprise.
If you are a stickler for color, you may not like the Cintiq's default color settings. I've never been able to get my desktop Cintiq to be quite as precise in its color calibration as, say, an Apple cinema display, and my guess is the sketchbook Cintiq also can't be fine-tuned as precisely as some would like. Although to be fair I haven't done much research into how to calibrate the new Cintiq. But for general purpose cartooning and illustration the color is still very good.
