Category Archives: Art

Wacom Cintiq HD13 DTK1301

Wow, two blog posts in a month, not to mention a year! I meant to write about my Cintiq HD13 many years ago, but I never got around to it because I never used it much – until more recently.

Wacom Cintiq HD13 DTK1301

Back in the early 2000s, when I first started doing digital art, I spent four hundred dollars on a much too large Wacom Intuos3, a fairly basic tablet that didn’t have a screen. I really would have liked a Cintiq, which did have a screen but cost more than twice as much, but I definitely did not do enough digital work to justify such a thing, and ultimately my Intuos served me well for a number of years.

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Digital Drawing 230304

When I started drawing more in pen a long, long time ago, it took a long, long time for it to catch up with pencil. I’d argue my pen work never felt as fluid as my pencil drawings, but it also helped improve my pencil work a lot, albeit in a roundabout way. Furthermore, drawing in pen has other benefits, so in the end I call it a tradeoff.

2018 anthology in ballpoint pen
2019 anthology in fountain pen
2020 anthology in pencil
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Digital Drawing 211108

I actually meant to write this last November, but various things got in the way, some of which I might write about later. The blog isn’t seeing much update since the Nonsense Wars Youtube is doing pretty well, and I’m posting stuff there that I might have previously posted here. Art stuff doesn’t really have a good place yet so…

Way back in 2012 I wrote about learning to use ink, remarking that it might be a turning point. That did turn out to be the case, though not necessarily in the way I thought. While, I did do more with ink afterward, I also managed to streamline my pencil drawing process, which paid far more dividends in the end. Anyway, I started to get that feeling again!

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Art Evolution Omnibus 2019 II

… and part two of the omnibus covers (increasingly uncommon) digital work.

So this “character sketch” from 2011 starts a series of digital paintings in which I implement a “hybrid” shading using pencil lines and digital color. I would not even think about doing this now, but at the time I needed a crutch to distinguish hard and soft divides in my shadows, which had been blurring into a muddy mess in the past few pieces.

11.07.09
11.07.09
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Art Evolution Omnibus 2019

Ten years ago in 2009 I wrote an NW post highlighting pieces that significantly influenced my drawing over the previous ten years. I don’t write about art much these days as it doesn’t change nearly as much, but I think another ten-year omnibus is appropriate.

I’m going to split out traditional and digital media because I find that variations in my digital painting are much more exploratory than progressive, while my traditional work – pencil, pen, colored pencil, even watercolor – does actually improve.

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