Drawing lengthy lines/curves with a Wacom?

[yakz]

What are the techniques that you use to create a relatively long, CLEAN line or curve with a tablet?

With a good sharp pencil and paper that you can freely spin, drawing lines and curves isn't so difficult. You can't really rotate a 9x12 tablet around a bunch though, nor would you be constantly spinning the document around.

Plus, since the document is on the screen and you are drawing on a secondary surface, its difficult to go any significant distance and still hit the line or curve.

Do you try to draw slowly? Do you draw in little segments? How do you keep the line sharp and clean?

I'm asking, because the recorded scripts (for painter, or paintchat, etc) I've seen, the artist is always very sketchy. The lines are not clean like penciled and inked lines.

Also, plenty of people do digital inking.. so how do you keep the lines clean, and how do you do "long" lines and curves?

Thanks,

-Kyle

[ArtJunky]

This is one of those problems that I have run into myself. It would be nice if either Photoshop or Painter, or both had a tool that you could control a curve when drawing. The only method that I have is to use the curve tools but that's hardly like drawing. Ideally, the tool should be simple and would basically recognize the shape you are drawing and adjust it within a certain tolerance as you draw. So, if you are dragging a curve that is basically part of a circle, it would recognize this by holding down a keyboard command to make it conform to an oval shape.

Does this make sense?

After thinking about it a little more, I think there needs to be some sort of french curve tool that would allow you to select the french curve that you want and then draw close to the curve tool edge. I picture it allowing you to draw either close to the edge with the option to specify a range away from the edge that it still draws the line. In addition, I see it also allowing you to specify that you want it to snap to the edge of the curve for more precise curves or "feather" it for less precise lines.

I picture having a pulldown of curves that could be resized and rotated easily to fit the tactile drawing needs.

The other idea I was thinking of would be to have some sort of "gravitational" points. When using flash's vector brush tool, you can ask it to basically smooth lines to conform to common shapes.

Another idea would be to have a tool where you basically set the center of the arch, where you set the origin and then you start to draw. It would then basically give you a representation of a arch dependant on where you started to draw. It would need to be set so that there is a variability adjustment to it so that it didn't look too mechanical. Otherwise, you might as well use the marquee tool and just stroke the edge.

The last thing I was thinking of would be to have a tool something like illustrator's splatter tool that would allow you to lay down brush strokes and then manipulate them using other brushes to nudge or distort the brush.

Perhaps someone with a closer ties to Corel would want to pass these ideas on to them. I'm not actually sure if they are universal needs but something needs to be added.

[Pencil Soldier]

Use a french curve on the tablet. Just pretend the tablet is a piece of paper.