Anyway, it’s been a theme for me lately.

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Now I am not down on abstract art in any way.  Most of mine is abstract too.  I just think that as any kind of artist, we must come to the realization that not everyone is going to understand our work, in fact… count on it.

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Hello,
A while ago I was really into digital art. I’m painting in oil pastels at the moment. I did a series of abstracts in addition to some digital art portraits I find the ability to layer images the most satisfying part of digital. I mainly use illustrator and photoshop. I had an old tablet that I never could become one with. I’m sure the newer ones are much better. What do you think?
J.Reinartz

J, I love the work you sent here below.  Many times when an artist picks up digital to any degree, it’s like starting over from scratch rather than an extension of their work.

I too love being able to work in layers to achieve certain effects.  That was a totally new concept to me when I began working in the digital form.

As for the tablets. They are much better than they used to be.  I had tried an old graphire before and found myself hating it.  With the intuos3 they have really improved to the level that it’s worthwhile having one in your art arsenal.

If you have some work you’d like to share with us, submit it by emailing william@b5media.com  I’d love to post your work too.

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Issues.
I’ve fully transitioned to using the tablet as my primary pointing device though.  There are times it responds slow when I am using program(s) that are fairly intensive (such as browsing the web with 5 tabs open, installing some software, and rendering a movie in the background).  During these times, since I am using this on a laptop, I just use the little touch pad. 

Drawing.
I am impressed with the pressure sensitivity that this thing has.  I’ve been using it with a fairly cheap (compared to everything else) program called Smoothdraw (which runs at $45 as a download with a nice free trial by the way too) and it has performed admirably.  I can achieve almost perfect pencil effects with the Intuous3.

Price.
Okay, I analyze things to death and initially, I don’t think think I could have justified paying almost $300 for this piece of plastic that sets on my desk and I only use for graphics every now and then.  But after using it and getting through those initial four hours of frustration, I use it almost constantly now.  It begs to be drawn on.  As for the price, well think about it this way:

How much do you spend on paper, illustration board, canvases, prismacolor pencils, watercolors, acrylics, sketch journals each year?

See what I mean, I think I just saved myself around $600 I normally would spend elsewhere to get my sketching fix for the year (I’m the one who always buys tons of sketch journals and pilot v5 pens).  Now, since I take my laptop with me about everywhere anyway as a professional blogger, I just bring my tablet along too.  It’s about the size of a larger sketch book, but with endless possibilities.

The above review was for Amazon.com when they contacted me about reviewing it on their site.  Then I realized that I only could write 300 characters there.  Then I figured out that it would be good to publish here because "hey, Amazon doesn’t pay me to write for them!"

Enjoy.

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I’m not trying to rush it or anything, but this is the results of that thought. 

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But this is my first true digital painting.

Not bad for a first day with a tablet if I do say so myself.  My wife likes daisies, so this is for her.

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Below was an idea I had for a (funky) Christmas card derived from me playing with layers in paint shop pro.

My apologies to anyone who I may have freaked out with the thought of Christmas being only 4 months away.

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So here’s what’s included in this episode.

Exc interview with Ms Rosario Dawson and a personal walkthrough of her comic series.

Exclusive catch-up with Ed Brubaker – Veteran of the industry talking candidly about killing off Captain America and his career to date.

Corey El Rey Lewis then chatted with MySpace about Sharkknife and PENG, two distinct comics that obviously reflect his distinctive vision and worldview.

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But I failed to mention color schemes in the process. 

I have found the following to be a pretty good standard for colors.  If the colors appear together in nature, then they will work visually for your project.  Granted, this is a pretty loose judgement, but it seems to work for me.

The color scheme above is entitled Fire Flower, based off of the colors of the following image I took while on vacation earlier this year.

I haven’t worked out how to pull these types of color values out using free software yet such as gimp, but I have found a website that will do it for you. 

By the way, this is the flower I used for that really, really annoying post.

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I look forward to the two erasers! lol

Post from: Artist Hideout