Scanner or Tablet?

rlehm

I have been drawing doodles, taking a picture with my iphone and emailing them to myself... I then clean them up in photoshop and they look pretty good. I am in need of a better way of doing this.

I cannot decide if a tablet or scanner would work best. I can draw. I have been drawing since I'm old enough to hold a pencil and took every art class offered throught school and then a few in college while I earned my undergrad and master's. Not sure if that matters or not, but I am comfortable with paper pencil.

I have never tried a tablet. I have also never scanned drawings into Photoshop. Will a scanner give as good a result as a tablet? Will it look close to, or as good? For those who have tried both, what did you finally decide and why?

IsabelleK

I used scanner before, and yesterday I bought Wacom Bamboo Fun Pen&Touch Small, and I can tell you from few hours of drawing in few different graphic software, that this way is much faster.

Metronome49

A scanner will retain the real-world quality of your artwork. A tablet can make it easier because you can draw right into your graphics program, but it won't be the same.

It depends on what the art style you want for you game to be.

old_kipper

scanners are really good. With a few bit of set of photoshop actions you can semi-automatically clean up scans and size them ready for a project. If you want to animate on paper and scan get yourself something to register all the drawings in the same place, and then have something in the scanner to make sure you can position them identically when you scan them. Animators do this with peg bars. It's a bit of a fuss though.

A tablet is the other option and is fab. There are so many animation programs you can use on computer now that for most things it is as quick or quicker. The only problem is replicating real texture and detail. But on the upside you can check your animation really easily as you work. In the old days it was down to flipping bits of paper to check.

tip. If you use your camera to take in images of your artwork, try backlighting it, or at least making sure it's in really good light when you snap it. Photographing line and then cleaning it up in Photoshop, and colouring it there is works as well.

As metronome49 says... It depends on what art style you want for your game to be.