Painting with light: Sweetness and light

As you may have gathered from my post Warning Light I have recently purchased a Wacom Intuos Pro graphics tablet to aid with my Painting with light composite post-processing. I chose to buy the ‘small’ version which has a working area of 6.3 x 3.9 inches (160mm x 100mm). To me, this is a more than adequate size to be able to work without moving my hand around too much, and is pretty much the same area that a mouse covers on a mouse mat. Even so, the actual tablet itself is still about the size of a piece of A4 paper, and I have seen numerous reports from people who have bought the (larger) medium size and then wished they had gone for the small instead for precisely these reasons. Bigger isn’t always better!

Note: There is a difference between a graphics tablet and a drawing tablet. Graphics tablets have no screen, and you need to work with a computer monitor to see what you are doing. Drawing tablets have their own screen, and so you can work directly on them.

The tablet itself plugs into the computer via a supplied USB cable (it can work via Bluetooth but then you have to purchase an optional battery) but the pen requires no batteries or charging. There is a nicely weighted stand for the pen (it advises against standing the pen up in storage to prevent wear & damage of the nib) which also acts as a storage compartment for a range of spare nibs and a nib removal tool. There are black nibs, white nibs and a spring-loaded nib – I have no idea what the difference is between them but will try them out in due course. There is also a handy storage bag to keep the surface of the tablet dust-free when not in use.

The driver and software are simply downloaded from the Wacom website and allow a multitude of customisations to the way that the tablet & pen work and feel. So far I have pretty much left it at its factory settings but maybe after prolonged use I may feel the need to add some customisation. Interestingly, you can have different customised settings for different programs; so you can have one set for Photoshop and another for Lightroom, for example.

I still find that I instinctively use my mouse and so I’ll really have to make the effort to use the tablet until it becomes second nature.