What the Wacom Can Do

After a minor case of unsubtle hinting, I was given a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch graphics tablet for Christmas.  I hadn't really used graphics tablets much before, and my last attempt (borrowing Tim's tablet, which is also a Wacom) produced this rather unimpressive bit of scribble:

A concept sketch for Fort Paradox 115: my first graphics-tablet drawing.  Srsly.

However, I was pretty sure that my initial failures were just teething trouble.  After all, I spent my first two or three weeks in The GIMP being hopelessly confused and (whisper it!) almost missing Photoshop, of all things - before it suddenly clicked one day, and I've been using the program for all sorts of things ever since.  I expected a similar thing would happen with the tablet, if I had one of my own and was able to get some practice.

It looks like I expected right.  This morning, I finished this (a rather better piece of scribble, if I say so myself):

Blue in the Firelight, January 2013

I almost crashed GIMP during the production process, as the image had so many layers; in the end I fixed the problem by separating the thing out into three different files - one with the initial compositional layers, a second to tidy up the line art, and a third to add the colour.  You can see a higher-resolution version of the finished picture on my DeviantArt page, and you might notice it cropping up as my new avatar on DeviantArt and on Steam.

Where next?   Well - here's a bit of good news for the Root Hill attendees among you - I'm very nearly finished the Root Hill On Camera 2012 DVD: the video segments are rendered, the disc menus are authored, and the print components have been designed.  All that remains is to produce the physical copies and get them in the post.  And once that little project (little... haha, right) is off my slate, I'm planning to try and get back to animating something.  So many ideas drifting around right now, including Papercuts episodes 5 onwards (waiting on script delivery from a guest writer or two), Arbitrary Stopframe Series 2 (waiting on... um... me getting round to it), The Murkum Show (working title, waiting on me figuring out what it's actually about apart from having lots of Doctor Murkum in it), and the long-planned Fishy Business remake Empire of the Pond (which has recently seen some movement on the test-illustrations front).  But more recently, the idea occurred to me that I should try doing a quick-and-dirty (that fatal phrase...) graphics-tablet cel animation featuring my little-known character Elbows Dude in a variety of improbable scrapes, which he solves with his elbow powers.  Right now, I honestly don't know which route I'll be going down next, but all five of them have some appeal, so I'll hopefully be picking one and getting down to business before too long.  Watch this space!


- The Colclough