Drawing Digital Art With My New Sketch Tablet

Written by Rolf

For years I have wondered how cool a sketch tablet would be and whether I would be able to produce realistic drawings with it. Last week I bought one and although drawing this way needs some getting used to, it has great potential.

My new tablet in particular is a Trust Slimline Sketch Tablet "With big 200 x 150 mm working space to let your creativity flow". It cost me about 60 euro and so far I am not regretting it. The 200x150mm includes pen-touch-sensitive 'buttons' (see photo), but the actual drawing space is still large enough.

The pen is wireless but needs 1 AAA battery and comes with 3 extra tips. The tablet connects with a rather short USB cable to the computer. The pen has 3 buttons none of which I have really used yet. The tip has a 1024-step pressure sensitivity and that should be more than enough for any sort of sketching.

The working space is actually a transparent sheet you could use to slide a photograph under for tracing. If you use a tool like Photoshop you can insert a digital image into a layer for tracing, which is what I did. I found this gorgeous image of a mother and child orangutan on the brilliant photo site The Big Picture and decided it would make an ambitious project for my first tablet experiment.

Using a pen with tablet is unlike using a mouse. The working space of the tablet resembles the screen, so to close a full screen browser window, you will need to move the pen to the upper right corner of the tablet. Whether you can use relative positioning too, other than this absolute positioning, I don't know, but if so, it is very well hidden. Either way, the first step of reproducing the orangutans consisted of tracing the global outlines and then adding some orange hair.

The default settings for the pen were good enough for my inexperienced experimenting. The tablet (or the pen?) senses when the pen is very close to the tablet and moves the cursor accordingly. Touching the tablet with the tip is the same as left-clicking. I am sure this is reprogrammable but as I said, the default configuration is rather intuitive and I didn't dare play around with the settings too much. The only thing I did was program two of the 42 pen-touch-buttons on the tablet to zooming in and out in Photoshop (Ctrl + and Ctrl -).

One very cool feature is its pressure sensitivity and the default way this works in Photoshop. If you choose a brush that is 100 pt wide, that will be the maximum width of the brush when you paint with maximum pressure applied. If you push down very lightly, you will only get a thin line. While you paint, it keeps scanning for the pressure and will adjust the effective brush size immediately. Color, type and transparency works like they do normally when you use your mouse. You can still use your mouse in conjunction with the tablet, which works out really well.

Obviously, a digital drawing lacks the 'authenticity' and romance of actual paper, but it offers a range of advantages, like working with layers, brighter colors, deepers shadows and the power of undo.

I will need to practise drawing this way, but my first experiences left me enthusiastic to try more. It will not replace my real-paper sketchings, rather it is an extra dimension for my artistic skills.

If you would like to hire me to create a drawing, send me an e-mail.