Thanks for the compliments about the hands. Art Spieglman rocks, btw! I learned to draw hands from life drawing (lots of it) but this book is an excellent reference:
I've only really started exploring my Wacom tablet. It's the budget model that they make (can't remember what they're called). When I was running Windows, I used it with Painter (I think that it's made by Corel? Not sure) and photoshop. Now I'm running Ubuntu, and I'm using it in the GIMP. GIMP rocks, by the way (way more powerful than Photoshop, but it's only something like 9 megs, and free!). I find that the Wacom actually works better in Ubuntu than Windows. Wacom has allowed the open-source community to tweak the linux drivers, so it works beautifully.
I used to work in the animation biz before switching careers, and we used tablets at work, but the software was all proprietary animation production stuff, not the kind of software you can easily buy or download for home use. I've tried using it with Illustrator and Inkwell, but I just get thousands of nodes on all my vectors. So I haven't found any vector stuff that works well. I'll try and find the software that you mention (hopefully it runs in Wine) and try it out. You could always just draw your image as a raster (high res) and then convert it to a vector image, if it's just line work.
Once my student loans are paid off, I'd like to get one of these:
It's a Wacom Cintiq. It's a combination LCD monitor and drawing tablet, so that you basically draw directly on the screen. They're something like two grand $, so I won't be buying one for a while!
