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Sunday, May 21, 2006 - 20:59 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Time Ticks By

Two weeks of much the same thing - waking at about 6 am, breakfast, reading the papers, sticking around for odd jobs, lunch break and a siesta, back for more of nothing and then to the bunk. Salvation was a stack of Newsweek, Forbes and FHM magazines that a bunkmate had stashed away in his cabinet. And yes, I do read FHM on literary merit. Doesn't everyone?

Met a few of the camp dogs at the cookhouse. They've grown quickly, and still have that habit of crouching and just looking mournfully at servicemen who are munching away. They get lucky once in a while and get a substantial slab of meat - which proves that things have improved from when they refused our packed rations outright. Picky!

I should have propounded my election thoughts, and written my diatribe on the relative grading system that NUS operates on, far earlier. There are just so many juicy topics to wring controversially sweet droplets from, but too often I find myself with just pen, paper and precious little privacy. The keyboard yet rules.

At least NS makes one treasure the weekends, which due to the new five-day work week, is actually two full days. No more senseless Saturday mornings where the whole unit appears to be sitting around. Taken together, that's 70-80 Saturday half-days that I could have been put to better use, had the decision been made slightly earlier. Argh.

One thing about the military, they feed you, and they pay you (at least in Singapore). Since I figured that I would need to produce some graphics of a certain quality for my upcoming personal projects, I did a bit of research and found that many of the more professional tutorials strongly recommend a tablet. With a bit of cash to spare, why not?

So I made my way down to Sim Lim Square and got myself a Wacom Graphire 4. I was planning to just take the smallest and cheapest of the range in case I end up getting little mileage out of it, but a glance at the A6-sized entry-range product and I balked. The active area was small. No way I could draw naturally on that. So it was to be the A5 one, listed at S$279.

The specs are here, and I've illustrated it below (click to enlarge):


All My Own Work

What better way to demonstrate its abilities than by drawing it itself, eh?

Well, I confess that it got a bit getting used to. It's a skill hovering the tip low enough over the surface to move the mouse cursor, and high enough so that it doesn't activate. Played around with the bundled Corel Painter Essentials 2, and I think I can see the potential in the package. Now, I just have to find the time to experiment and produce polished results. The only constant in the tutorials I read was the hours even accomplished artists take.



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