Ramblings of an Artist #2 (Patreon)

Welcome back to Ramblings of an artist where I ramble on about random things which may or may not be related to art or any one topic. This time, it's about the other hand.

From as long as I've been working on digital art, it has always been a hands on effort. Not once have I not been able to work on a picture without having to utilize both hands. During the mouse age, I had my drawing hand on the mouse and the other hand on the keyboard ready to hit all the keys to switch to a different tool or to move around in the environment. I know the space bar and undo keys get hit a lot. It was during the days of photoshop 6 and illustrator 10 and yes, even in illustrator it was a full hands on experience. 

These days, the other hand is still working together but just in a different place. No, not there. Most of the time, it's controlling the buttons on the tablet to which I assigned the modifier keys such as ctrl, alt, shift. Space bar is on there as well as the button that switches the mouse cursor to a different screen. There's also a touch control for zoom. With Clip Studio Paint, I squeezed most of what the other hand needs to do onto the CSP interface and being able to customize the interface to save time is great. Select all is now a button, I can place undo on the top bar, I can rotate, zoom and move around the canvas via buttons on the interface, etc. I can press any of those with the tablet pen and it does what I want.

Why would I want to put more work onto the drawing hand? There were times where the other hand would suffer from RSI (repetitive strain injury) from repeated movements on either the keyboard or the tablet buttons. I tried and looked into solutions to combat this. I tried wrist restraints. I've had various controllers bound to certain keys. I considered foot pedals but I will have to keep my feet at a certain position for hours. I also considered hand movement controls such as the leap motion but I don't think that would be ideal since I'll have to be precise in my hand movements and if I need to do a hand movement more than once to get it to understand what I want it to do, it's not more efficient than pressing a button which is sure to execute something the first time. 

The only solution was to stop doing the movements. It is one of the reasons I moved all the functions normally done with the non drawing hand to the software interface where I can press them with the tablet pen. If I really needed to, I'll work on a picture with only the drawing hand but will require a lot more movement. Surprisingly, I haven't suffered much strain on the drawing hand, probably due to naturally holding a pen. 

In conclusion, we're all frail human beings and to offset the disadvantages from our desire to do repetitive things with technology, we use the same technology to try to fix it. In the comment section below, let me know if you have ever had to deal with things like RSI from things like gaming too long, coding a project or from having to press the same keys over and over on one side of the keyboard to make something pop out a food reward.

(Photo by Anas Alshanti on Unsplash)