I purchased Corel Painter a while ago after getting a heads-up from a friend that it was on special offer. It was an older version that still worked on my operating system, but having downloaded and installed it, I then did nothing with it and it sat on my hard drive gathering dust for four years. Some time later I got a drawing tablet for Christmas, and, being a luddite old-school pencil and paper kind of guy, I found a choice spot for it in a corner and left it there in the box for eight months.
A friend got in touch back in July, saying he had written a book and wanted some illustrations to go with it. Another artist had already done some pictures but not been able to continue with them, and my friend wanted the remainder of the pictures done in the same style. However, inspection of the other guy's illustrations revealed that he'd used a drawing tablet to produce them, rendering them in that clean, precise style of which only digitally-drawn images are capable. Having told my friend that I couldn't draw digitally and having agreed with him to start the pictures over in my traditionally-rendered style, I then gave in to an impulse, broke out the tablet and fired up Corel Painter to see what would happen. Shockingly, the drawing tablet was easy to use and the software was intuitive and the resulting pictures weren't horrendous.
One of the biggest advances to my workflow when using the tablet is that I can do my usual drawing in blue coloured pencil and scan it on to my computer and paint over a greyscale version of the drawing. This cuts out the time-consuming stage of having to trace the blue pencil drawing on to watercolour paper before painting, and I can also do the drawing at a larger scale on A3 paper where before I was restricted to A4.
Sometimes you just need a little push to get out of your comfort zone and do a new thing.
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