Cheap Graphics Tablet?

#13

Welcome to the digital drawing club and I hope you enjoy your investment.

#14

Thank you Kahn. Now off to look at some tutorials. :grin: Should get here today.

#15

You may find this helpful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPJfS4rHnzY

#16

PERFECT! This is fantastic. Thank you!

#17

any experience with using a tablet, ipad, to draw with? just curious if there’s a big difference between a ipad and a drawing tablet. I have an “old” ipad 4th gen so I am limited in the choices of apps.

#18

Shoot us a couple uploads after you get your tablet. i wanna see what you can do with that bad boy. it will also be great to look at later down the road to see exactly how much you have improved over time

#19

Heh considering I haven’t done hand drawn art after the age of 5 or so it would be not good to look at. I really want that record too in the hopes to actually see improvement. Not sure this forum is the right place for that though.

#20

@Chaosmeister
You can post whatever you want to Erratic Errata section. Also there is a specific artwork thread here as well: Get yo Art on Peeple!

@G0R1LLAMUNCH
There are some differences indeed.

A drawing tablet connects to your computer and you can draw in any software you have. There are many free and paid drawing programs out there. Your computer is most likely more powerful than a tablet, which is a plus. Basically a computer is generally the better platform to draw on from a technical perspective.

With an ipad you are limited to whatever app is available on the app store, which is way more limiting but there are some great apps out there for iOS like Procreate. If you have an Apple pencil, you can use your ipad to draw just fine. A tablet has way less clutter and is better for portability and ease of use.

Other than software, there are differences in hardware too but those aren’t important in your case.

#21

Have been doing some arting every day so far, feels good. One question though. I think my images may be too big, I do 11*17 Inches at 300 dpi. They look great but when I do tokens for example and have to scale them down there is so much detail lost as the lines are fine. Anyone have a good recommendation?

#22

i usually do my tokens at a canvas 10x6 (or 6x10 for landscape creatures such as wolves or alligators and 6x6 for foreground tokens like boulders and bushes). when i am done i use the wand tool to select the whole drawing and trim the canvas to fit the token (crop tool also works well for this, but then you have to adjust the size yourself). it seems to keep the detail pretty well when i upload it into roll 20. i hope this helps you out man. i cant wait to see some of your work!

#23

here is one of my recent assets that i made (a yog crystal heart for a golem) using the 6x6 method i explained above.

rock%20heart
rock heart.png1707x1889 509 KB

#24

Thanks TheWunderLich, it’s a good pointer. I am not really painting any bigger than that. What’s your DPI and do you export to R20 in full res? Because I size my tokens down to about 200*200px

#25

I just use the dpi that it starts as, pretty sure its 300, but I would have to check my computer to make sure. I save the pics as a .png and upload it to roll20 as is, the resolution seems to be fine so far. Hope that is helpful

#26

It is, thank you very much!

#27

Just my two cents here but if you were to produce tokens to sell on Roll20 they require 280 x 280 at 72 DPI (PNG). I took that to be a good standard to follow. However, I have found that if you start with 280 x 280 it is pixelated when you illustrate it in photoshop and the quality is really not that good. I found that the best method is to start larger and illustrate at 560 x 560 at 300 DPI, I then make a copy of the final image and reduce the size to 280 x 280 at 72 DPI (PNG). This method allows for better line quality and then meets the recommended size requirements from Roll20, anything larger is actually a waste of space and bogs down the system. 300 DPI is best for if you were to print a physical copy on paper, not as a digital asset.

Maps and backgrounds are a different animal, they start much larger. 1920 x 1080 (JPEG) is a rough standard. I begin with 300 DPI and then make a copy and reduce the DPI to 72 while keeping the 1920 x 1080 size. Roll20 recommends JPEG for backgrounds.

Hope this helps!

#28

XP-Pen. Budget price, and it’s been working like a charm close to a year.

I think mine is Star G640 - $30.

#29

I am just doing them for my players. Thanks though, good advice.

#30

Fair enough, your players are lucky to have you running things!

#31

Heh Thanks, we will see.

#32

personally I have a XP-Pen Star G430 osu drawing tablet . Astoundingly, the tablet not only works well in affinity photo , it appears to take full advantage of some default features of the program. Good product for its cheap price that I can’t see any flaws with. Although its size is relatively small compared to other tablets I have still found it large enough. Also used it on Osu where it works well.