Having Fun with New Toy

My Bamboo set up next to my laptop with a quick cuttlefish sketch.

Really it isn't a toy, it's a very useful tool for my artwork it's just so much fun it feels like a toy. I recently got a Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch, it's a graphics tablet that lets me digitally draw and paint in a way that feels a lot like drawing with a pen or pencil. I've been wanting to do a series of illustrations featuring the creatures from my jewelry designs and I kept putting it off because honestly I'm just not that great with paints. I need ctrl+z in real life when it comes to painting anything 2 dimensional, painting jewelry and sculpture is a totally different set of skills it's adding color and enhancing texture I've sculpted, it doesn't deal with things like shading and perspective.

The tablet has taken a little getting used to, it arrived from Amazon last Wednesday and I produced a lot of crappy sketches in GIMP getting used to it. The tablet came with Photoshop Elements but Elements has a lot of features missing that GIMP does have or which CS5 has but neither Elements nor GIMP has (which I understand, Adobe wants people to have a reason to upgrade to Photoshop CS5 but is CMYK too much to ask for Elements?) so I probably won't use it much.

So here's a work in progress painting of a Steampunk Octopus.