More comics! MORE COMICS! wooooo!
I got a new drawing rig! If that’s the sort of thing that interests you, read on and join me on a tech tirade! if not, just scroll down to the next comic! 😉
I LOVE digital art. I mean, I love making all art, but I especially love digital art- the intersection of creative expression with technology just GETS me. And, for probably about six years now, my main art set up has been an iPad Pro (two different iterations of the 12.9 model actually!) and I’ve LOVED it. It’s portable, it’s convenient, it’s sturdy, and it has a full-featured port of Clip Studio on the app store, which is the only software I like using. I didn’t really have a ‘desk’ once we had kids, so portable was the name of the game.
But for as long as I’ve been interested in digital art, I’ve always pined after the Cadillac of digital art set-ups: the Wacom Cintiq. It’s a big ol screen (anywhere from 16 to 24 inches large) that you hook up to a PC and draw on using their sweet pressure-stylus… that’s a LOT more drawing real estate than an iPad. All the cool comics artists and animators I looked up to had them. Of course, they used to be like $5k, so not really in my price range.
But lately I’ve noticed that thee prices of ones worth getting started to come down more in the $3k price range. And I have a desk/desk area! Which means I could use a larger set up. I started thinking to myself “Maybe I should get a Cintiq.” But I read some troubling reviews and asked around to friends who own them, and what I heard from real people who really owned them was “Yeah, it’s been a headache owning it- dead pixels, driver issues, etc etc.” Not what you wanna hear when you’re dropping $3k on something.
So, I decided I’d take a chance on a different brand, Huion to be specific. I had an old Huion HD 22 inch at my old job for animating and teaching students to drawn and animate. It was a beast and it was quirky and old, but it worked. I figured, “well, I imagine they’re only gotten better since I used that one four years ago.”
HOT DANG I WAS RIGHT!
I love it. I got a Huion 16 inch 2.5k drawing display, and it’s great. It’s going to allow me to use programs outside of just Clip Studio that I love using on the PC- things like Moho (animation) and Affinity desinger/publisher. The 16 inch display is as tall as the ipad, but considerably longer, which makes drawing on it real nice! PLUS, because it’s hooked up to my mac Mini, everything just runs so much snappier than on an iPad.
Anyways, some examples of what I’ve been able to draw with it:
That second one is actually a brush that I made in Clip Studio using the Huion. It was a lot of fun to make, and now I’ll never have to draw book cases ever again! haha.
The biggest difference between the iPad and the Huion (aside from the screen size) is the stylus. The Apple Pencil v2 is awesome, but the Huion has a more Wacom-style stylus that has some squishy spring-loaded give in the nib of the pen, which makes it feel so natural when you’re pressing into the screen to get different line variation.
Now it ain’t all roses- the Huion doesn’t have multi-touch gestures like an iPad does. The Cintiqs that DO have multi-touch as well as pen input are quite a bit more expensive than I’d ever personally want to spend money on. But even though the Huion doesn’t have touch input outside of the stylus, I’m lucky in that I’m actually sort of used to it- back in the day before I had displays to draw on and I used things like Wacom Bamboo’s and Wacom Intuos drawing slates, I got really used to using hot keys and whatnot to zoom/track/rotate/whatever the canvas faster than I can pinch zoom anyways. I’ve only used the Huion a couple days and already I’m basically used to navigating the canvas this way once again.
This blog post has gotten real long, so I’ll try to wrap it up!
I still enjoy drawing on the reMarkable 2 e-ink tablet. A lot of my digital art set ups are designed to help me go FASTER, and the reMarkable really helps me to slow down. I made a video about it some time ago, and I think I’ll make a follow up at some point:
Other than that, there were a few comics from the archive that I was reading through that caught me off guard and gave me a laugh:
And with that, I’ve successfully posted a Sunday update! Although, looking at my clock, it’s 12:01 midnight, meaning it’s actually monday. DANG. I should probably go to sleep.
Thanks so much for reading this blog post, and reading my comics, and watching my videos, and all that fun stuff!
GO GO MACH ROCKET SHEEP! 