Exercise 01: The Painter’s Pallette and Pen Margaret Lewallen ITGM 705
The tablet is a USB addon to any artists graphic tablet, created for ease of changing and mixing colors in your program of choice. If you're like me, you get frustrated easily with having to stop what you're doing in a program to mess with the color pallette to change colors in a project. All that time consumed just trying to pick colors, and its not the right one - I believe the Painters Pallette can save you lots of time with this step.
So, how it works. There's ten pre-set color nodes on the pallete, in primary and secondary colors, along with some other basics. To the side, you have a 'mixer pallette', that also pop up on screen so you can see the colors there too. The mixer pallete lets you test colors, as well as mix and refine your own. The top smaller block is a 'water' block. This block lets you 'clean' your brush, as well as dilute your 'paint' for a more realistic effect. In the middle there are four buttons. These represent four basic settings for your paint - acrylic, oil, watercolor, and pastel.
The pen, while not to different from the graphic art pens that are already out there, comes with various brush nibs rather than one small nib to work with. This way, it doesn't only look like you're working with a particular brush, it feels like you are too. I believe with the amount of interaction from the tablet and pen, the product is participatory, as well as procedural. I say participatory because you have to actually tap the color wells and change the brush nibs to get the effect you want with the art program. I believe it is procedural due to each artist having their own particular way of handling colors
and their brushes, and thus once you settle into a process, things move much more smoothly for your work.
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