Comic relief at CompUsa

Saw a cool demo of the Toshiba 3505 at CompUsa yesterday. Nice big display. Nice performance. But what really caught my attention were the characteratures that the sales associate was drawing in Journal. Granted, he was a practiced doodler, but he said he’d only dabbled with the Toshiba in off hours, and yet he’d clearly become quite proficient.

I’ve always wondered how someone who knew how to draw might do with a tablet. His technique was simple. First rough in the drawing, just like on paper using long thin strokes with light pressure. Then draw the permanent strokes over the sketch using a heavier pen. He varied the pen width for artistic affect. Then he went back in and erased the rough sketch stroke-by-stroke using the eraser tool set to erase any strokes the eraser interests. He used the undo feature often when the wrong strokes were erased. It was kind of a poor man’s layering. Interestingly, the stroke smoothing that the tablet applies to all strokes didn’t seem to get in his way–although he said it took him some time to get used to it. If I remember correctly, it initially gave him problems when drawing crosshatches. I’m not sure what he meant. Maybe it’s difficult to draw small wiggles in lines because they are smoothed away.

There’s no doubt that there are better programs for drawing, such as Alias Wavefront’s SketchBook, but it’s fascinating to see what can be done with the tablet.

I wonder if a new generation of digital comic book artists is going to evolve with the growth of the Tablet PC.