Helpful Books/Links for Drawing with Wacom?

February 17, 2013 8:59 PM

I am a decent artist but very rusty, have intermediate Photoshop skills but draw quite well on my cheapie SB Pro app on my Kindle. (I even sold prints using just that.) Now, I have a new Wacom and besides the usual adjustment to using a wacom stylus, am finding that all three applications on my Mac have pros and cons (as a beginner with this wacom tablet), with the biggest con being the user myself. Can you recommend any books or links on doing drawings and paintings using the Wacom Bamboo (Splash) besides the applications' websites? Any brushes you favor or have downloaded and so forth? As an aside I note that pics I do in Art Rage at 300 dpi saved as psd don't open on my SB Pro application but this may be a future question.)
posted by snap_dragon to Technology (3 answers total)

What flavor of OS X are you running? There's a freebie version of Sketchbook in the App Store for us Mac users, it might help in transitioning to working with a peripheral tablet.

I learned almost entirely by just doing. While I did take classes in college to fill in the gaps, I mostly got to where I am by playing with the tools. I am personally trained with traditional media but a lot of the practice translates into digital and what doesn't you can make work if you apply it differently to fake it. (I apologize that I can't find a better way to explain it)

This guy has some awesome drawing demonstrations-- they aren't digital but the idea/skill easily carries over. You're sure to find many "speed/live painting" videos floating around on YouTube, and they're worth watching even without any kind of narration just so you can see how the artwork is composed and how one works with the various drawing apps.
posted by Yoshi Ayarane at 10:58 AM on February 18, 2013

I like Ctrl Paint's series of videos. The intro/101 ones I found very good to get started with a tablet especially if you do the exercises. Then after that it was just playing around until it became intuitive.

At the moment I mainly use Daarken's brushes (he's got some decent tutorials as well), though they are more advanced) plus a couple of other specialist ones I've picked up off Deviantart and ImaginationFX cover disks... but 90% of the time I just use a bog standard chalk brush and fuzzy round.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:41 PM on February 18, 2013

Yoshi, I am running Snow Leopard at this point and have Sketchbook Pro 6 along w/ newest Art Rage and PS CS5. (For the things I am doing in Photoshop, it could very well be from 10 yrs back though.)
posted by snap_dragon at 12:49 PM on February 18, 2013