Wacom CTE-430 Drawing Tablet & Windows 7

I was cleaning out my home “tech closet” last week.

Tearing down old cell-phone boxes, old hard-drive product boxes, laptop boxes now that they have been “burned in” and I’m not returning them to the store…stuff like that. Sorting plastics/papers for recycling, etc.

While I was putting some of the small-bits I wanted to hold onto in my catch-all shoeboxes for such things tech, I found my old Wacom CTE-430 (Sapphire) drawing tablet and pen.  I had got this a long time ago when Lavie was doing drafting and design work on the computer.

As a young kid, Alvis had a copy of Disney’s Magic Artist and Sketch Board that she loved. But as she got older she outgrew it so it was passed on to relative’s family who had young children to use.

Now that Alvis is much older and quite the artist, I wondered if she would be interested again in trying the whole “digital artist” thing. Her preferred medium are watercolors, pastels, colored pencils, charcoals, and other medium that are -- by nature -- very messy and require lots of scattering of these items across the desks, the floors, the window ledges, etc.  Oh, and lots of my favorite mugs left next to the kitchen sink soaking brushes in soapy water.

Maybe Alvis would find it relaxing to do some digital sketch-work again when she was bored but didn’t feel like hauling out her normal art supplies.

So I decided to connect it to my Win7 x64 system.  It found some drivers and seemed to work OK but some of the pressure support for the pen didn’t seem to work.

Did some Google work and found the Wacom site but the US driver page wouldn’t work correctly to let me grab the drivers using the form selection boxes.

Eventually I found a direct link to the driver page I was looking for:

Driver 5.2.5-5a(RC) for Windows 7, Vista & XP (32 & 64 bit versions) - Wacom Graphire3

Downloaded and installed fine on our Windows 7 x64 systems.

Next I needed to find a few paint programs that supported tablet usage. This Gizmo’s Freeware page had more than I was looking for. Score!

Best Free Paint Program - Gizmo's Freeware

I downloaded and installed quit a few of them on Alvis’s system.

In the end we both thought the Art Rage 2 “Starter Edition” (free) was the best starting point. The sketching surface and tools were very easy to get started with.   Alvis thought this was hands-down the easiest of the bunch to use and play with. If she really gets into it, we will probably spring for the full Art Rage Studio Pro version. at $60 it seems a great value for new digital artists.

The others are also quite good, Project Dogwaffle & MyPaint were particularly well rounded applications.

We aren’t quite up to using the tablet in Photoshop yet, but I think with some practice, it could be useful there as well supplementing digital photo editing work.

Nice to know “old technology” can find new life…

Cheers.

--Claus V.

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Visually Inspired…

Lavie is scheduled for another round of outpatient procedures today so I’ve taken the day off to play supportive husband.

Expect intermittent blog posting today.

Offered in this post are a number of items that are inspiring visually.

First up, high-res desktop wallpaper guru Mando Gomez has presented a number of dual-monitor flag-themes over the years.  These three have particularly inspired me and rotate on my desktops:

mandolux desktops – Texas/v2

mandolux desktops ad – Hope

YARRRR! on Mandolux Flickr Photostream

(in case it wasn’t clear…attribution to all images is due Mando Gomez)

I wasn’t sure about the last one with all this Somali pirate shenanigans going on.  True piracy isn’t nearly as glamorous or entertaining as watching Johnny Depp carouse around.  However, given that at least some folks in the Navy look to have a handle on individual situations, and it is just plain hard to find a good Jolly-Roger desktop image, I figured I’d pass it on.

Crazy Dinosaur Comics artist Ryan North has this geek-inspired t-shirt: TopatoCo: Time Traveler Essentials Shirt 

It contains a summary of major scientific information that could be handy just in case you are swept unexpectedly through a time-space wormhole and pop up in say, the Middle-Ages.

There is also a poster available as well.

Graham Rawle has a collection of fun visual wordplay known as Lost Consonants.  Here’s the formula: take sentence and remove a single consonant from one key word, turning it into another.  Then add an image that goes with the repurposed sentence and see what you have got.  Kids and (most) adults pick it up pretty quickly and it is pretty clever.

Engineering Windows 7 : A Little Bit of Personality and TechBlog: Windows 7’s weird and wonderful wallpapers explained.

Both posts take some time to highlight the amazing (really is this Microsoft coming up with these?) choices in wallpapering options under Windows 7.

Many are quite “trippy” and I have to confess I’m liking the change from the traditional wallpapers offered by Microsoft.

Vista’s standard default wallpaper collections were a large move forward, but these Windows 7 options are amazing; not just for the diverse artwork in itself, but also for the deviation from the button-down collar attitude.

Fun!

--Claus V.

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Clever Card Design

I was tasked with working up a new set of business cards the other day.

We’ve got some high-profile projects and are meeting with various vendors and the exchange of business cards seems to be in vogue again.

Were it up to me, I’d just write my name and phone # on a length of Cat-6 cable.  Pricy but does the trick.

Alas I was encouraged to look deeper for inspiration.

In that search I found these sites that offered some creative and out-of-the-box business card designs.  I’ve seen a few of these before, but were price not a concern, I’d be hard-pressed to not attempt at least a few of these cards.

• Cool business card designs - creativebits

• Cool business card designs, Part 2 - creativebits

• 24 Creative Business Card Designs – Toxel.com

I’ve since come up with some designs for our group’s business card with the helpful input of some colleagues.

Nothing near as fancy, but definitely an improvement over Cat-6 cables…

--Claus V.

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Warm things for cool and blustery days

Minipost.

For the Belly

I still love RSS feeding the Houstonist for the latest behind the scenes goings on around our fine city of Houston, Texas.

I miss that they seem to have dropped their previous Tech Buzz regular posts.  Not so much  as they often pulled material from my blog, but I liked that local tech-news connection.

Anyway, a surviving post category has been local dining locations, and a top-post this week was Houstonist: One Pho the Money, Two Pho the Show covering two new Pho shop locations about Houston.

I’ve found a few choice Pho picks off Harwin, Fuqua, and recently on Bay Area Boulevard worthy of eating.  I sometimes stop in with a few near the light-rail line on the south-side of downtown with my Dad after work as well.  So I was happy to see this featured and be able to note some new joints to try.

A nice super-big bowl of beef Pho with some torn basil and hoisin sauce does wonders beyond miracles to my soul.

Of Belly “Bear”ers of the round and tumbly kind

I’m a kid at heart.

Give me a cold winter night and a DVD or VHS tape of the classic Winnie the Pooh stories and I am in childlike comfort.

Original Winnie the Pooh drawings » Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

This brought me back to all things wonderful.

Hop over to BibliOdyssey: Original Winnie The Pooh Drawings for the full and amazing post up of E.H. Shepard’s brilliantly simple but evocative drawings of our beloved bear and friends.  Peacay also provides some nice commentary on them near the end of the post.

As stated, there is no telling if or how long the image links may survive depending on any copyright challenge requests for posting them, so finish up those stoutness exercises and head on over before they disappear like honey before a bear of very small brain.

….hmmmm.

Wonder how Pho with honey would taste?

--Claus V.

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