The pen is mightier than the mouse
If engineers Doug Engelbart and Bill English hadn’t come up with the computer mouse, we might all be controlling our computers with pens. But styluses ended up confined to graphics tablets, a niche option for professional artists. Meanwhile, the rest of us got to push flat plastic blobs around our desks. There are times when we could all do with a pointier pointer, though. Years after Steve Jobs declared them dead, Apple is just one of the companies resurrecting styluses. So maybe we should look again at graphics tablets too.
Wacom is the big name in this area, and although its Intuos Pro and Cintiq tablets are beyond most budgets, it also offers much more affordable versions. The Creative Pen & Touch Tablet is sold as Intuos Art, Intuos Photo or Intuos Comic; the difference is in the software that’s included. With the Art, you get Corel Painter Essentials 5, a basic version of the leading ‘natural media’ program, used by artists and illustrators to produce artwork reminiscent of paints, pastels and pencils.
The Creative Pen & Touch Tablet feels plasticky, but is nicely designed. Extra buttons on the surface and on the pen let you operate functions without having to reach for your keyboard. It’s much smaller than the tablets you’ll see in commercial studios, with a drawing area that’s slightly less than half A4, but we found there was still just about room to draw comfortably. It recognises finger taps and gestures as well as the stylus, and you can control regular Windows features as well as art software.
Like most graphics tablets, it’s just a sensing surface, not a screen: you plug it into your PC via USB. As you draw ‘blind’ with the pen, your work appears on the monitor. It senses pressure, so you can vary lines by pressing harder, making drawing feel quite natural.
It’s never going to be as natural as drawing on an iPad, especially with an ‘active’ stylus, such as the Adonit Jot Touch PixelPoint (for iPads), or Apple’s Pencil (for iPad Pro). That’s the way to go if you can afford it. For Mac users, the Astropad app (£8) even lets you use the iPad as a graphics tablet for your desktop software. Unless you already have an iPad, though (there are no comparable styluses for Android), the Intuos is much cheaper.
Which bundle should you buy? Intuos Art has an official price of £75 including Painter Essentials 5, which is £30 on its own. Intuos Comic swaps this for Anime Studio Debut 10, a good choice for beginners who want to learn how professional animators work. For still comics, you get a two-year trial of Clip Studio Paint Pro (also known as Manga Studio 5), normally £35, which you can pay to upgrade or use as a cut-down version when the trial expires.
Intuos Photo (also £75) comes with the full version of Corel PaintShop Pro X8 (worth £45). Mac users also get a version of Macphun Creative Kit thrown in, which would normally cost over £70. This will make PC users feel short-changed, but it’s still a good deal. You can knock a few pounds off all of these prices if you shop around.
You can also buy Intuos Draw at just £55, with ArtRage Lite, a £25 painting program. This can be upgraded to ArtRage 4.5, for £21 (a 50 per cent discount). The catch is that you get the plain Creative Pen tablet, which only recognises the stylus, not your fingers.
VERDICT
Mastering a graphics tablet takes some time, but this one is usable and good value if you want to improve your art.
SPECIFICATIONS
Corded tablet with cordless stylus • USB • Active area 152x95mm • 290g • Two-year warranty • Requires Windows 7 or OS X 10.8.5 or later