A graphics tablet is an input device specifically designed for artistic work on the computer. A tablet consists of a pen (known as a stylus) and the flat drawing surface. Having a tablet is necessary to use HSDA, or any painting program for that matter. With a graphics tablet you can draw strokes almost as naturally as with a regular pencil or brush.
One of the key features of a graphics tablets is pressure sensitivity. Here we have two strokes: with pressure sensitivity (tablet) and without (mouse):
Go get yourself a graphics tablet if don't have one already!
Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5.
Modified by Harry Storbacka.
While drawing itself is just a matter selecting the brush tool, putting down your stylus and moving it around, a few things are worth knowing:
Opacity - how well the stroke covers what is beneath it, is an important feature you'll use a lot. Opacity is set in the tool settings dialog (shortcut key: F5). A high opacity is used when drawing hard edges. A lower opacity is used when blending colors together.
The eraser tool is also affected by the opacity setting. To clean up edges around your drawing you should use a high opacity - usually 100% - and a hard edged brush.
Brush scale - (tool dialog, F5) controls the size of your brush. Usually it is a bad idea to scale up (more than 100%) due to degrading quality. Scaling down is a useful feature however. Many of the brushes shipped with HSDA are quite big and to use them for i.e. line drawing or to texture smaller object, scaling down is necessary.
Colors can be picked from a layer by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking somewhere on the layer. This changes your currently selected color. The color selector (F2) is also updated to show the picked color.
When blending colors, the used brush plays a big role. When using hard brushes, one way of blend by using a low opacity (10%-40%) and repeatedly picking the color of the previous stroke, as illustrated below:
Blending using soft brushes is done the same as with hard brushes. The blend from one color to another is much smoother:
Masks (or selections) are a way to limit the area affected by the used tools. Masks can be added (hold down Shift) and subtracted (hold down Ctrl). To invert a mask, select mask->invert from the menubar.
A mask created using 3 elliptic selections: the base, and two ellipses subtracted horizontally and vertically. Finally the gradient tool was used to fill the masked area.
A mask can be saved in the mask dialog for later use:
Masks in perspective are covered in the Perspective Drawing tutorial.
When you first select the gradient tool in a new image, the gradients dialog will pop up. Select the gradient you want from the list (or create a new one) and close the gradient dialog (F8). Put your stylus down on the image and drag. You are shown a preview of the gradient that will be drawn. Once you are happy with the gradient, lift the stylus.
To lock the gradient to a fixed angle, keep the Ctrl key pressed.
The gradient editor (F8) allows you to create new gradients and to edit existing ones. A gradient consists of color stops. A color stop defines the color and opacity of the gradient at the specified point.
For more advanced use of gradients check out the perspective drawing tutorial
Initially a new gradient has no color stops. Left click on the gradient preview and a color stop will appear.
Left click in another spot and you should see a solid color in the preview.
Click on one of the color stop boxes to select it. When a stop is selected you can change its color and opacity by clicking the color selector or the opacity adjuster.
You can rename a gradient by double clicking the name in the list.
Remember to click save when you're done.