George "Trey" Hatt

Okay, so I just bought a Wacom Bam­boo Fun pen and touch tablet (hooray left­over stu­dent loan money!) You can see the full specs here; this isn’t a tech blog! How­ever, I will say this: If you have any artis­tic lean­ings and have Pho­to­shop or Illus­tra­tor, you need to get a pen tablet. It doesn’t have to be this one, per se, but get one. Now. Unless you are hard core and have as much man­ual dex­ter­ity with a mouse as you do with a pen.

Here’s one of my first doo­dles. I made it in Photoshop:

Here’s what the actual tablet looks like in my rig:

Lud­dite that I am, this is the first time I’ve actu­ally used one of these. I was afraid that lay­ing your hand on it while you draw would con­fuse the thing. It turns out that when the pen is within about 5 mm of the work­ing sur­face, it turns off the touch capa­bil­ity. The heel of your hand won’t make the thing freak out while you’re drawing.

Also, you can flip the pen over and Pho­to­shop auto­mat­i­cally enables the eraser tool. And to top it all off, you can still use your mouse while the tablet is plugged in. That’s real impor­tant to me. Just like it’s unnat­ural for me to draw with a mouse, it’s weird to nav­i­gate Pho­to­shop with a pen.

If I go free­lance, I will def­i­nitely list this among my vital tools. (Maybe that would make a cool blog post…hmm.)