# Working with tablets

This tutorial is intended to describe you the first steps with working with a tablet with &krita;. The tutorial assumes you are using &Linux;.

## Configuring it

As any hardware it nearly works out of the box. &Linux; should recognize it fine, but you might have to configure the X11 server by hand. The best way to do this is to follow the instruction on the Wacom &Linux; howto: .

Then, in &krita;, you need to enable the various tools (in the Tablet section of the Settings Configure &krita;... dialog) — you can find more information in the tablet settings section.

## First contact with the tablet

There are three devices of your tablet that you can use with &krita;:

- the cursor, the mouse that was shipped with the Wacom tablet

- the eraser, the round part on the top of the pen

- the stylus, the thin point on the bottom of the pen

By default, when you use the stylus or the cursor on the tablet, the Brush tool and the pixel brush painting operation will get selected. The eraser device is associated to the pixel eraser painting operation. But if you select a different tool or a different painting operation with one device, &krita; will remember the association when you switch between devices.

## Outlines of a flower

Even if you knew how to draw before you started with a tablet, you will need to adapt to the tablet. It doesn't feel the same. So I suggest to start with something simple, like a flower, and to use a picture as a model:

A flower A flower

A flower

First, you will need to create a new layer for the outline. I advise you to lock the layer with the picture, it will prevent you from making mistakes.

Drawing the outline of the flower seems pretty easy, but for your first experience you will have a great difficulty to precisely follow the line on the screen while your hand has to move on the tablet. Eventually you will get something like this:

The outline of the flower The outline of the flower

The outline of the flower

## Colorization

For the colorization, you will need to create a third layer. You will have to move it below the layer with the outlines, and do not forget to lock the outline layer.

It's mostly easier than the outline part, just select the color you want to use (either with the color selector or with the color picker), then for most of the work you can use the fill tool: with the mouse, click on the part you want to fill, as by default the fill tool will take the outline into consideration. On the following image, the different colors of the heart of the flower are not seperated by outlines, to do them I just completed the missing outline with a yellow or brown line to create the separation between the different colors.

The colored flower The colored flower

The colored flower

The resulting image looks and feels like old fashion clipart, mostly because it lacks shadows and illumination, which are not covered by this tutorial.