How to Draw Clean Lines With a Drawing Tablet

The research

• Why you should trust us
• Who this is for
• How we picked
• How we tested
• Our pick: Wacom Intuos
• Flaws but not dealbreakers
• Our pick for students: One by Wacom
• The competition
• Sources

Why you should trust us

We spoke with professional artists and educators who use drawing tablets every day:

• Dami Lee is a cartoonist and author of the book Be Everything at Once. Lee has done giveaways with XP-Pen.
• Victoria Ying is an artist and illustrator of the book Meow! Her work has appeared in Disney films such as Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, and Moana. She has participated in panels for Wacom and was paid for her time there.
• Cher Threinen-Pendarvis is the author of The Photoshop and Painter Artist Tablet Book. She has been paid for consultations with Wacom and Corel.
• Jim Mortensen is a supervising producer on Big Nate at Nick and previously a supervising director at DreamWorks TV, known for his work on Breadwinners, Cool It, and Home: Adventures with Tip & Oh.
• Rhoda Draws is an artist, Corel Painter Master, and author of several books on creating digital art. She has received free tablets from Wacom in the past.
• Carolyn Dickey was a print designer for a fashion company at the time of our interview.

Ellen Airhart, who wrote the most recent update to this guide, found the process of installing the eight drawing tablets she tested for this guide confusing, and if something's going to trip you up, it probably challenged her first. She has been a fact checker and writer at Wirecutter since 2019, and she is an amateur artist who likes to paint portraits and pets in acrylic and watercolors.

Senior staff writer Melanie Pinola and staff writer Justin Krajeski contributed to earlier versions of this guide. Melanie reviewed tech hardware and software for over a dozen years for sites such as Lifehacker, Laptop Mag, and PCWorld, and she has been engaged in drawing and painting as a hobby for much longer. Justin has been reviewing products for Wirecutter since 2016, spending time with all kinds of devices from ultrabooks to portable hard drives. As a kid, he drew mythical creatures around the ring holes in his notebooks; as an adult, well, he still does.

Who this is for

This guide is for anyone making their first foray into creating digital art or retouching photos. Writing your signature with your mouse or a laptop trackpad is bad enough, but trying to create a detailed sketch or to precisely retouch a photo with those tools is terrible.

A drawing tablet, also known as a graphics tablet, translates the strokes from a pen or stylus to your computer screen with much greater precision. It's far more natural and comfortable to use than a mouse or touchpad whether you want to paint, illustrate, animate in 3D, create a comic, or retouch photos.

You can attach a drawing tablet to any Windows PC or Mac, which makes it versatile and useful for years to come. If you're interested in a graphics tablet but don't want to spend a boatload of money on an accessory you might not use every day, our picks are for you.

For beginners, we don't recommend, and didn't test, pro tablets (such as an iPad Pro or Microsoft Surface Pro) or graphics tablets with a screen (such as the Wacom Cintiq line) because they're prohibitively expensive, and illustrator Victoria Ying pointed out that when you're using a pro tablet, your hand can block parts of your art while you're working. If you're dipping your toe into digital art, you should try an affordable graphics tablet to see if it meets your needs. Many of the experts we spoke to used drawing tablets priced similarly to our picks many years into their careers. Screen-less drawing tablets have a "harder learning curve," Ying said, "but a lot of my friends working in feature films prefer it to the feeling of a Cintiq or iPad."

How we picked

Photo: Michael Murtaugh

Based on our research, expert interviews, and testing, we found that the key features for a drawing tablet (in order of importance) are the following:

• Pressure sensitivity: Many of our experts agreed that the most important feature of a drawing tablet is its pressure sensitivity. The higher the pressure sensitivity, the better you can control the line weight (how thick and opaque the lines are, based on how hard you press down on the tablet with the pen). We found that a minimum of 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity (pressure sensitivities scale upward in intervals of 512) is plenty. However, many of our long-term Wirecutter testers have used their tablets for years, and they say an extra $20 was worth paying for double the pressure sensitivity over the course of their artistic development.
• Compatibility and stability: Although "no one will explicitly ask about the quality of the driver software, they should," Jim Mortensen said. "It's super-important." The driver affects how well the drawing tablet works with your computer, which software the tablet will work with, and the presence and severity of input lag. Lines should appear instantly. Drawing tablets in general are glitchy and hard to set up. In our experience, some of our options and their accompanying software took hours to start operating—we're here to save you the headache. The best tablets work instantly, without any downloads or security hang-ups.

• Price: Graphics tablets aimed at beginners cost less than $100, while bigger, professional-level tablets with more advanced features can cost three to five times that amount. We focused on the sub-$100 range because extras such as multitouch and pen tilt recognition don't make a huge difference in what you can create with a drawing tablet. As Victoria Ying advised, "[Approximately] 100 dollars is reasonable; you can upgrade as you move forward with your artwork."
• Tablet size: The smaller the active area, the less your hand must move to manipulate the cursor on the screen. This can mean less arm fatigue, but when you're working on large (or multiple) displays, you may need to zoom in to work with fine details or map the active area to a portion of the screen. Small graphics tablets, such as the One by Wacom, are about the size of a mouse pad (with an active area around 6 by 4 inches) and highly portable. Medium (8-by-5-inch) and large (10-by-6-inch) drawing tablets are about as wide as a keyboard without a number pad, so they're better suited for dedicated graphics work. After talking to our sources, we think the smaller drawing tablets offer the best quality for the price, especially for beginners.
• Pen type: All of the pens we tested are battery-free, which means you never need to charge the pen or swap out its batteries. Battery-free pens are convenient and cost-effective over the long run.
• Tablet buttons and customizability: Most drawing tablets let you map keyboard shortcuts and other actions to buttons on the pen and tablet, but beginners probably won't need more than a handful to cover the most-used actions. Some tablets let you map the pen buttons to only a few set actions, while others offer over a dozen to choose from. More customizability means you can fine-tune your workflow, but having easy-to-use software is more important than having 20 customizable buttons.
• Complimentary software: Some tablets come with software trials. The more expensive tablets feature more well-known names, such as Adobe, while the more affordable options come with less familiar and harder-to-use software. The Wacom tablets we tested come with a trial of Corel Painter Essentials, and some of our sources have used Corel Painter for years. We were unable to download Painter Essentials because of compatibility issues with the version of our laptop's operating system—Corel later clarified that the software requires macOS Catalina 10.15 or newer. Cartoonist Dami Lee told us that she mainly uses Clip Studio Pro, a free trial of which comes with both of our picks.
• Multitouch and tilt recognition: Two other features, multitouch and tilt recognition, distinguish tablets aimed at beginners from those for professionals. Multitouch lets you use your fingers on the tablet as you would a touchpad—for example, pinching to zoom or rotating artwork or 3D models. Tilt recognition lets you create different types of strokes based on the angle at which you hold the pen, offering a bit more creative control over your lines. But none of our experts thought these features were necessary for a beginner tablet, and they didn't use these features themselves for their professional work. So although we took these added features into consideration, we gave them much less weight than more crucial functions.
• Resolution: A tablet's resolution determines how many lines you can draw per inch (lpi), which translates to how much detail you can draw in the tablet's active area. The tablets we looked at were consistent—2,540 lpi for small tablets and 5,080 lpi for medium and large ones—so this wasn't a distinguishing feature.

Wacom is to graphics tablets what Google is to search, and every expert we spoke to recommended Wacom tablets for their reliability. Some experts have used Wacom for decades. We also tested models from less well-known brands such as Huion, Parblo, and XP-Pen based on positive reviews and their potential value. Many of these tablets offer a larger active area and more shortcut keys for the same price as their Wacom equivalents do.

How we tested

We tested each drawing tablet on a Windows PC and a macOS computer, using the latest driver from the tablet manufacturer's website. (We uninstalled the drivers between each tablet because multiple drivers can interfere with a tablet's performance.)

We tested driver stability, input lag, and program compatibility. A tablet could feature more levels of pressure sensitivity than the most expensive competition, but if it doesn't work with your animation or drawing program, it's basically useless.

We tested each tablet with Adobe Photoshop 2021 and Pixlr. We drew and painted basic shapes to test input lag as well as line weight and consistency. We created nuanced shades of gray—from very faint to almost black—and drew strokes that tapered to a point by lifting the pen. And since people are familiar with their own signature, we signed over and over again to see how close the tablet pen matched handwriting on paper. We painted self-portraits to see the tablets in action. We also looked for any glitches, such as the cursor not appearing where it ought to or failing to move as it should. And throughout our tests, we observed how the pen felt to hold and draw with, and we noted the tablets' customizability.

Our pick: Wacom Intuos

Flaws but not dealbreakers

In a February 2020 blog post, software engineer Robert Heaton raised privacy concerns over the fact that Wacom collects a lot of data from your usage—including which applications you use—with its software. Wacom replied in a statement that its software driver collects data "for quality assurance and development purposes only." The company also confirmed that the driver collects a "sample of information" such as the tablet model and the software applications in use with the tablet, and that the Wacom Desktop Center and the control panel (Windows) or preferences pane (macOS) collects "basic app usage data."

If you do not want to participate in this program, you should opt out by doing the following:

1. Open the Wacom Desktop Center.
2. Click More.
3. Click Privacy Settings.
4. Turn off Wacom Experience Program.

The Intuos has four tablet keys, fewer than other tablets in this price range, which have as many as 12. The keys sit along the top of the tablet rather than to the side—where they are on most other tablets—so they're a little harder to reach while you're drawing. If you rely on such buttons frequently for keyboard shortcuts, this positioning might be an issue, but we think most beginners are likely to use the pen more than the tablet keys. The pen's customizable buttons and the tablet's four keys should be enough to cover the most-used shortcuts or workflows for beginners.

Multitouch is missing from the Intuos, but that's an unnecessary feature unless you plan to use the tablet as a trackpad, and we don't think multitouch or tilt recognition is crucial for beginners.

Our pick for students: One by Wacom

The competition

The Veikk A15 Pro started drawing immediately and was a pleasure to use out of the box. It's about 10 by 6 inches and has 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity. We initially liked it as a medium-size tablet pick. But a few rounds into testing, we had some trouble redownloading the driver, and the instructions and documentation were confusing and incomplete. Even with the help of the New York Times IT department, we were unable to resolve this issue.

Another large tablet, the Artisul M0610Pro, also provides 8,192 levels of sensitivity. However, upon plugging in the tablet and downloading the driver, we couldn't get the tablet to draw and click. We reached out to customer support, and representatives responded about four days later, but their advice was not helpful, and we were unable to resolve the issue.

The Parblo A610 Plus V2 offers roughly the same size and sensitivity as the Veikk tablet does, but the Veikk was slightly simpler and faster to set up. If our picks are out of stock, or if you see this model for cheap, it's a good option as a first tablet if you're willing to tolerate the setup process.

We also researched several other graphics tablets, including more recent models by Gaoman, Huion, Turcom, and Ugee, but we dismissed them due to middling or poor reviews, worse features, or limitations such as requiring an AAA battery for the pen.

Sources

1. Dami Lee, cartoonist and author, email interview , January 28, 2021

2. Rhoda Draws, artist, Corel Painter Master, and author, email interviews, May 19, 2017, and January 27, 2021

3. Cher Threinen-Pendarvis, author of The Photoshop and Painter Artist Tablet Book, email interviews, May 30, 2017, and February 8, 2021

4. Victoria Ying, artist and illustrator, email interviews, June 8, 2017, and January 19, 2021

5. Jim Mortensen, supervising director, DreamWorks TV, email interviews, June 18, 2017, and January 25, 2021

6. Carolyn Dickey, print designer, email interview , June 21, 2017

7. Aaron Rutten, Best Drawing Tablets 2020 - Professional Tablets, YouTube , February 21, 2020

8. ergojosh, This is the digital art tablet you should buy, YouTube , April 5, 2020

9. Richard Hill, Jon Stapley, The best drawing tablet 2020: Our pick of the best graphics tablets, Creative Bloq , November 30, 2020

10. 9 Best Graphic Tablets for Beginners in 2020, Architecture Lab , August 30, 2020

11. Best Graphic Tablets For Beginners, Concept Art Empire

How to Draw Clean Lines With a Drawing Tablet

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-drawing-tablets-for-beginners/