Wacom Graphics Tablet - Do I Really Need One?

Some people may be familiar with the brand name Wacom they have established a huge name for themselves in the digital art and design community over the past 20 or more years. I'm not here to teach you about how successful their company is though, we're going to talk about some of their products and how they can significantly change your creative workflow.

Whether you are a professional or amateur or don't even have a creative bone in your body I'm sure almost everybody has opened a paint program. You tried to draw little stick people, fluffy clouds with the airbrush tool and maybe even a decent house using multiple rectangles and squares. I wont say it's impossible to create fantastic art with a mouse but it can be frustrating at best.

I'm left handed, use the mouse in my right hand and although it's steady most of the time I'll never have to control I have when using a pen or pencil. Enter the graphics tablet or drawing tablet whatever you want to call it, it certainly is ingenious. I'm still shocked that there is a huge part of the population that know nothing about these inventions, there is also a huge percentage that cannot live without them. Let's not waste any time.

Do you find the mouse hard to draw with? Imagine you wanted some of your own handwriting in a project or your own signature at the bottom on an email. Graphics tablets make a world of difference.

It is a similar concept to a mouse, the computer uses the tablet as an input device. Wacom graphics tablets and many other companies offer different size tablets for different needs, some are only a small 5 inch rectangle while some are up to 12 inches and larger.

For those who aren't familiar the pen or stylus is usually wireless and either has batteries or doesn't require power. The tablet's work area is the only part that will receive the movement sent by the stylus. So without overcomplicating things, the stylus needs to be within about 10 - 15 mm from the surface of the tablet, and within the graphics tablet's work area. When you move the stylus over the work area the 'mouse' pointer on the screen will follow!

It can be set up two ways, the work area of the tablet, lets say 10 x 8 inches can be a direct copy of the screen only smaller. Simply put when you move the stylus to the top left of the tablet the pointer will be in the top left of the screen, if you're in the centre of the tablet, guess what? You'll be in the middle of the screen. This, for me, is the easiest way to use the graphics tablet, you can easily point to different parts of the tablet to manoeuvre around the screen easily and with some practice becomes quite normal. There is however another way.

You can set the tablet up to work just like a mouse. When you lift the stylus from the tablet and place it somewhere else the pointer on the screen doesn't 'jump' to that position. Do this with your mouse now, move the pointer to the bottom left of your screen, now pick up the actual mouse and place it somewhere over to the right. When you place the mouse back down the pointer is in a similar position to where you left it. That is how the tablet can be set up to work, if you so desire.

You may be thinking 'how do I click?' well fear not, it's really simple just tap the tip of the stylus onto the work area. It's that simple, so for movement you hover over the tablet and when you want to click just come down and tap!

On many of the stylus' there are one, two or sometimes more buttons that can be easily pressed while holding. These buttons can be configured to double click, right click or middle click.

Almost all graphics tablets are pressure sensitive, this is very handy for the digital artist. You can paint and draw naturally, the lighter you touch the tablet with the stylus the fainter and thinner your lines will be and the harder you apply pressure just like in real life you will achieve darker and thicker brush strokes and lines. No matter how good you are with a mouse, this pressure sensitivity is indispensable and allows total creative control. There are also settings where you can change how sensitive the pressure is and in programs like Adobe Photoshop you can alter what happens when you press harder or softer. Maybe you only want brush strokes to get lighter or darker with pressure, sure you can do that. Do you want the size of the brush strokes to change while maintaining a constant colour? You can do that too.

You may be thinking that drawing tables are only for creative professionals and artistic people. That may be the case with many, but there are people that use these almost without the need for a mouse. You can navigate around your favourite operating system fairly quickly and easily but there are still times where the good old mouse is quicker.

If you are a designer or digital artist you probably already have a graphics tablet, if you are a beginner or hobbyist in the digital creative world then you should definitely look at getting a graphics tablet. They are much easier than a mouse and quicker than drawing on paper and scanning it into the computer.

The Wacom range of graphics tablets caters for everybody with small entry level tablets like the Bamboo which are very cheap for a beginner ranging to the Intuos range for professionals. If you're really keen they also offer a range of LCD tablets which are like huge touch screen monitors for your desktop! They are a little expensive for me at the moment.

Just a word of warning some people start to think bigger is better, in this case if you are drawing of painting for hours on end in front of your desk the larger your tablet the more fatigued you're going to get since you will be moving your arm so much. My tablet is by no means small but it isn't huge around 8 x 6 inches I tend to zoom into my work so that I can add very small details.