wacom cintiq. wow.
Wacom recently released a (somewhat) affordable version of their Cintiq drawing tablet, which allows you to draw and paint directly on the screen. Today we picked up the smallest version, with a 12-inch screen.
After playing with it for an hour, I can safely say that I don't regret a penny I spent (though I'll have to get that back by selling some stuff on eBay!). If you're like me, your greatest enemy is yourself – and you often find yourself paralyzed, pen poised above paper, terrified of screwing up. The Cintiq frees you of that neurosis, while retaining the tactility, immediacy, and joy of drawing on paper.
And that means you can work more freely, and much faster -- I did the above sketch in about 15 minutes, maybe 3 times as fast as my pen-and-paper productivity.
The Cintiq won't make you a better artist. If you tend to draw guns that look more like hairdryers, as I do – well, you'll still draw hairdryers. But at least you have the freedom to draw increasingly more gun-like hairdryers, without wasting an entire pad of paper.
carla echevarria
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Reader Comments (3)
Funny you should fall in love with this as I have been sniffing around trying to find a good tablet for sketching.
I tried one of these tablets with a screen built in like 4-5 years ago and it was cool-ish but the lag btw your pen position and what was drawn on screen was a bit painful. It was more like an etch a sketch vs pen on digital paper.
Have they fixed this with the Cintiq?
hope all else is well-
Spooner
Yeah, I remember hearing that about earlier versions (also made by Wacom). They seem to have nailed it in these current models, though. No lag at all, and barely any offset – the thickness of the glass creates a tiny gap between the onscreen cursor and the physical point of the pen, which can make you a little cross-eyed when doing detail work. But it's a minor inconvenience, relatively. On the whole, it's just like drawing on paper.
PS. Nice to hear from you!