Putting pen to tablet

Putting pen to tablet

There’s nothing like getting to grips with a new technique or an unaccustomed piece of equipment for making you think – usually beginning with ‘why doesn’t this thing work the way I want?’

I’ve owned a Wacom tablet for around ten years, and I haven’t used it much: I edit with a mouse (though that may be about to change). When I bought it, I did less work on images than I do now, though I still do very little by most standards.

And once again, I am being gently bullied into action by my fellow Critique Team member, Chase, known to her friends as Janet, who does an awful lot of work to bring her still life images together. Therefore, she knows far more about the technicalities, conveniences and comforts of using that tablet.

So, as with my blog on Levels, this isn’t a definitive ‘this is how to do it’ guide, but an exploration of issues that probably don’t affect seasoned users, and may not have occurred to those who have never bought a graphics tablet.

The first thing is that it feels unfamiliar. My tablet (it’s a Wacom Graphire 4) is big and clunky, physically, and the pen is also rather large. I enjoy the physical act of writing with a fountain pen, and the Wacom pen is light but thick by comparison. It’ll feel OK to those who are used to a Mont Blanc piece of jewellery, but it’s so different from my slender Cross device. Time will tell whether it is comfortable.



Because of its age, the Graphire has no drivers for Windows 10, and so much of the customisation that you would normally have isn’t available. There’s no pressure sensitivity, no clever shortcuts. It’s like a ballpoint. I hate ballpoints.

But it will allow me to draw lines as I would with a pen or brush, for which a mouse is tricky. Try signing your name with a mouse on Photoshop to find out what I mean.

If it works well, I’ll be updating to a more modern device, I suspect… For the moment, I need to practice using it, and work out where to put it (currently, on the left of my keyboard) and how to orientate it. And, despite advice from one YouTuber to throw my mouse away, I’ll not be doing that yet.

All tips and suggestions are welcome, though I reserve the right not to go along with all of them. My aim is to find my way to use the device, as my aim with writing on paper was to find a comfortable personal script: I hated the Marion Richardson script that I was taught at primary school, with no looped letters, and the unbalanced lowercase letter S. My teachers expected strict adherence to the model – in looking for an example, I discovered that Ms Richardson herself saw it as a base for people to develop their own style.