The mouse is a clumsy, limiting
tool ill-suited for the process of creating art on a computer. If you're anything
like me, one of your first peripheral purchases back in the early days was a graphics
tablet or a mouse shaped like a pen (or, in my case, both). But in the early days
these alternatives were, at best, reminders that technology was a long way off
from adapting itself to the needs of artists working in a digital medium. Tablets
were slow and buggy. And pen mice were just silly. Plus you had to keep switching
back and forth from stylus to mouse any time you wanted to access a menu or palette
or otherwise perform navigation tasks. So I and every other designer and artist
I've known in the last 12 years or so resigned ourselves to working with a regular,
old mouse.
But recently I've been revisiting
graphics tablets. Back in November I reviewed the USB-based Graphire tablet from
Wacom. It was a nice tablet, one that I actually started using for all of my computer
tasks, not just drawing. And now I have my hot little hands on Wacom's higher-end
Intuos 9" x 12" USB-based tablet. In short, I love this thing. I can
no longer imagine working in a graphics application without it. This is a very
serious tool for graphics professionals—both 2D and 3D—and it definitively
addresses my needs for a solid, versatile tool for both common tasks and work
in graphics applications.
On the surface
The advantages of the Intuos 9" x 12" on the surface are, of course,
quite obvious: You get a whole lot of tablet acreage to work with. Its active
area is about the same size as the viewable area of a 17" monitor, so you
don't need to worry about running out of tablet while you're in the middle of
a brush stroke.
For those who like to kick
back when they draw, the Intuos also includes a number of function key equivalents
right on the tablet. There are 11 presets for editing functions (cut, copy, paste,
undo, etc.); five blank buttons; and six tablet-specific buttons for adjusting
pressure sensitivity and toggling between mouse mode, pen mode and "quick
point" mode. All of the buttons are programmable via the Wacom Tablet Control
Panel.
More goodies
There are other advantages as well. For one, the Intuos tablets (available in
sizes from 4" x 5" to 12" x 18") ship with a pen that supports
1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity—twice that of the Graphire line. This
provides for some awfully smooth gradations in graphics applications, all adjustable
by the user via the Wacom Control Panel. The Control Panel not only lets you set
pressure curves manually for both global and application-specific settings, but
it will also allow you to enter in pressure via the pen so that the software can
determine your pressure levels for you.
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| The image
above is a single stroke in Synthetik Studio Artist utilizing both tilt and pressure.
In the case of this particular brush, tilting the pen at extreme angles causes
the paint to spray outward in a straight pattern. Toward the end of the stroke,
I began to straighten out the pen, which caused the more chaotic thread effect
seen at the inner point of the spiral. (An example of pressure and tilt in motion
appears on the next page.) |
The pen also supports tilting
for directional spraying in certain applications, such as Synthetik Studio Artist.
I don't know exactly how many degrees of tilt the pen supports, but I was unable
to discover any limitations. I could rotate the pen from end to end, and it seemed
to follow my movements perfectly. It also supports a full 1,024 levels of pressure
even while tilted.
