Customizing the functions of a Wacom tablet on Linux is not easy. Unlike Windows and Mac OSX, there are no good GUI tools (at least that I’m aware of), and the official methods are often buggy and inconsistent. Hopefully these will be fixed in the future, but for now here’s what I’ve discovered.

xsetwacom is a command-line program used to configure Wacom tablets. To customize the buttons on my Graphire4 tablet, I started by typing in the following:

xsetwacom –list -v

This gives us a list of devices that the program “sees”. More importantly, it gives us an identifying number which we can refer to that device with. A Wacom tablet will show up as several devices – mine showed up with entries for the pad, eraser, cursor, and stylus. Since I wanted to customize the tablet itself, I chose the ‘pad’ number (11) and entered these commands:

xsetwacom set 11 Button2 “key core alt”

xsetwacom set 11 Button1 “key core ctrl”

It takes some experimentation to figure out which button is which. I don’t know of a good way to determine this without trial and error. Either way, this seems to work at the moment and will let me paint a little faster I hope!

For more help, check out this page on the Linux Wacom Project.

A quick post for tonight, with two words that I’ve found very handy: More and Very.

When I feel satisfied with a particular drawing, I’ve found it useful to remind myself that I can do more. Sometimes I wonder if the biggest difference between the amateur and professional artist is that the professional is willing to do more when the amateur is willing to say “that’s good enough”.

While I’m doing more, it’s good to think about how I can push it to its most extreme – its “very” state. This doesn’t mean to exaggerate things, necessarily. It simply means that whatever I’m drawing, I should exaggerate the concept behind the drawing to its most extreme state, and exclude everything that doesn’t lend itself to that concept. For instance, if I’m drawing something still, it should be very still. If I’m drawing a jungle, I’ll make it very jungle-y.

I don’t claim that this is golden advice, or that I follow it very well. I only wanted to share it because it’s helped me, and perhaps posting it in a public place will force me to follow it better myself!

No, the image isn’t it.

A while ago, artist Bobby Chiu took to posting inspirational and encouraging quotes and thoughts on his twitter account. I always found these to be very uplifting, so I had the idea to create a shell script that would feed me inspirational quotes by my favorite artists.

Download

While it’s no substitute for a good work ethic, I found that I appreciated being reminded of things said by artists wiser than I. I’ve set the script to run when I login, which is pretty easy on Linux Mint and Ubuntu.

A few technical notes:

• Linux only – sorry!
• Uses Notify-send, and thus only works on Ubuntu-like distributions AFAIK. With a little creativity I’m sure you can adapt the script to use your distro’s notification system.
• “sudo apt-get install notify-osd” should install notify-send.

Got any inspirational quotes from artists you like?

http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2011/02/openmw-09-and-dungeonhack-progress.html

Some of the work I’ve done for Dungeonhack has been featured on the Freegamer blog! I’ve been following them for a long time, so it’s fun to finally see my work there. Free publicity, development experience, motivation to improve your artwork, and some work to put in your portfolio… Contributing to open-source is a win. B-)