Wacom Intuos 4 Pen Tablets

anyone ever used one if this for artistic purposes? If so what did you think to them? Are they easy to use, does it feel as natural as traditional freehand art? Are they worth the £300-400 asking price?

TornadoShaun wrote:anyone ever used one if this for artistic purposes? If so what did you think to them? Are they easy to use, does it feel as natural as traditional freehand art? Are they worth the £300-400 asking price?

I use a fairly old Wacom Graphire:



Mostly for when I'm in Corel Painter 11, which is the perfect software for a pressure-sensitive stylus. It has a very intuitive feel, ideal for creating brushstrokes and working with 'natural media' in the digital realm such as watercolour, oils, chalks, pencils, etc.

If used with software like Corel Painter or a properly configured Photoshop then you can achieve extremely realistic effects. It's a lot of fun, but if you generally paint impasto and work a lot with textured paper, of course you're going to miss that moving to digital. Some tools like watercolour behave a bit weird in Painter but that's software and has nothing to do with the tablet (although the tablet drivers are excellent and allow you to customise pretty much everything. Even if you have multiple pens it remembers the settings for each one, lets you set sensitivity etc.)

One major issue with working digitally is that one might not appreciate their attachment or comfort brought by working with their hands, touching and feeling the aesthetic properties of their worldly physical materials.. taking this away can create a sort of uncanny feeling that can be off-putting, but is usually offset by the sheer freedom and diversity that a tablet allows (particularly rubbing things out and creating nice smooth lines with effortless media control like stroke width). Tablets I find are best for illustrative and graphical work. They are certainly not a replacement for natural media. Actually one fun thing to try is combining scanned-in natural media and working over that, like papers.

Also you will need to get used to looking at the screen and not your hand on the tablet, which didn't take me too long. Playing games a lot seems to help improve this remote hand-eye co-ordination so it might be easy for you. If you are trained in working on canvas drawing at arm's length in the "art school" way then this will help also because you will be less attached to your hands and more on the image you are creating with your strokes.

But the Wacom tablets are in a class of their own and are a pleasure to use. Certainly worth the money if you are sure you are going to use it. The pressure sensitivity is fantastically responsive and the pens are much better designed than other products (and require no batteries). Using less dynamic media emulations like pencil, pen, dry media etc, and in some cases virtual paint, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. However, to work with digital paint and big gestural strokes you will want a faster machine so you get the instant result without slowdown (you can sometimes see the strokes lagging behind on screen which is disorientating).

I have an Intuos3 9x12/A4 tablet.

For instance, this is the third thing I ever created with my Wacom in about 30 minutes copying or roughly tracing a photo of my band (I can't remember). The colour is really rough but if you look I think the gestural line strokes are really nice:



This is thanks to the fluidity of the tablet's tracking. My strokes are pretty fast and broad so I am really happy with the tablet's ability to keep up and include small details like the little flicks at the end of strokes where I move to another.

Working on very small areas of fine detail with the lightest of touch is exactly how you would expect, it is very accurate, after a little practice of course. And that's with 2000 levels of pressure sensitivity or thereabouts - the Intuos4 has around 4000.

So I thoroughly recommend the Wacom tablets and wouldn't consider any alternatives they are so good, but as ever they are only as valuable as you use them. Although if you find yourself not getting on with it then they have a very high resale value, at least 60%.

TornadoShaun wrote:anyone ever used one if this for artistic purposes? If so what did you think to them? Are they easy to use, does it feel as natural as traditional freehand art? Are they worth the £300-400 asking price?

Wacom are quality. i've got the older Intuos 3 for use in painter x, and paid about £300 for an A4 size one. If you're serious about digital art get one - they're a real investment. As for the feel, well, you're holding a pen so I guess it's about as real as it could possibly be.

I bought a used one (used for show demos etc. complete, boxed and mint) from Intuos themselves - link below

http://eu.shop.wacom.eu/Intuos3-Used_cat_9104.html

I got the cheap Wacom Bamboo for Xmas but I'm going to wait until I get back to Bristol before I try it.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

If I got one I'd be using it with Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2010. I would like to get the medium sized intuos4. One thing that confuses me about these is how you are meant to know where your pen strokes are going. On paper, you can obviously see the art you are creating and where your lines are going. On a pen tablet I'm going to assume you can't see the art being created on the drawing pad so how can you see on screen where your pen mark is about to land?

TornadoShaun wrote:Thanks for the feedback guys.

If I got one I'd be using it with Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2010. I would like to get the medium sized intuos4. One thing that confuses me about these is how you are meant to know where your pen strokes are going. On paper, you can obviously see the art you are creating and where your lines are going. On a pen tablet I'm going to assume you can't see the art being created on the drawing pad so how can you see on screen where your pen mark is about to land?

I had a quick go with my Bamboo tablet yesterday and it was the first time I had ever used a graphics tablet so I wasn't how exactly it worked it either, but what happens is that the tablet still knows where the pen is even when it's not touching. So if you lift off slightly it will stop drawing but still move the cursor around on the screen and then when you have the pen where you want it you can put it back down on the tablet to draw.