Friday, January 28, 2011

Hi-Tech Tangle

I got an awesome new toy for myself for Christmas, a Wacom Intuos tablet.  Now I can tangle on my computer with Photoshop.  Does anyone else out there do this?

I've been having so much fun learning how to make tangle brushes and figuring out how to do "pencil" shading by changing my brushes.  Once I get a few, I'll post them here if anyone else wants to try it.

I did my "Tangled in Art" title using Photoshop as well as my football tangle. Here is one of my favorites.

5 comments:

  1. Lovely, I too am a PhotoShop junkie but I do all my original Zentangle pen to paper and scan them in. I'm a graphic designer and find it refreshing to get away from the computer for the Zentangle process. Enjoy your tablet and exploration, it's a great creative journey that we're all on.

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  2. I've been eyeing off Wacom tablets for ages. How do you find it for shading? That would be the main thing I'd miss - pushing the graphite around on the paper with my paper stump. Would really appreciate your feedback on your experience with it so far!! (Also a Photoshopper, ex Graphic Designer.)

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  3. I first tried to tangle with photoshop because I had no scanner and needed to get one of my drawings onto my computer. I got so frustrated with my camera I decided it would be faster just to recreate the thing.

    I don't have trouble shading. What I do with a pencil is just use a very light touch and put multiple layers where I want it darker. I shade the same way on the computer, but my " light touch" is a very large soft brush. Hardness: 0. Opacity:35, flow: 30. I also change the brush settings to be pressure sensitive. Sometimes I mask off the background and use a huge brush. Then approach from the outside in and you get a very soft shading. You can see I used this in my header.

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  4. Thanks for all that info, Cris! I think I know what I'm putting on my b'day present list this year. [grin] My eventual idea is to be able to draw on the Wacom, and have the laptop connected to a data projector, so I can draw tangles and have it project onto the wall in real time... for teaching classes. I think that would be awesome! Currently I demonstrate on paper (which I would continue to do some of - because that's the medium we're using anyway) and I have overhead transparencies that I then leave up on the wall for people to refer to as they're trying out the new tangle.

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  5. wow, you can do that well with PS, that's awesome. I have paint shop pro and a wacom tablet that I love, but controlling the pen is something else. The wiggly lines are magnified, so then I have to use vectors. It just doesn't give me the same sense of 'whatever' to tangle on the computer. All my other art, I love doing on the computer!!! We'll see, now that I've seen your work, I'll probably give it more of a try. Great work.

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