Ask and ye shall receive. Timing is, however, important. This is the time of year, or we are just getting to the end of the time of year when the bulk of our seminary subscriptions renew. So, feeling generous, Tim asked if I wanted any new equipment. I thought on it, and saw an ad on my Photoshop User’s magazine for a Wacom Intuos 3 Tablet. I’d been thinking about tablets and had no idea what they cost or which ones were good etc. So I got on their website and read up on this nifty device. After reading third party reviews, I determined this was the industry standard for my needs as a digital artist. So I told Tim and he was happy to oblige me. Two weeks later, a-hem, my tablet arrived from Amazon.com.
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The font I designed this month for VDD Club is my first tablet project! I got the 6×8 tablet. The tablet plugs into my computer and with the pen they provide, I can draw on the tablet and it shows up on my monitor. It is a lot easier than using a mouse to draw with. And you can get special effects not possible with a mouse - it is pressure sensitive, and so when I press harder, the brush stroke is wider or darker. I am just learning how to use it, and this font is my first project! It came with some free software. I usually use Adobe Photoshop, but Corel Painter Essentials has some neat effects that Photoshop doesn’t have, and that is what I used to do the DWHScript Font. |
Corel Painter Essentials is a beginner version of the more robust professional Corel Painter X. It comes with a large selection of media types - or pen/brush categories, and then within each brush category are several variants. I chose Art Pen Brushes as my brush category and Grainy Edge Calligraphy as my brush variant. Then I started writing my letters on the tablet with the pen it comes with. It was so easy! And if I made a mistake, guess what . . . on that same pen, on the other end is . . . lo and behold . . . an eraser! It works just like a real pen eraser, only better because it leaves behind no marks at all. I still feel more comfy with Photoshop so I saved the file as a jpg and opened it in Photoshop to isolate each letter as a separate file. Then I imported each character into my Font Creator software - had to rotate some letters a bit, sized and spaced them just right and saved and installed my new font! Then I made a sample page and uploaded everything to the website for Club members to download.
Anyway, using my new toy was fun and easy and I’m just getting started.
I’ll let you know how it goes from here. Oh yeah, about my tablet, lucky for me I have a deep drawer where my keyboard and mouse reside, and the tablet rests either in front of or behind the keyboard just fine, without taking up extra space on my desk. Otherwise I’d have to put it somewhere else when I wasn’t using it.
Debra
