Tutorial Dog

In this Photoshop tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up Photoshop so that it can use the tablets input, create an outline from a photo, color and shade all using the tablet. The tutorial includes a time lapse of the process I took to creating the final product.
A graphic tablet allows you to take Adobe Photoshop to a new level. You can take advantage of the brush tool and it’s powerful ability to imitate different traditional mediums of art and human input. For this tutorial, I’ll be using a Wacom Bamboo tablet. It’s Wacom’s (Wacom is the industry standard supplier) most inexpensive tablet ($79), but still does a good job. Tablets can range from the Bamboo which has only pressure sensitivity, to monitor tablets with pressure & tilt sensitivity. The monitor tablets are relatively expensive investments though. If you’ve never used a tablet before, it will take some time getting acquainted. One thing that would throw me off was that when I draw, I like to rotate the paper to draw straighter, but that doesn’t fly on a tablet because the cursor becomes disoriented on a non-monitor tablet.

Start Large, then downscale. The most important thing to know BEFORE you start, is to start BIG. Working on a large document will allow you to zoom better but more importantly downscale all the minor imperfections you would see at a larger size. Start at least twice (four times is optimal) the size of what you expect to be the final image size.

Step 1: Outline

For this tutorial, I’ll draw Kobe Bryant from an image. One great thing is you can draw an outline right on top of the image. Create your document (remember 2x or 4x it’s intended size) and import any reference images making sure you resize the image to take up the appropriate space in the photoshop document.

Setting Up the Brush with Tablet

The first thing you’ll want to do is create a new layer for the outline. To set up the brush controls, take a hard round brush (the size depends on the size of the document). To enable the tablets input, we need to access the Brush palette ( Menu Bar >> Window >> Brushes ). First set the spacing to 1% under the “Brush Tip Shape” option. Next enable the “Shape Dynamics” and set the Size Jitter control to Pen Pressure & the Roundness Jitter control to Pen Tilt. Since my tablet doesn’t have tilt support, you see a caution sign next to the tilt control. The tilt isn’t necessary, and you