Digital painting setup with Cintiq and Ergotron LX arm, starting a drawing class

Posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2017

My husband got a Cintiq awhile back, and when I first tried it I didn't really enjoy the digital feel of it. I like to feel ink bleeding into the grain of the paper, and watch the water drip through a wash. Plus, it was taking up so much space on the tiny desk that we share!

I recently got fed up with it and decided to change the setup. I wanted to recover the desk space but we didn't have enough space to move the giant tablet over to the side. I bought a small table from Amazon and invested in the Ergotron LX desk mount which fits our Cintiq 22HD. I had to get the small table because the desk we have, while it's beautiful, it doesn't accomodate the clamp that this and most desk mounts have. The mount itself is so amazing because the tension is adjustable, and it holds the 20lb Cintiq just great. Here's a photo of the setup:

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I set up an old pillow case and used this clip-on lamp to put together a still-life arrangement. With the LX arm, I was able to rotate and adjust the tablet to portrait mode and started painting in Photoshop. The arm held the weight of my arm very nicely with some adjustment (we forgot to adjust the arm at first and the Cintiq kept sinking down. We thought we had exceeded the weight limit). Here's the full setup:

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This was the first time I attempted a digital painting still life. Here's the result:

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I'm also taking this Udemy course though I think it might cover some stuff that might be a little too basic (contour lines, basic shading, etc). It asked me to draw an eye as a before/after exercise. Here's my before:

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It was cool to learn how to do the "flicking" motion in order to draw angled eyelashes. I'm on an exercise now where I need to contour-and-shade 5 real-life objects. I'll post those a little later.

July 27th starts a watercolor class I'm doing with my sister. Pretty excited for that too, and will post from that class if there's anything post-worthy.

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