CSI 6x06, some random fannish stuff

So I thought I might try to be productive and finally get my AU recs page updated, opened the the folder where I bookmark the stories I plan to rec, saw just how many had accumulated since I last updated early last year (meep! it has been this long already?!), and was promptly discouraged by overwhelming numbers. Especially since I couldn't even fully remember some of the stories I bookmarked. I think before my next attempt I need to limit myself to some reasonable number of recs I'm going to add and slowly whittle down the pile. Anyway, instead of starting that, I watched the latest CSI episode, 6x06 Secrets and Flies.

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I also got the Revenge of the Sith DVD (I haven't watched any extras or rewatched the movie yet, though), and the new Dykes To Watch Out For collection, i.e. Invasion of the DTWOF, arrived from Amazon. I read the comic strip online,but it is always nice to have them finally in a collection on paper, and the books have new extra material too. So: *squee!*

a question about graphics tablets...

I don't draw on/with the computer, I prefer the more old fashioned media, preferring to work on paper, but even for the very limited graphics and image manipulation I regularly do on my computer, that is cleaning up scans, or filling in the grays for my icon images, using a mouse is really tedious and annoying. And the few times I tried to actually color a real sketch in a graphics program with a mouse wasn't a pleasant or even really workable arrangement. If you have ever tried to achieve relatively fine control with a mouse you know what I mean.

So I was thinking that I would like to get a graphics tablet, so that I could hold a pen-like device for these things. As with most computer stuff there is a really wide price range, and considering my finances I'd like to get the cheapest that will decently fulfill my not very sophisticated graphics needs, mainly a) it has to be supported under Linux with GIMP and b) it should allow me to clean up and color scanned sketches without any hassle. Because of the first requirement, I have pretty much decided that I'll get a Wacom, since there seems to be good driver support from the Linux Wacom Project for many Wacom tablets, and while I know that probably others are compatible, I have no interest finding this out the hard way, or to fiddle endlessly (or even worse without the help of step by step how-tos) before it'll work.

So my question is for those of you who have worked with graphics tablets, are the cheapest, small Wacom tablets okay the kind of simple tasks I have in mind? Like, I could afford a tablet like the Wacom Volito 2 that is A6 in size, but I have no idea whether that works okay for coloring sketches and such. The only times I have tried working with a graphics tablet was on other people's computers and those were really large (i.e. larger than A4) professional high resolution graphics tablets that they used mainly for technical sketches and such, and completely different category from what I can afford to buy for myself.

GIP

Here's finally the Arsenal!RatCreature icon, as requested by derryderrydown. I hope it's what you had in mind.

BTW, that was rather hard to draw, I ended up staring an inordinate amount of time at the Two Towers poster over my bed, to look at Legolas' archer pose (not that that was a hardship or anything *g*). Arsenal's costume is supposed to be the one from the Arsenal mini series, not the red version of Ollie's costume with the hood, but the red and black one, that was back when he still had shaggy hair.