Wednesday, October 04, 2006

The Mother Of Invention...


My styli with the new grips; the sheet of card taped to the tablet makes the surface less slippy, aiding drawing.

A couple of hours into my first all-nighter in the new flat and the rubber grips on both my Wacom styli split. These aren't actual components of the styli, mind - since I have a tendency to put The Death Grip on anything I draw with, I squeeze them into foam-rubber sleeves designed to make pencils more comfortable to hold. Since the Wacom styli are much fatter than pencils, the sleeves only last a couple of months before splitting. I have a supply of spares, but - I realize at 3am - they're safely packed in the loft of our little house in Nottingham.
I can order more online, or see if the art shop down the road stocks them, but neither option deals with the fact that, by 3.30am, my thumb is already getting sore from the hard plastic of the stylus; after a little experimenting I find that three sheets of loo roll folded over into a 1 1/2 inch strip, wound tightly around the stylus and secured with masking tape, does the trick nicely; you have to disable the button on the stylus, of course, but I've never been able to control that anyway.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I have to do a similar thing with my sable brushes, I wind a slightly thick and spongy tape around them and then cover that in masking tape. Why do so many drawing implements come with such a teeny surface area to hold? It really does make for very cramped drawing and inking if you're a bit Hulk-handed.

Unknown said...

Me too - I used to used both sable brushes and dip pens, and I'd just wind big rolls of masking tape round the ferrules. When I got my first graphics tablet, I did the same with the stylus, but I didn't realize that, on the brushes and pens, a coating of Indian ink would build up on the tape over time and harden it; without that, the tape disintegrates into hideous sticky mush within a year.
That was why I'd moved over to using the rubber grips...

I. N. J. Culbard said...

My word, that tablet's taken a battering. I have a spare in better condition you can have (I recently acquired a new tablet -- still Wacom). The old tablet served me well, six years in all.

Anonymous said...

Btw, the correct plural of 'stylus' is 'styli' - possibly pronounced the same way as 'stylae' in English...

Unknown said...

I will not misspell "styli" again.
I will not misspell "styli" again.
I will not misspell "styli" again.
I will not misspell "styli" again.
I will not misspell "styli" again.
I will not misspell "styli" again.
I will not misspell "styli" again.
I will not misspell "styli" again.
I will not misspell "styli" again.
I will not misspell "styli" again.