The Brilliant creative team blog

I have used a few tablets in my time and to be honest felt quite put off by them, to me they always felt unnatural, especially being so used to gaining the effects I needed with a mouse. There are many styles and techniques that just cannot be achieved with just the use of a mouse and so went out and bought myself the Wacom Intuos 4 A5 tablet.

Within moments of playing with it I felt a great sense of relief that I had not wasted my money on a cool looking but ultimately useless piece of kit. I have always been told that anyone who works with image editing, painting, or illustration software needs a Wacom tablet. Graphic designers, illustrators, visual effects artists; if you ever brush on a paint stroke, it’s seems ridiculous to use a mouse.

The pen/tablet interface makes painting and drawing much easier and faster. It’s more comfortable on your hand and, thanks to pressure sensitivity, more expressive especially within the fine details of a piece. Because the tablet can send pressure, tilt, and bearing information to the computer, you can create calligraphic brush strokes, and other effects that work just like real tools. All this without clenching your hand into the tight little claw a mouse requires.

The Intuos 4 has a scroll wheel with a big button in the middle that’s called the TouchRing. Anyone who has ever picked up an iPod will identify with this feature straight away, it can control zoom, brush size, tilt and cycle through the layers palette, in the long run it will save you so much more time.

I am really impressed with how far drawing tablets have come since I first used one and although it will never eliminate the need for a mouse, its great to be able to pick it up and just draw!