My Work Setup

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Spending the day hunched over a Cintiq will make you a hunchback. So, inspired by Borodante’s enlightened video entitled This is Why Your Drawing Setup Sucks!, I experimented with duplicating my Cintiq screen on my 27-inch iMac screen. The goal is to be able to sit upright in a posture that will not hurt my spine and neck. It will take some time to get used to using my Cintiq as a plain, but very expensive, tablet, but if it helps my back it will be a great change.

In the picture it looks like the Cintiq color values are green compared to the iMac. The Cintiq screen is actually calibrated correctly. It has a matte screen that’s a miracle to draw on. When I’m sitting in front of these two screens, the images have the same colors, but the Cintiq images are less brilliant. That’s the price you pay for having a matte screen that feels like butter.

Black & White Text Print

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Text box 80% opacity.

Text box 80% opacity.

Pure white text bubbles look harsh and seem disconnected from my book’s images. To get a better effect, I set the textbox background opacity to 80% to give the feeling that the boxes are an organic part of the page rather than a sticker pasted on. With the textboxes at 80% opacity the pages have a holistic feel, but I wanted to see how they would look on the printed page. I printed the page above in black and white at 300dpi to get an idea of the levels. They look just right…in black and white, at least.

I’ve moved my Cintiq back to my Windows box and I’m happy now. Clip Studio Paint works better on Windows 10 than on macOS, at least with my gear. I can’t find anything on the Web about poor performance on Macs, so I’m thinking that it may be my Apple hardware that sucks.

Today I Moved Two Inches Forward

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Today I put in a solid six hours of work and finished two pictures. I feel that working with the Cintiq is many times more productive than working with the Huion pen display or with the Wacom Intuos tablet. Really! I used to scoff when artists claimed they worked twice as fast with their Cintiq’s as they did with the Intuos tablets. I’m a believer now.

By the way, I use the word “finished” cautiously. I’m painfully aware that, in my case at least, a picture is finished only when I can no longer bear to look at it, or when I realize the every “improvement” I make is pulling the picture further off track.

I started page 23 yesterday and completed it today. I started and completed page 24 today. I’m giving myself an encuraging pat on the back. There are 50 pages in this book, so I’m about half way there. “There” is June 30, the deadline I’ve set to get this book published.