Hi all! Little bit new around here, but I'm a freelance digital artist in my spare time and I'd like to chime in that while it's true that you can create amazing work with Wacom's Bamboo line, the Intuos4 has the advantage of tilt sensitivity, which does wonders for making things feel so much more natural.
However, don't think you'll be good at art with a fancy new tablet. It's my opinion that the art hierarchy goes like this:
1.
TECHNICAL SKILL: This is the most important thing. Most artists start off thinking that imagination is the most important. It's not. If you can't express that imagination of yours accurately, your art will look bad. How do you develop it? Draw from life. Seriously. Don't stylize your drawing in anime/manga style (I know most artists start this way, but the best move back to life drawing for improvement). Study perspective (ugh), lights and shadows, and anatomy. Learn how bones connect to muscles and how they appear under skin. It's a long, tedious process, and it will take you years of practice.
2.
COMPOSITION: Second most important is how your overall art piece looks. How it sits in the frame is one thing, but more important is how you direct your audience's eyes around the piece. The great art masters paint/draw their pieces in ways that make your eyes travel around the piece in certain ways, whether its moving along the edges in a circle before focusing back on the figure or staring the figure deadpan in the face. You've got to arrange your art so it doesn't look like a mess. Composition applies much less to technical drawings and concept art.
3.
IMAGINATION: This is obviously important (unless you're aiming for a career in hyper realistic portraits, in which case, it is only slightly less important). After you've mastered technical skills and composition, your imagination makes what you draw "your art". However, as a precaution, don't let imagination get ahead of technical skills/composition. This is something SO MANY artists (including myself) fall into. The worst result is that you end up using imagination to make up for lack of technical skills, such as hiding hands/feet behind things so you don't have to draw them, or giving your characters weird armor/clothes to cover up your weak points.
4.
EQUIPMENT: Last but not least is equipment. I'm speaking mainly for digital art. You can do amazing things with Wacom's Bamboo line. I used to use a Wacom Graphire, the smallest, least expensive tablet out there (I recall it was $50 new). I now use an Intuos4 and it has improved my art by smoothing out my workflow with shortcut buttons and allowing more precision, but most of my improvement is due to practicing technique and composition. I recently used a friend's Graphire (mine has long since broken) and found that I can produce artwork of the same caliber as my Intuos4, but it just takes me much longer. Point is, equipment is probably the least important. Software-wise, you need a painting/editing program with layers and pressure sensitivity. MSpaint can only take you so far. Paint Tool SAI is good, Corel Painter is great, and Photoshop is the preferred tool for most professionals. I haven't tried GIMP having been spoiled by the afore-mentioned programs, but I've heard good things.
Here's an example of my work process:
I usually start by painting random abstract marks as a background and work up from there. It's not everyone's cup of tea (some like to sketch first). I then do a really rough sketch and block in base color/shading.
Why I put in the background first is that it makes composition (rule #2) so much easier, since you're not putting it in later. You get to see the colors and how they work out before you invest all that time into the character. The drawing I did above is a bad example because I decided partway through I liked a different background color (huzzah photoshop layers!), but usually I stick with my initial background and just develop it.
From there on out it's my favorite part. I just take a hard brush and paint over my colors and sketch. This is where technical skills of shading, colors, and anatomy come in. The rough sketch tests your technical skills a little, but the final rendering of a character will really show your abilities.
The final touch is overlaying textures/other special effects in Photoshop to really make the piece "pop". If you're a really great artist you won't even need these, but sadly I'm not there yet so Photoshop really helps tie my piece together.
Wow, that was a long post.