i agree. you put a whole lot of detail into this one. good job man!

yes, me agrees too. have you finally bought a tablet?

Still using a mouse. But if anyone wants to donate a tablet I'm willing to learn.

dude, you can get a Graphire 2 for only $99. For a Wacom, that is cheap. They aren't very big, but they are very high quality. And whatever you do, do NOT get a tablet made by anyone other then Wacom.

hey, i've got a 5-year old Calcomp Creation Station tablet that works fine :P Wacom certainly is good, but its not the one and only..

I have the 6x4 inch Graphire 2, and I really like it. Before I bought it I would get cramps from using the mouse for so long. It has really made tiling an easy and enjoyable experience, and I have improved greatly.
It also comes bundled with Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is almost identical to the full version of Photoshop. You're still using the gimp, right? If you don't want the mouse and software it with, you can probably just buy the tablet and installation software cheap on ebay.

For tiling, Photoshop Elements is fine, but for other things, it is pretty severely limited. It's been a while since I used it, but I believe it cannot select by color, there are no layer masks(?), and they removed color corrective functions (levels, etc).

I made the comment about buying only Wacom because I have had really bad experience with other brands that cost just as much. I bought some crappy tablet a year or two ago (it cost the same as the graphire2) and it had only 128 levels of pressure (graphire2 has 512). Also, it only seamed to work only when it wanted too. The pen on it was connected by a short, fat wire and there was no eraser (not neccessary, but a very very nice feature). So in summery, there may indeed be other brands out there that are good, but it is my personal recommendation that you buy Wacom products because they are of an extremely good quality for the price. :)

Elements is missing layer masks, but it has levels and other color corrective functions (at least on the version I have). I have only owned a Graphire 2, so I cannot compare, but the only problem I've ever had is that my stylus tends to come apart now that it's been dropped a few times.