Tools

When trying out Inkscape and trying to customize a brush to my preferences I noticed that Inkscape didn’t react to pen pressure. I use an old Graphire 4 which isn’t really a tool for professionals and probably not even for happy amateurs like me. But I have it and I’m used to it.

I started fiddling late in the evening with the drivers causing havoc and after some frustration next day managed to restore functionality to what it was before: working perfectly in Photoshop but no pressure in Inkscape. I installed the latest drivers from Wacom and after a couple of unfruitful attempts learned a few things:

• remove tablet first
• then uninstall old driver using the Control Panel
• reboot
• download and install new driver from Wacom site
• plug in tablet

To set the pen pressure in Inkscape you simply push the button with the downpointing arrow and it will apply to the calligraphy tool if that is selected.

 If that doesn’t work you will have to check if the “Input device” settings are correct. Choose Input devices under File menu.

The pen should be checked and set to “screen”. The checkbox below should also be checked.

 
First time around I did all this and could not get Inkscape to respond to pen pressure. When I looked at the hardware tab and tried the pen in the test area I could only make one “lamp” lit up.

Thanks to a wonderful person, I was made aware that I hadn’t installed the latest version of Inkscape. I was running 0.48.2 – at this moment said to be the latest stable version and I thought it was a good idea to have a stable version… After upgrading to 0.48.3.1 r9886 pen pressure worked in test area and after rebooting twice also on canvas

The third axis is pen pressure.

And here is the first doodle with pen pressure finally working like it should

I was planning to use a vector based editor in my comics making process and downloaded Inkscape. It was quite a while ago and I never got to using it. The reason was I couldn’t make it work with my Wacom tablet. The cursor moved but I couldn’t draw a line. I’ve had some experience with Illustrator and never really felt comfortable with it and it is far too expensive for a hobby that generates no income. So I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t use Inkscape because the interface looked promising.

Today I downloaded and installed version 0.48.2 without any hopes..but it works!!

Generally I think the interface gives a good overview but personally I would have prefered less colorful icons. One thing that I really like with Inkscape is the scroll bar with colorswatches and it’s easy to set a default font, Digital Strip being the one I use both for Guillaume’s Rambling Ride and Exodus from Masr.

As a quick test I took a drawing and imported it into a layer. On a second layer I started to try out the tools. My favourite is the “calligraphic or brush” tool set to “brush” which I’ve used on the arms.

I think I might get that page done for Guillaume’s Rambling Ride someday…