- 7,469
- Posts
- 19
- Years
- Age 34
- Britland (United Kingdom)
- Seen Nov 23, 2023
So after years of...
...using this layout, I finally stepped up and got myself a new computer AND tablet.
The PC itself is a new model Packard Bell iXtreme, with a 1TB hard drive and a whopping 6 GB of RAM, making it a perfect upgrade from the puny memory-faulty 2 GB computer I've been using from '06 until now.
The monitor is of the same brand; Packard Bell Viseo 230 23" Widescreen LCD Monitor - 1920 x 1080 resolution.
I've also changed tablet.
It is the Trust Slimline Widescreen Tablet 16529.
The fact that it is not a Wacom tablet did not put me off from purchasing it. It just so happened that I was looking to replace my five year old tablet with something fairly new and modern for quite a while now and felt that a widescreen tablet would suit my needs a lot more seeing as I work on very large canvases (which is also the reason why I wanted a widescreen monitor.)
Unfortunately, most widescreen Wacom tablets cost an absolute bomb and while I did have enough lettuce to go spending on a new computer, I didn't want to spend a ridiculous sum on a tablet. Unless you're really a keen professional artist or just absolutely anal about your way of working digital art, I would find you rather naive to believe that the only sort of tablet you would be satisfied with is an expensive one.
Sometimes expense doesn't make the product.
I bought my first tablet for about £40 and it became my little workhorse for many years. All art you've ever seen me display here or elsewhere on the internet was done with a little second-rate tablet that nobody other than UK/EU citizens would have probably ever heard of. So go boast about your Bamboo Fun tablets, Intuos tablets and Cintiq tablets elsewhere, because you're wasting precious minutes of your life on somebody who is happy enough with something bought from a scrapyard.
But what I found via a little trip to Amazon was quite lovely. The Trust Slimeline Tablet cost a good £48 and is one of the most inexpensive widescreen tablets I've seen on the market to date. Before considering a purchase, I decided to flip through the customer reviews and it had quite a few good ones, so that really pushed my decision to buy it and now that I've had it delivered to me, I can finally try it out.
Unboxing the tablet was quite pleasant, I brushed my hand on the smooth pen-sensitive surface, which was such a contrast to my last tablet and definitely aids in my comfort.
However, one thing I was slightly irked about is a need for a triple-A battery inside the pen, which did increase the weight a slight bit and made me a little worried that wielding the pen would become a tad irritating. Because I happen to use a tablet quite a lot, I'm afraid I'll be needing to replace the battery quite often, but for the price I paid for the overall product...that didn't seem like such a big thing at all.
Once installing the driver, I started practicing my strokes in SAI and on MSN, I then discovered that the pen tip is actually extremely sensitive and would react to the slightest tap of the tip to the tablet. This is apparently the default pressure sensitivity preset and it was a bit annoying to shift through preset levels to eventually find a level I felt was good enough.
But I also discovered that no matter the level of sensitivity you choose, accidentally pressing the tip too much on the surface will be treated as a double-click and—knowing all too well how a program like SAI operates—it will bring up far too many option windows when you attempt to tap at a brush in the tool panel. Now...I have a habit of using my pen instead of my mouse to select options when I'm in the midst of drawing, and I also have a habit of being rather heavy-handed at times as I do this, so having to adjust to this sort of change is rather annoying. I'm quite sure there are options that I'm missing which can cure this problem, but I haven't delved into them just yet.
Drawing with the tablet is a very pleasant experience and certainly made up for the little niggling faults I've encountered with it thus far. Because of the wide area I have to play with, I don't necessarily need to touch the position of my tablet. It used to be that I would have so much frustration with angling my strokes and would often try to angle the tablet itself so I can adjust to the direction of my pen strokes. That only seems to happen with small tablets, there's only so much room you can have to really let your pen flick and sometimes you do so more in a single direction that you need to rotate your tablet a bit so you don't end up going off the edge - this can be irritating, but I'm happy not to have that problem now.
The strokes I can make with the pen are quite refined, much like sketching with a perfectly sharp and shapely pencil. This has left me a lot of room to apply more detail to my drawings than I ever had patience to with my last tablet. Tell me, do you feel motivated to put effort into your drawing more with a sharp pencil than you would with one that's been used a lot? The answer to that question is a no brainer. You have more control over a sharp pencil and the strokes you can get out of it would be perfect for your caricature—not only that—you can change the way you make these strokes depending on how dense you would like them to be, and that's something you can definitely do easily on this particular tablet. The tip of the pen can feel a little gritty on the actual surface, but I personally like that, as it emulates the feel of graphite onto paper and has that sort of traditional feel and effect as I get creative. It is little things like that which can motivate me to get my artsy juices out and make something good.
I didn't want to make this too lengthy, so I'll just summarise briefly. Overall, a very wonderful tablet. It does have one or two little issues that might influence the experience a slight bit, but I think the enjoyment you can get out of drawing with this tablet would overweigh any con by a mile. This is coming from somebody who stubbornly clung to her last tablet so much that she threw away a Bamboo tablet just because it didn't match up. I stubbornly clung to my older tablet because I felt it was the only thing that could truly match up to what I felt suited me the most.
In a way, all artists have their "comfort tools" - things that they feel they can only rely on to get an edge with their art. But I believe that times like this make us underestimate what exactly we're capable of doing. A tablet is a tablet, it's a tool for you to use for your art...but it doesn't necessarily dictate to you the quality of art you're most likely to produce. You could have a very expensive tablet and only get so much out of it, whilst with a small, casual tablet you can get the very same result, perhaps even better because there isn't as much complexity with a cheapy little thing than more defined and sophisticated ones currently being sold in the market.
I felt that typing all this up would help other people become more insightful about what they look for in a first tablet, or perhaps another one if they feel like replacing the one they have. And the one I have in front of me right now is definitely on my recommendations list. For a good £48 I managed to get a lot of enjoyment out of it during the very first day, and it was more than enough for me to pack away my old tablet to be used for another day. But I'll reiterate again, that it isn't the tablet that makes the artist, it is the artist that makes the tablet.
So while you have the tool of the trade in front of you, it is only through your imagination and your creativity can you create with it something that is worthy of being called a skillful piece of art.
Spoiler:
...using this layout, I finally stepped up and got myself a new computer AND tablet.
Spoiler:
The PC itself is a new model Packard Bell iXtreme, with a 1TB hard drive and a whopping 6 GB of RAM, making it a perfect upgrade from the puny memory-faulty 2 GB computer I've been using from '06 until now.
The monitor is of the same brand; Packard Bell Viseo 230 23" Widescreen LCD Monitor - 1920 x 1080 resolution.
I've also changed tablet.
It is the Trust Slimline Widescreen Tablet 16529.
The fact that it is not a Wacom tablet did not put me off from purchasing it. It just so happened that I was looking to replace my five year old tablet with something fairly new and modern for quite a while now and felt that a widescreen tablet would suit my needs a lot more seeing as I work on very large canvases (which is also the reason why I wanted a widescreen monitor.)
Unfortunately, most widescreen Wacom tablets cost an absolute bomb and while I did have enough lettuce to go spending on a new computer, I didn't want to spend a ridiculous sum on a tablet. Unless you're really a keen professional artist or just absolutely anal about your way of working digital art, I would find you rather naive to believe that the only sort of tablet you would be satisfied with is an expensive one.
Sometimes expense doesn't make the product.
I bought my first tablet for about £40 and it became my little workhorse for many years. All art you've ever seen me display here or elsewhere on the internet was done with a little second-rate tablet that nobody other than UK/EU citizens would have probably ever heard of. So go boast about your Bamboo Fun tablets, Intuos tablets and Cintiq tablets elsewhere, because you're wasting precious minutes of your life on somebody who is happy enough with something bought from a scrapyard.
But what I found via a little trip to Amazon was quite lovely. The Trust Slimeline Tablet cost a good £48 and is one of the most inexpensive widescreen tablets I've seen on the market to date. Before considering a purchase, I decided to flip through the customer reviews and it had quite a few good ones, so that really pushed my decision to buy it and now that I've had it delivered to me, I can finally try it out.
Unboxing the tablet was quite pleasant, I brushed my hand on the smooth pen-sensitive surface, which was such a contrast to my last tablet and definitely aids in my comfort.
However, one thing I was slightly irked about is a need for a triple-A battery inside the pen, which did increase the weight a slight bit and made me a little worried that wielding the pen would become a tad irritating. Because I happen to use a tablet quite a lot, I'm afraid I'll be needing to replace the battery quite often, but for the price I paid for the overall product...that didn't seem like such a big thing at all.
Once installing the driver, I started practicing my strokes in SAI and on MSN, I then discovered that the pen tip is actually extremely sensitive and would react to the slightest tap of the tip to the tablet. This is apparently the default pressure sensitivity preset and it was a bit annoying to shift through preset levels to eventually find a level I felt was good enough.
But I also discovered that no matter the level of sensitivity you choose, accidentally pressing the tip too much on the surface will be treated as a double-click and—knowing all too well how a program like SAI operates—it will bring up far too many option windows when you attempt to tap at a brush in the tool panel. Now...I have a habit of using my pen instead of my mouse to select options when I'm in the midst of drawing, and I also have a habit of being rather heavy-handed at times as I do this, so having to adjust to this sort of change is rather annoying. I'm quite sure there are options that I'm missing which can cure this problem, but I haven't delved into them just yet.
Drawing with the tablet is a very pleasant experience and certainly made up for the little niggling faults I've encountered with it thus far. Because of the wide area I have to play with, I don't necessarily need to touch the position of my tablet. It used to be that I would have so much frustration with angling my strokes and would often try to angle the tablet itself so I can adjust to the direction of my pen strokes. That only seems to happen with small tablets, there's only so much room you can have to really let your pen flick and sometimes you do so more in a single direction that you need to rotate your tablet a bit so you don't end up going off the edge - this can be irritating, but I'm happy not to have that problem now.
The strokes I can make with the pen are quite refined, much like sketching with a perfectly sharp and shapely pencil. This has left me a lot of room to apply more detail to my drawings than I ever had patience to with my last tablet. Tell me, do you feel motivated to put effort into your drawing more with a sharp pencil than you would with one that's been used a lot? The answer to that question is a no brainer. You have more control over a sharp pencil and the strokes you can get out of it would be perfect for your caricature—not only that—you can change the way you make these strokes depending on how dense you would like them to be, and that's something you can definitely do easily on this particular tablet. The tip of the pen can feel a little gritty on the actual surface, but I personally like that, as it emulates the feel of graphite onto paper and has that sort of traditional feel and effect as I get creative. It is little things like that which can motivate me to get my artsy juices out and make something good.
I didn't want to make this too lengthy, so I'll just summarise briefly. Overall, a very wonderful tablet. It does have one or two little issues that might influence the experience a slight bit, but I think the enjoyment you can get out of drawing with this tablet would overweigh any con by a mile. This is coming from somebody who stubbornly clung to her last tablet so much that she threw away a Bamboo tablet just because it didn't match up. I stubbornly clung to my older tablet because I felt it was the only thing that could truly match up to what I felt suited me the most.
In a way, all artists have their "comfort tools" - things that they feel they can only rely on to get an edge with their art. But I believe that times like this make us underestimate what exactly we're capable of doing. A tablet is a tablet, it's a tool for you to use for your art...but it doesn't necessarily dictate to you the quality of art you're most likely to produce. You could have a very expensive tablet and only get so much out of it, whilst with a small, casual tablet you can get the very same result, perhaps even better because there isn't as much complexity with a cheapy little thing than more defined and sophisticated ones currently being sold in the market.
I felt that typing all this up would help other people become more insightful about what they look for in a first tablet, or perhaps another one if they feel like replacing the one they have. And the one I have in front of me right now is definitely on my recommendations list. For a good £48 I managed to get a lot of enjoyment out of it during the very first day, and it was more than enough for me to pack away my old tablet to be used for another day. But I'll reiterate again, that it isn't the tablet that makes the artist, it is the artist that makes the tablet.
So while you have the tool of the trade in front of you, it is only through your imagination and your creativity can you create with it something that is worthy of being called a skillful piece of art.
