Final Year begins!

It’s been a while since my last post on here, mainly because I’ve had a busy summer working on my MG! Since getting back to University in Huddersfield it’s been very busy indeed, I wrote a review of Spore for the student magazine and I’ve been busy getting myself ready for the workload that comes with the final year of a degree.

After working at Canalside Studios for a year and using decent graphics tablets I decided the time had come for me to invest in a Wacom tablet, more specifically the Intuos 3 SE A5 wide model. Being the Special Edition model built to celebrate 10 years of Wacom, the package came bundled with an airbrush and also comes in a special black finish. The airbrush is an interesting addition because initially I was confused how it differed from the regular stylus apart from the extra £90 it would cost to buy it seperately! After some research I found out that it worked like a real airbrush but it needed brushes configuring for it in Photoshop. Once this is done you can set the wheel to adjust anything you want like opacity or brush size whilst the tip is configurable as well which essentially gives you control of 2 different properties of the paint in one pen. Very useful!

Here’s a shot of my desk to give you an idea of the size of the A5 wide unit. Its roughly the size of a keyboard and I’d say just about the right size for a 22″ wide screen monitor. I map the working space exactly which leaves a strip about a 1cm wide at the edge of the tablet which is unusable but I’d rather have the correct ratio when I’m painting. The extra 1cm just goes onto my second monitor in any case which isn’t a problem.