Man, I really need to get into the habit of posting to this blog... I've been so busy with everything lately... ooof.
I Bought a tablet PC a few weeks ago, and I
love it! I'm using it mostly to do sketching in drawing class, and doodling at home. It's such a great way to be able to look through old drawings and weed out the bad ones without going through a huge stack of paper! I need to start posting some of them here, which I'm working on.
I'm learning a few different programs on it such as
PAP animation,
Digicel Flipbook,
ArtRage2, and
SketchbookPro2, as well as re-learning
Painter a little bit. I'm really liking Sketchbook Pro and ArtRage for drawing with. They are geared more for tabletPC with easy to navigate interfaces to quickly change from tool to tool without interrupting workflow too much.
The animation programs both have thier strengths and faults. The drawing quality on PAP is really nice and it seems like the interfae, while pretty non-stantard, is easy to use. There are still some issues with Tablet PCs, as the cursor tracking doesn't quite match up to where you think you are drawing on different parts of the screen. Hopefully they will fix this before the final release of V4. Flipbook has a more standard interface,and is easy to use and fast, but the drawing tools really need some work. It was designed more for scanning in traditional animation, or capturing stop-mo from a camera, and consequently the drawing tools were never developed properly. It does let you do full on ink and paint of 2D animation though.
Oh, and Painter and ArtRage... I suck suck suck at painting.
I just started my second term as a campus mentor at
Animation Mentor. I'm looking forward to seeing another group of students come in and start down this difficult path of becoming an animator. It's very inspiring to see so many people excited and dedicated to learning the craft, so good luck to you all!
