Ordered my new Wacom tablet, should have it tomorrow. I got the "large"... ran me about $450 on Amazon. I'm really looking forward to it. I enjoy work where I have to draw. I have seriously been considering a sideline writing and illustrating my own graphic novel series. Though I have no idea how I'd go about trying to sell and publish it. I probably can't afford a literary agent. And nobody takes unsolicited work anymore.

So it might be a self-publish kind of thing. From my own web site, printed by brother Brad.

We'll see if it goes anywhere. I license "Comic Life" Deluxe, which is a killer app (except for its goofy interface sounds), which makes laying out the boards easy peasey.

But I'm dying to give the new Wacom a try. The last time I used one, they were pretty primitive. Kind of an alternate input device without much touch or feel to it. The tendency was to just use it like a mouse or a trackball. I wasn't really all that impressed. But now I see some of the work being generated on these babies, and I am.

I think the biggest issue is going to be what to set the buttons and touch wheel to. There are four touch wheel settings and 8 buttons to configure. Oh, and two buttons on the stylus. (Click and right click?)

I guess one touch wheel setting is going to have to be brush hardness. I use zoom (magnifying tool) quite a bit. I'll have to see, developing the workflow is going to be part of getting the feel of this tool.

I was thinking, based on our font thread, how cool it might be to use this tablet to design type. You can actually get brush-feeling and chisel/marker-feeling nibs.

Oh, you can also evolve workflows for different apps... so where your Photoshop settings can be one way, you switch to Illustrator, and you have a whole 'nother configuration. Same for ANY app... even if you bail to the finder and use the thing like a mouse. Which I highly doubt I will do.

I may have to re up my Painter license. But it's been so long, I'll probably be paying full price again. Yeah, just checked. Screwed. It's a $279 app. But it may be a must-buy now that I'm going tablet again.

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I have seriously been considering a sideline writing and illustrating my own graphic novel series. Though I have no idea how I'd go about trying to sell and publish it. I probably can't afford a literary agent. And nobody takes unsolicited work anymore.

Well, I think you should. Your stories tend to be interesting. And with dedicated practice, they'll get even better. I shudder to think what the next true R. Crumb would come up with, but I know I'd want to read it. I think the world is ready for true subversives rather than the pseudo kind you often see on the left. Ass-kissing of current trends is not making a "social statement" nor is it particularly daring. Regurgitating Hugo Chavez may please the easily baffled crowd, but it's not the same thing as true social commentary, something South Park almost has a monopoly on at the moment. "Radical" is now a word that means being a brown-nosing douchebag who toes the party line.

Hmmm. Maybe that could one of the blurbs on the back of the dust jacket.

There is this online publisher called Blurb.

Cool! Thanks. Please god let this thing be good. I don't know that I can take another hardware disappointment. Also, I hope I made the right choice for size. I thought about the Extra-Large, which is more the size of a conventional drawing board. But it wouldn't fit easily on my desk in front of the monitor.

When it comes, I'll mess with it and give my full review ASAP.

That size seems pretty big to me. Maybe at some point the tablet could be so large it's cumbersome. Can't wait to see some samples.

We have one of the x-large ones in the office. Intuos3 I think. They are to big. They just take up to much space. The large size will be just right for you thalo.

A long, long time ago Atari produced a graphics tablet for it's line of computers. It looked like this

Well, first impressions of the Intuos4 are pretty damn good. The first thing that struck me, out of the box, is that the tablet doesn't feel CHEAP. It's solid, and well made. Pleasingly hefty, but not too heavy for its size. The pressure sensitive part is a matte black surface, and the control areas to the left and right are glossy.

Couldn't be easier to set up. I loaded the driver from a download, rather than the CD-ROM. It's a double-click of a package file, enter your admin password, agree to terms and conditions, install. Done and done.

The grip pen is a beefy, rubber coated stylus. There are two buttons on it, right click and double click. The double click I haven't quite gotten the hang of... First problem: doesn't register as a double-click on my computer (might be set too fast)... but I can double click easily by tapping. There's what looks like a button on the top of the pen, feels like you can press it, but it ain't. It's an ERASER. God, I love it. The give is just the pressure sensitivity of the eraser... so again, you can lightly erase, or bear down. OK, I admit I love that. But it also turn out that if you don't love the eraser, you can program that thing as a click button, a keystroke, a modifier. I think it would be kinda stupid as a modifier while trying to use the pen. Imagine trying to write with a ballpoint click pen, whilst your thumb was on the clicker. As far as I'm concerned: eraser. Kind of the easiest decision on how to program what appears to be a lot of programmable stuff.

Preliminary tests in Photoshop were great. Smooth as silk. Not too much polygonization. Really feels like drawing with a pencil, and the thing truly is pressure sensitive. Quite impressive and intuitive. When you bear down and make marks, they're darker... when you ease up, they get lighter. You can go from just barely caressing the surface, to really grinding the nib in. Takes a little getting used to. Signing your name looks like your signature, your handwriting looks like your handwriting, but maybe when you were a little tipsy. So an imperceptible lag. Plus the fact that you're looking at your screen, and not at the tablet itself for the results of your mark-making. There are settings for tilt sensitivity (a slider for normal to high), and tip feel (a slider for soft through firm... preset midway between the two). You also have a visual progress-bar kind of thing for visually testing the pressure sensitivity.

I'm just using the presets on all the control buttons and the touch ring for the time being. The default touch ring setting is a zoomer. It's sweet, if you can master the scroll wheel on an iPod, you can master this... but I don't yet see any easy way to get the thing to go back to actual size. If you try and use the touch ring itself to back the magnification down, you get close, like 98% or 94%, but it's tough to hit it right on 100% magnification. Hitting the center button on the touch ring cycles through different touch ring settings, so that's not the way. Other presets are cycling through the layers in Photoshop. That's handy. Brush size, meh... canvas rotation, hm. Interesting, like rotating the paper when you draw, doubt I'll use it. Again, tough to get back to default rotation.

OK, all together you have four different programmable touch-ring presets, and 8 programmable "ExpressKeys"... one really impressive thing is that the illuminated labels of the functions change as you program the keys. At first I went oh shit, those stupid labels are permanent... you'll program the keys but it'll be like the Mac keyboard where you have to read a label for something you changed the function on. Nope. This baby gives you a crisp pixelated label that reflects the way you programmed the key. If you set it to be a click, it says "click"... if you set it to "show settings" (the default), it's a question mark. If you set it as a modifier key, like "command"... it shows you the little cloverleaf symbol of the command key. There's a hand tool, and the icon is the hand. Very nice indeed.

The unit comes with a mouse, which turns the tablet into a glorified mousepad. It's a programmable multi-button mouse (I think there's 4 different clickable areas on it)--my favorite--plus a scroll wheel. It looks nice, it all works fine... and will make a nice paperweight.

Compared to the old days, Wacom tablets have come a long way. They're quite less is more. Black on black, slick looking. The only thing you see that breaks up the slim edge-curved 2001 monolith feel of the thing are the illuminated function labels.

Oh, also pretty nifty: you can change the MAPPING of the tablet to either the full screen, or a portion thereof. I'll have to experiment with that. The setting is illustrated graphically in the pref, so you know how the screen is mapped in relation to the tablet. If you set a portion of the screen, rather than the full... you would of course have to use your regular mouse to access the stuff outside of the mapped areas.

I kind of tuck my keyboard up under my monitor so I can still access it while using the tablet. Not too bad.

On the backside of the tablet, there are four rectangular rubber feet for non-skid. I don't see those lasting very long if they are simple adhesive, but I can't tell.

So far, I love this thing. Nice little weighted holder for the grip pen that looks like an inkwell, and which holds a few extra nibs. Nib changing is just screwing off the front of the barrel and pulling the nib out. Nibs are about an inch long, and the width of a wooden pencil lead.

For any visuals or additional tech info you may need regarding this model tablet, go here

Looks like a great new toy you got there...I mean "work tool." You'll be having lots of fun with this black beauty.

An iPad is a toy. This tablet has the FUN of a toy, but it's turning out to have much more potential as a serious work tool. Which theoretically I have to put into practice starting later today. It will remain to be seen how it performs over time, I'm sure the honeymoon period will be over... but right now it's pretty sweet.

Tried it in Illustrator. Oh sweet mercy, it changes the whole app for me. The freehand tool is finally worth a damn. Even the pen tool rocks when using the stylus rather than a mouse.

In Flash, since the drawing tools are so primitive, and there's a lot of auto-smoothing going on, it's not really amazing there.

I'd love to try the Wacom in Illustrator using the freehand tool. Even with the best of mice, I've never been able to accomplish much with that tool. And it sounds like making Bezier curves is doable as well.

And I would think for basic editing in Photoshop, the Wacom would be extremely useful. I'd like to try that as well.

England just scored. Again, the goaltender seemed out of place. England just scored another goal...only it didn't count because the referees are retards.

Oh, messing around with photo retouching with the Wacom. Great great. Siloing photos is much easier... though for pinpoint precision with an eraser, I tended to use the nib end with the eraser tool, rather than the ass end of the stylus with the eraser end.

SELECTING with the lasso tool is much nicer with the control of a pen, too.

Airbrush tool: like an airbrush. Wonderful. The thing works with the stylus a couple of inches off the surface, and it works with the nib pressed in rather strongly.

The other thing: you know what? The PRICE was right. These things aren't very expensive. The Large was $450, but the next size smaller (which to be honest would probably have been fine)... only $309 from amazon. The small (which would have probably been too small) $199.

I have the feeling the Wacom is one of those devices that you wonder how you ever did without.

I'm fairly proficient with a mouse drawing Bezier curves. But I suspect a tablet like yours might help with some of the fine work. And I have little doubt that lasso-selecting, masking, and silhouetting would be VASTLY improved in Photoshop. I don't do it that often, but if I did it enough it would pay to have that $300.00 tablet.

Have fun with your Wacom, thalo! What can be said about Wacoms? They just work in (near) perfection. I never had trouble with my wacom Intuos 2 (A4 size). But i never replaced my mouse with the wacom, i think for navigation around it's speedier with the mouse. For drawing the wacom excels.

Yes, brother smithz, I agree that the mouse is going nowhere. The Wacom mouse is nice (oh BN, it's SIX clickable programmable areas, not five... you can press down on the scroll wheel too.) But I can't see myself doing anything but drawing with the Wacom.

I used one for a while during the legacy, but wasn't that thrilled with it. These babies have surely come a long way. I used it today for real. Just worked, that's the best compliment I can give it. I wasn't fighting it, it just did the job when asked.

Here are the buttons I commonly use on my Mac's mouse:

1) left-click
2) right-click (control-click)
3) scroll wheel (up and down for scrolling internet pages only)

On my Logitech mouse I have a button near the thumb that is set to Exposé (show all windows) but I don't use it that often, but it comes in handy every one in a while when trying to find a buried window. On my PC I set that thumb button to the internet "back" button. Works great for that.

That's it. That's hardly an explosion of buttons, but I really can't imagine working efficiently without the right-click. And scrolling internet windows is a pleasure with the scroll wheel. Think of it as the equivalent of the "swipe" on the iPad or iPhone. What sucks though are those scroll wheels that have no ratcheted "click" feedback when turned. They just spin, and to me they feel like a broken scroll wheels. And they have scroll wheels that tilt from side to side, but even for me that's overkill. My Logitech also has the "push down the wheel" button but, again, that's overkill and in practice is too hard to use.

But it sure sounds like your Intuos 4 is among the best money you ever spent. I'd really like to borrow it sometime and do a little Photoshop editing. I'm not an illustrator, but I do have to draw things from time to time, if only in making precise selections. And that is a BIG pain in the ass even with the best of meeses.

Don't mention more than one button, thalo will rant again.

Me? No, I say let's put even more functionality on the mouse. Let's have friggin' buttons to control our monitor brightness on the fly... show/hide the dock, what the hell, let's have a full QWERTY keyboard on the thing, so we don't have to type with both hands. A simple, click-chord/swipe-thumbwheel, and you get the letter "M" simple!

Then it's just a small matter of double-click/wheel-click/right-click swipe, and you can type an "N"! Wow!

And then let's make mice like Wii controllers, gyro-driven so they tell where they are spatially. So pretty soon we'll be picking up our mice---shaking them at the sky, and that movement will allow us to, say, close a Finder window. It'll be great. Instead of clicking an icon on screen or using any kind of a graphical interface.... we can just wipe the mouse over our butts to empty the trash.

Ever seen all the buttons and switches on one of those upper echelon joysticks? They just about have the capability of doing what you describe. But that's apparently good for things like flight simulation and various games.