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My Wacom pen died mid commission and I ended up drawing with a mouse for 3 hours
So this happened last Wednesday around 11pm. I was finishing up a portrait commission for a guy in Portland, had like 2 hours of work left on the hair and lighting, and my pen just stopped. Dead. No warning, no jitter, just nothing. The nib was fine, the tablet lights were on, but the cursor wouldn't move at all. I panicked because the deadline was Thursday morning. I tried plugging it into a different USB port, swapped the cable, even did that driver reinstall dance twice. Nothing. So I grabbed my cheap wireless mouse, turned the smoothing way up in Clip Studio, and just went for it. It took me almost 3 hours to do what should have been 45 minutes, and my wrist hurt so bad by the end. The client actually loved it which is wild, but I know the line quality is a mess if you zoom in. I ordered a new pen the next morning for $42. Anyone else ever have to finish a piece on a mouse? How do you keep your lines from looking like shaky spaghetti?
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davis.mia17d ago
Used to roll my eyes at people who said mouse drawing was doable. Figured they just weren't picky about their work. Then my pen crapped out two days before a con and I had no backup, so I did a whole 8x10 inking with a trackball mouse. The trick that saved me was pulling the smoothing up to like 70 percent and drawing way slower than normal, plus doing lots of short strokes instead of long ones, then cleaning up with the eraser after. Lines still weren't as clean as pen work but the smoothing did most of the heavy lifting.
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