Hardware for pictures

Continuing a series of posts about how I do my pictures. Today about the hardware I use.

I started drawing for research/blog/talks on a Samsung tablet (therefore with my finger, not a stylus), using the first drawing software I found. It worked pretty well. For example the picture below was made at that time, and looks ok to me.

The important feature is that your drawing software supports layers, as said in the previous post.

Nowadays, I use a graphics tablet with a stylus. It is a “black” tablet, not one with an LCD display. So I need to plug it to the computer, and look at the screen of a computer, while moving the stylus on the tablet. It looks weird at first, but one gets used to it in a few minutes.

Specifically, I use a Repaper tablet by iskn, although I suspect any tablet would suffice for my modest needs. Actually, for me this tablet is a bit annoying because it is not supported by Linux (my usual OS), so I needed to go back and forth between Windows and Linux. I’ve heard that Wacom tablets work well with Linux (or Ubuntu at least).

I guess the bottom line is that for simple drawings you don’t need fancy stuff.