Monday, October 24, 2016

Horse Tamers Daughter excerpt 3 and ink rant


My illustrated lyrics for the "Horse-Tamer's Daughter" song were the closest I ever got to doing Darkover themed sequential art. "Sequential art" is a classy way to refer to "comic books" or graphic novels. I dropped in small pieces which matched the line of text nearest to them. In this excerpt the lyrics panel originally would have obscured the body of the horse so I didn't draw it. I still want to do sequential art in this style, black ink drawing with a real old-style dip pen.

However I don't like to draw with dip pen, it's old-fashioned, messy, blot-filled, and hard to correct. For this reason I sunk big bucks into a Cintiq stylus tablet where I could do "digital inking" with no drips and wet napkins messing up and staining my hands. I've done a lot of work on the Cintiq but unfortunately there is a major design flaw in the Cintiq which comes either from Windows 10, Adobe Photoshop, or Wacom the maker of the Cintiq. This is kind of hard to explain but I'll try it. When I set my stylus down and apply pressure to the screen to draw, a little circle appears around the stylus point spot, and then a pop-up menu appears and covers my drawing so I can't draw. This happens almost every time I touch stylus to screen. I have to stop the pop-up by tapping the stylus again. 

I called Wacom and they were at least helpful in saying that it was a known problem. But they were helpless to suggest a remedy and they said to try to contact Microsoft about it. Surely they jest. As for Adobe, they are the least user-friendly graphics software people I know. I searched the Almighty Google for forums where people might have answers, and I did find a few, but they didn't work for me.

I have no idea what is going on and no change or upgrade is forthcoming so I use my Cintiq just as it is, dismissing pop-ups every few seconds when I draw. Thousands of units must have been sold by now so does any other Cintiq user have the problem? One of my favorite artists, Simon Stalenhag, uses a Cintiq just like mine and I would like to contact him about it but he only allows contact through "Tumblr" and I have tried to enter "Tumblr" but failed. OK enough ranting.

Black ink old fashioned dip pen on old fashioned paper, 2" x 6", summer 1984 when no one worried about unwanted computer pop-ups. Click for a larger 2016 view.

No comments: