I love graphics tablets

A graphics tablet brings art and animation closer together. It means that you can combine good animation tecnique with artistic flair. Most animators are artists at heart and have probably spent their lives holding a pencil. Being able to simulate the action of using a pencil as a piece of hardware is an ingenious idea. Before I bought a graphics tablet i was having great difficulty using a mouse to animate. It feels unnatural to move around the software packages and trying to draw with a flat hand using a mouse. The leaders of graphics tablets are Wacom and they are generally very expensive to buy. I bought myself a cheap one by Trust and so far it hasn't given me any problems. I have been using it for about a year and a half now and it has been an invaluable tool. I use my tablet to colour in Photoshop and it has been very useful in packages like ToonBoom. Like traditional animation it means you can draw directly into each frame. It can be more time consuming but in the end the work pays off and it looks better. It steps the animation up a notch rather than using simple shapes.