website/content/posts/putting-wacom-tablet-good-use.md

title	date	draft	type	tags
Putting the Wacom Tablet to Good Use!	2021-05-26	true	post	Linux Art

Originally posted on my old blog

I've had a Wacom tablet for a long time now, but there's just never been a legitimate use for it, really. Everything that I could do with the tablet, I could also do with my laptop's touchscreen and stylus, so it always seemed like a bit of a waste. Sure, the drawing experience is a little bit better, the screen is a bit larger, but why use a Wacom tablet when the touchscreen and stylus work just fine?

Well everyone, I've finally found a great use for it. It's quite obvious, actually: Krita, KDE's finest drawing and painting app! The touchscreen and stylus do work, if you count working as having a terrible drawing experience on a cramped screen since Krita likes overwhelming you with its menus and dockers which also take up a ton of valuable screen real estate. Also, the slightly better control of the stylus you can get with an actual Wacom tablet really helps too. (My laptop's touchscreen, which also coincidentally happens to be made by Wacom, is crying right now.) Behold the terrible drawing I did with the touchscreen and stylus. It's really terrible, just saying.

OK, so why I am even using Krita in the first place? Well, since school's starting to wrap up now, I've suddenly had a lot more free time, perfect for exploring Krita with my sister! Anyways, here's some takeaways about Krita:

1. You want a big tablet screen: See above why laptop touchscreens don't work too well.

2. The learning curve is well-designed: I thought the learning curve was overall quite nice. It didn't blast you with an impossible interface like something like Vim, while still not devolving into stupidity like VS Code. Mostly a nice consistent learning curve. Krita sure has a lot of features and it can do some powerful things! Of course, I will never learn how to do all of things, since you can already get make some pretty impressive drawings with just a few basic techniques.

3. It's slow: Maybe it's the slow computer; maybe it's the large poster-sized drawings that we're doing, but Krita's performance wasn't something to admire. Generally, things like drawings strokes were pretty speedy, but throw in some more fancy moves, like the move tool, or undo, or fancy effect brushes, and Krita would noticeably lag, sometimes quite painfully. I mean, you really don't want the undo button to take 10 seconds to work, right? It also takes a concerning amount of time to start up, but maybe it's my computer's fault for being slow.

4. Shading is hard: Yeah, I didn't believe my sister about this until I actually tried shading. It makes drawing seem so easy when you try shading. Just look at the painting at the bottom of this to get a glimpse at some truly horrible shading. Maybe I'm just not using the right brush for the job or something.

5. Layers, layers, layers: Layers are awesome! If only Krita wasn't so slow at managing them. (See above)

Here's the horrible drawing I promised. It's horrible in so many different ways, just saying...