CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

I've been working on getting a feel for my Wacom tablet and I wanted to know if you all had any tips. My main problems are making smooth, crisp lines. Line weight and thickness vary abruptly in ways I don't intend and I find it very difficult to get the kind of smooth lines I'm used to with a pen. Does any one have any advice on how to make things look a little more clean and natural?

Oh, I suppose I should mention my equipment. I forget the exact specs of my tablet but it's not particularly large. My programs are Photoshop CS and Inkscape. Inkscape is an open source program with features similar to Illustrator. It has a nice way of smoothing out lines as I draw but it doesn't allow me to vary my line weight by pen pressure, and the smoothing is often counterproductive for small details.

I dunno...I'm having the same problem with my Wacom too...one thing I found that sort of helps is to put a piece of paper over the tablet and then draw. it helps the pen not slide around so much.

First of all, it takes practice to get the wacom to perform. There is a traction issue that can be solved using piece of paper as ShiHi mentioned. Somthing worth checking might be the PS:CS tablet settings... adjusting them can help the system work much better.

Indeed, your tablet options will have a lot of impact on your lines. Do you know how many levels of pressure sensitivity your particular tablet has? The higher the levels, the smoother your lines will be (and the more expensive the tablet). And I'm not familar with the CS version of photoshop, but it too should have options somewhere for configuring pressure sensitivity.

I'm not sure whether I can really help since I only use my tablet for coloring and screentoning. I've never attempted to line-draw on it. But, I've adjusted between the 3 levels of pressure sensitivity on the tablet itself.