Is It Possible to Do Digital Art With Carpal Tunnel

Preventing hand injuries from digital art

I got a question about cartoon injuries, and I typed up a pretty lengthy response so I wanted to share information technology here as well.

I go asked a lot about manus strains and injuries, and it is something most artists have to face ane time or another simply considering nosotros work so hard for our dreams. I personally don't get strains or injuries, both for fine art and for piano playing when I still majored in it, two main artistic paths where hand/arm injuries are common. My easily rarely feel tired and when they practice, I stop drawing. And so when I become asked, I usually can only offer the fact that you tin find a lot of carpal tunnel exercises on google and there's nothing else I know nigh relief exercises, other than I detect that flinging my hands too help loosen them up a bit.

The about important thing about this event is actually prevention rather than relief. I would like to believe this approach is what prevented me from getting injured–I've never really been a push through the pain type person, and glorifying suffering and pain as a sign of hard piece of work is definitely unhealthy, every bit those are huge signals from your trunk telling you to finish. There are many things that I know for sure strains your hands much more than anything else that I will list below, and I believe that, if it is possible for yous, the most efficient way to deal with injury is to find out which of these things is the cause and working effectually it.

The start big cause is posture; if your arms have no support points (ie you have to hold your elbow up with your muscles or tense your wrist to maintain stability) y'all will strain much easier, simply like how you become tired easier standing at an uncomfortable pose vs a well grounded 1. And then be sure to seat yourself so that yous have somewhere to residual your arm while drawing, while your trunk is at a relaxed angle with full support. For a normal tablet, residuum your arm and wrist somewhere on the table or the tablet. For a Cintiq or tablet monitor, try having information technology upright then that your elbow can rest on your desk, and your wrist tin can residue on the cintiq screen, and you simply need to use your fingers to control the pen.

The second crusade is your grip on the pen. This can be caused by your need for precision/speed of repetitive movement/force per unit area. Line art, or cross hatching, or pressing hard to get the darkness of the brush yous need, are all high stress activities that strains your hand much more than, say, rendering or putting down a base of operations painting. Knowing that, you can:

• Employ a higher brush opacity or plough off pressure sensitivity for opacity to preclude yourself from having to press really hard to become brush impact you want.
  
• Go to your wacom tablet preferences if you have one, and set the hardness of the brush so that it'southward easier to become the brush opacity/size you want. You desire to accept the problem of having to try to press lighter for lighter lines, rather than having to printing harder for darker/thicker lines. The latter strains much more than than the old.
  
• If your grip of the pen is too tight purely because the pen is slippery/too small-scale for you/hard to grip, such as one-time bamboo tablets, there are rubber tablet pen paddings that you can purchase online, or you tin can only use a layer of masking record all around the grip area to increase friction/grip comfort and make information technology easier for yourself to hold your pen. A Cintiq or Intuos Pro pen is ideally what you want your pen to experience similar: have friction on the surface so your fingers don't slip, large enough and then information technology rests and takes upward infinite comfortably between your thumb and alphabetize fingers without y'all tensing and curling your mitt in really hard, and shaped then that your grip is stopped right before the cone of the tip, preventing slipping.
  

The tertiary crusade is the schedule of your drawing. This may or may not be possible to alter because for a lot of the states, a borderline is a deadline. Only endeavor to space your tasks and then that you lot bike betwixt intense, detailed, hand-straining piece of work, and relaxing, loose, more brainstorming work. The latter is fantabulous for mitt rest while however being productive creative work. For example, if you are drawing comic pages, it might make sense in terms of efficiency to sketch 10 pages, then ink 10 pages, then tone 10 pages. But when you are inking those 10 pages consecutively, that's when you give your hands no rest and your manus will commencement to hurt a lot, while y'all take no option but to push through the hurting to get the piece of work done. Instead, attempt to draw these pages one past i, or have a few drawings at diverse stages of completion to rotate between. eg. you work on inking drawing A, so when yous feel your easily are strained, switch to putting downward loose underpainting for drawing B, switch back to inking cartoon A, and so start brainstorming cartoon C and think more than/describe less. Give your hands some natural times to rest up with less intense piece of work, and you get piece of work done without having to lose time past having to really end cartoon birthday.

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Every bit tempting equally it is to endeavor to experience like you lot are working as hard as you tin can to achieve your dreams and aspirations, while feeling guilty about resting/taking the more than relaxing route, think that your hands make your fine art possible, so treat them well!

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Source: https://okolnir.net/post/144112780802/preventing-hand-injuries-from-digital-art

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