Hello there,

This is my first official post outside the new members forums so I'll keep it fairly brief.

I am fairly proficient in Photoshop. I use it in my line of work, that being magazine layout. I use many of the tools, layers, clipping masks, all kinds of stuff, but all day every day, I use those to edit photos, create textures and backgrounds, but never draw. I am finding it an incredibly difficult thing to drawn in Photoshop.

There are two major issues that I run into.

1. Precision motor control through mouse.
I have a great mouse. Precise and responsive, but when I try to drawn, I find it impossible to do precisely what I want.

Solution to this would surely be a draw pad but to my understanding, they are expensive so my question is. Are there any pads that any of you would recommend that aren't expensive? And if not, or if our ideas of expensive differ, what other possible solution is there to this problem that you can think of?

2. Orientation in workspace
I find it difficult to know where on my work sheet I am. When I zoom out to get the grand detail, I lose detail in drawing, and since I'm drawing a continent size map, that detail loss is dramatic. On the other hand, when I zoom in, I lose the sight of where I am and therefore can't drawn exactly that I need to.

Now, the solution to this would certainly be to draw a zoomed out coast line as a rough path of where it should be, then zoom in and go over it and add details. Am I going in the right direction here?

Thanks for any help,

Unless I can sort these two issues out, I will have to stick to a good old fashioned paper, pen and ink, or pencil...