I got a drawing tablet last week. It’s an XP-Pen Deco 02. I used to be pretty good at drawing with pencil and paper, but I left that all behind when I was about 15 as school work piled up. Art for the Leaving Cert (the state exam in Ireland before university/college) was as much about art history as drawing a still life or a 3D projection, and it didn’t appeal to me.
Many years ago I bought a small Wacom tablet, but I could never get it working properly in Linux, so it was thrown aside. This tablet is a different beast. It’s huge in comparison with the small tablet I had before and much more sensitive. For a horrified hour, I thought that the pen pressure wasn’t being picked up by the computer. I reinstalled drivers a few times, rebooted, installed Wacom drivers too, in desperation. In the ends, I figured it out. I was using a brush in Krita that didn’t have any pressure controls!
In days gone by, I’d buy a book on drawing, but now I looked up YouTube. There are so many drawing tutorials!
This one by Marc Brunet had some solid ideas for progressing through 30 days, practising drawing circles and cubes and projections, but I needed a more basic introduction to using a tablet to draw.
Next up was Brad, who had this video showing some simple exercises to do, drawing circles in each corner of the canvas, drawing circles around them, and then joining them. Flushed with success, I looked at his other videos and found another video explaining how to draw digitally for beginners.
While it was good for practise, I probably should have stuck to drawing circles and other simple shapes, but this video did make me more aware of layers and different brushes. The result of my efforts may not look quite like what Brad had drawn on his video, however.
Onwards and upwards!
Well done taking the plunge and learning new tools. Similar to you, I’ve been accumulating courses in Udemy on using Affinity Designer but have ended up using YouTube just as much. Keep it up!