New drawing tablet, finally got my new tattoo design...

Hi guys!

Sorry for the silence... I seem to kind of just stopped tattooing, think I got bored of doing Sailor Jerry flash...
Have started drawing but I'm waaaaaay slow with pencil and paper. Just keep redoing because it's never clean or perfect enough, threw away a forest worth of paper by now. Don't seem to have these issues on a digital medium so decided to get myself a new drawing tablet and fire the good old photoshop back up! Hopefully I'll get the creative juices flowing and my priorities straight! Anyway, here's the first creation and most probably my next tattoo... otherwise it will still be a nice addition to m wall maybe... (the one in the picture is fake btw )

Nice, glad to see your back.

Really nice. I'd definitely wear that

Very nice work!

I have it the other way around to be honest... I really prefer paper for sketching, scan it as a template and use my Wacom/Photoshop or Illustrator to tighten it all up an add shadow etc. I get way more 'organic' or flowing lines that way.

Really dig the design you made!

Love it! Nice to see you here again

Photoshop on tablet....????

@balooka Before my old tablet stopped working I usually did roughly the same, and for the same reasons. I tend to use photoshop for clean ups and to quickly try some ideas which I can then sketch out again.
For some reason I just kept on tweaking this one and it took ages to trace everything over and over and over and over... guess all this fancy technology stuff just makes me lazy and impatient

@MalligaMallan No tablets but Photoshop on a laptop with a drawing tablet attached...

Tracing... I hear ya I trace in illustrator, either with active paint or just pen tool. I use PS and AI at work all day long so it's a second nature to me. Illustrator is much more forgiving when setting paths than photoshop and they both integrate really well.

For me this works really well because I save the illustrator path to photoshop as an active element (updates in PS if I modify in AI) and shade etc in photoshop. If I want to print for tattooing I print the shaded layer as reference and the illustrator lines for the stencil.

@balooka nice workflow! I like the paths, used them in PS a lot but never really got used to AI. Use it sometimes to convert my PS linedrawings to paths, and put them back into PS, but never for actual drawing. Should spend some more time learning it though but can't seem to get past the fact that I dont know how to change the line weight

I don't always start with a scan, could very well be a flash from internet, that is usually too small to use Main reason I work with AI is because I can scale with or without scaling the line weight.

Or better, set a line weight independent of scale. I use the pencil, not brush, to draw are flow lines like roses etc, and the pen for vector lines like a dagger etc. After drawing the lines I would like to see on my stencil I go to photoshop and add the shading and color. I can still edit the lines in AI and it'll get updated in the PS file.

Pencil tool is this one:


The speed you draw with dictates the level of smoothing/accuracy: it wil smooth out a fast drawn line or keep sharp corners if you go slow. Works AWESOME with a wacom/tablet.


Line weight in illustrator? You can use the presets (or download them) for calligraphy and such thing but for stencil maken I don't use them. My thermal copier will only take 1.5 pt or thicker lines.

@balooka awesome! thanks! will go give it a go soon

Good to see you back Pieter...if you quit who is going to do my tattoos???

Trying shading and colours for a ship I did a while ago with diluted black... you might notice I added water to the ink instead of the other way around... tattoo gets more solid toward the bottom
So that's two tattoos in the pipeline... going to be a fun weekend

@TexasPT Haha, thanks and no worries! Not going to quit, I just function in phases

bodey said:

@dirtnail is that the Deco 01 tablet?

Click to expand...

Yup, it is indeed

The tablet without screen like xp-pen deco 01 v2 is affordable but eye-hand coordination can be a problem for me.
I prefer the tablet with built-in screen like wacom cintiq or standalone tablet like ipad pro. they are more natural and intuitive because I can draw directly on the screen. the ipad is even more portable to take out and draw anywhere.