What graphics tablet do you use? Which art software?

[Kool-Aid]

Hey guys, for those of you who use graphics tablets with your Linux Mint for art purposes:
- What model graphics tablet do you use?
- Which art software do you use with it? (Krita, GIMP, Inkscape, or any other?)

Your help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[MikeNovember]

Hi,

I use a Wacom tablet.

No art software, just Gimp.

Regards,

MN

[Kool-Aid]

Thank you.

[Ivy_Pool]

My youngest uses the Wacom Intuos (possibly the M model) and Krita. She took an online Krita class last year.

[iliketrains]

No artistic talent here whatsoever but I do a lot of SVG editing. Pressure sensitivity and brush strokes, etc, don't matter much for that kind of work.
A budget 4x5 Wacom and Inkscape.

[stereo555]

Wacom Intuos4 Medium
Primarily Krita, which is very impressive. GIMP is used occasionally but it's nowhere near as user-friendly as Krita.

[Kool-Aid]

My youngest uses the Wacom Intuos (possibly the M model) and Krita. She took an online Krita class last year.

Thank you.

[Kool-Aid]

No artistic talent here whatsoever but I do a lot of SVG editing. Pressure sensitivity and brush strokes, etc, don't matter much for that kind of work.
A budget 4x5 Wacom and Inkscape.

Thank you.

[Kool-Aid]

Wacom Intuos4 Medium
Primarily Krita, which is very impressive. GIMP is used occasionally but it's nowhere near as user-friendly as Krita.

Thank you.

[Kool-Aid]

Wacom Intuos4 Medium
Primarily Krita, which is very impressive. GIMP is used occasionally but it's nowhere near as user-friendly as Krita.

I agree. GIMP is constantly been portayed as this ultimate Photoshop alternative but I am struggling to get to know it. However I am going to give Krita a try. Some of the artwork I have seen made with it looks amazing.

[rickNS]

I don't have any 'dedicated' graphics tablet as such, but do have a Thinkpad x200 Tablet. I just updated it to Mint 21. I got it pretty cheap, and would never sell because of it being a tablet. Nice bight screen too.

GIMP, ..ha I swore I had another program as well.

I agree. GIMP is constantly been portayed as this ultimate Photoshop alternative but I am struggling to get to know it.

Check out some of Tom Bland's videos, very well made / explained.
https://www.youtube.com/user/235bluefox/videos

EDIT; reason, fix spelling.

[AndyMH]

Don't use them much but I have two huion tablets. One (a small one) worked 'out of the box', The other
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00 ... UTF8&psc=1
didn't work. I had to install the digimend drivers from github. Having said that, fairly recently huion released their own linux drivers.

I checked them out with pinta and krita, don't use gimp.

[Kool-Aid]

Don't use them much but I have two huion tablets. One (a small one) worked 'out of the box', The other
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00 ... UTF8&psc=1
didn't work. I had to install the digimend drivers from github. Having said that, fairly recently huion released their own linux drivers.

I checked them out with pinta and krita, don't use gimp.

Thank you.

[Kool-Aid]

Hello Everyone, A little update.
I purchased the XP-Pen Artist 12 Pro. The driver was very easy to install. I went to the website and simply downloaded the driver for it.
https://www.xp-pen.com/download-450.html

So far the only issue I have had with it is the monitor and pen calibration settings. The laptop recognises the tablet but the cursor does not go to the right place when I use the pen. I had to turn off the laptop's monitor in order for the cursor to match the pen's movement.

Here's the problem: Both the laptop and the tablet are connected. When I place the pen on the right of the table it aligns with the pen, but when I move the pen to the left of the tablet, the cursor moves all the way to the left of the laptop monitor.

I don't know how to solve this problem.

Today I installed Krita and Inkscape and they work great. Krita is very similar to photoshop so I recommend that one. Inkscape is completely different to illustrator, a bit clunky with some familiar features missing. Of course this will take a while to get used to with some practice.

[ShyGuy]

I use a Wacom Cintiq 16 and Krita. I recently installed Medibang Paint in Bottles to play around with it.

[spamegg]

Wacom Intuos S P3 Small tablet, no art software but I use Xournal++ https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp for preparing mathematical learning content. I'd like to get into GIMP and Krita later.

[Petermint]

I find a good mouse on the right surface is excellent for drawing. For shading, I have an old tablet but it is not pressure sensitive in a useful range. Perhaps part of your question could be which stylus for shading.

[Portreve]

I don't have a graphics tablet since I'm not an artist, but I will share a bit of my own workflow here as maybe it might be of benefit to someone.

Typically when I'm producing something for print (either literally "printed out" or as an image to be displayed on-screen) I will use GIMP to do any pre-processing of the underlying raster image (assuming that's what we're talking about) and then I'll take it into Scribus to do any sort of text or other primitives overlay (for example, speech balloons). Once I have the layout completed, I will generally convert the text to outlines, and then output the whole thing as an SVG.

Then, I will bring that SVG into GIMP and have it rasterize it at an appropriate resolution after cropping to content (the page size will be much larger than the image) and then I output that as a PNG.

The higher the resolution you generate (particularly where fonts and vector art are concerned) the better the rendering you'll get. Then, I'll take that and have GIMP compress the image down to the finished size, which is the point at which I save it as the PNG as mentioned above.

Sometimes, I will have a piece of line art which already exists in a printed state, or which I am sourcing from a rasterized image. I will generally take that and bring it into Inkscape to let it do auto-tracing, which I will tweak the parameters until I get it exactly the way I want it (that is, as true to the original as possible without picking up previous-raster defects like stair-stepping, etc.) and then once I get it exactly the way I want, I'll save that as an SVG. Sometimes all of that is a preliminary step for me to take the image and use it elsewhere, at which point (generally) it gets re-rasterized somewhere else. Of course, it will generally be much better quality than it would be otherwise.

I used to have an account on Café Press, and they want their art at 300 dpi and (depending on the piece you're applying it to) there are some specific dimensions it has to be built to. I would use Inkscape and GIMP as image and artwork processors, then Scribus to do the layout, and then GIMP to rasterize as a 300 dpi PNG (which happened to be Café Press's preferred format).

The truth about graphics work is it's probably best treated with a healthy dose of UNIX philosophy: cleanly-designed, purpose-built tools to do what they are best at, so that the finished product has the benefit of the best tool for each element of its nature.