Digital art-fest extravaganza

I finally bought a graphics tablet. I've been told time and time again that you shouldn't get any graphics tablet that isn't made by Wacom, but I didn't want to spend hundreds of dollars on something that really didn't seem like it should be that expensive. Browsing the graphic_design subreddit, I stumbled on this review for a $50 tablet made by Monoprice. The reviewer gave it nothing but praise, and all the comments in the reddit thread concurred that it was a great product. And if it turned out to be crap, then hey, I'm only out $50.

It's pretty fantastic. As the review shows, it has the quality and accuracy of any Wacom. I have no idea why it's so cheap, but it's one of the better purchases I've made.

I was inspired to finally get a tablet thanks to an awesome dude I'm working with at my internship. His personal work is really good, most of it is pretty trippy (his piece is one of the first things that comes up in google when you search "trippy." He's pretty proud of that). He creates most of his work in a 3D program called Zbrush, which was interesting to me, because I wasn't even aware that was an option. He's shown me some stuff in Zbrush and let me toy around with it a little, but I'm not really feeling it. It seems like it would be so much easier just to freakin' draw it out and no have to worry about 3D crap. Though, I might use it to cheat when I need a proportional human model (there are free 3D models online), because the human figure pisses me the hell off and I hate dealing with it and I don't want to spend hours and hours and hours doing terrible sketches of the human body so fuck that. I'm not interested in making human beings anyway.

Anyway the last week has me obsessed with Mass Effect again, so I really want to do a portrait of Saren or a reaper or something. I found this awesome resource on deviantart and sketched out a few reapers earlier to familiarize myself. I got plans.

Those ideas are a long ways off, I actually have to learn how to make digital art first. We're never taught these things in graphic design classes, we're taught how to do magazine layouts and business cards and logos and stuff, which I can do, but it does get a little boring and tedious sometimes. I bought a couple books on digital art and I'm going to be teaching myself for a little while before I attempt anything big. In the meantime, I've spent hours on deviantart getting jealous at how fucking good these people are. Not sure if I'll ever be this great, but it's something to aspire to.