i got the coolest present from my parents this christmas, a wacom drawing tablet, but i haven’t had a chance to play with it until this afternoon because i was waiting for my new baby to arrive (see previous post).

using it for the first time (i’ve never played with a graphics tablet before) is exciting and eerie. unlike a mouse, where position/movement is relative to the location of the cursor on the screen (you can pick up the mouse and place it back down and the cursor is still in the same place), with the graphics tablet, the position is relative to the location of the pen on the tablet surface, which maps to the screen area, so if you pick up the pen and move it to another part of the tablet, the cursor mysteriously moves to that spot. it’s like learning how to mouse all over again.

another neat thing is that the tablet senses the location of the pen when it’s hovering over the surface. it only draws (or clicks) when you’re actually dragging along the surface. so you can move the pen and see the location of the cursor without drawing. in other words it acts uncannily like a real pen.

so after writing my signature like 10 times and scribbling in ms paint (the only graphics software i had installed at this point), i thought “well, might as well just draw (er, sketch) what’s right in front of me.” which happened to be a chair.

suffice it to say i’m pretty much blown away at how much fun it was to draw “into” my computer and have it look as good or better than using pen on paper. click on the image above to see the full original version.