Not so! In many ways the Wacom is more difficult to control than traditional drawing tools (it’s saving grace is the Undo function). Drawing Tipsīefore I started using a Wacom I imagined that it would magically transform me into a good artist. The software has a handy little preview of how hard you’re pressing so use that as a benchmark to find the best setting. I find that being able to keep a constant medium to hard pressure helps me make smoother lines. This means that I have to press harder to get the same line thickness than at the default settings. The most important setting here (and the only one I’m going to talk about) is the ‘Tip Feel’.Īs you can see from the screenshot above, I like pen tip to have a firm feel. This utility helps you tweak the special buttons on your tablet, pen pressure, and a lot of other stuff. In your start menu you should see a ‘Wacom’ folder, and inside, a ‘Wacom Tablet Properties’ program.
Shut down Photoshop, fire up the wacom tablet properties software just for fun, restart Photoshop. Now go ahead, draw a squiggly line! Does the brush vary in thickness in response to pressure? Great! It doesn’t? Don’t worry, it happens to us all of the time. Make sure the rest of the settings match the screenshot. Press F5 to bring up the Brushes palette and make sure the “Shape Dynamics” box is checked. Set the brush hardness all the way to 100% and size to about 20px. Press on the rocker button closest to the tip of your pen, which should be mapped to be a right click by default. Set your foreground color to black and select the Brush Tool. Go ahead and create a new Photoshop Document at a pixel resolution equal to your screen resolution. For a great video tutorial on Wacom settings in PainterX, check out Ray Frenden’s guest post from a while back. I’m only going to to cover the use of the Wacom with Photoshop because it is all we use at Go Media. Step 2Īdjust your Wacom’s settings Fire up Photoshop or PainterX and play around This is really cool once you get comfortable with it. Second, unlike your mouse, your Wacam pen will point to exactly the same spot on your screen when it is pointed at the corresponding spot on the tablet. Once installed, you should notice some things are different.įirst, the tablet is proportional to the screen now – you can point to any spot on the screen without picking up your pen.
Put in the CD that came with your Wacom or head over to wacom’s website to download the software & drivers for your model. Yes that new toy smell is really exciting, but we’ve got to install some stuff first. This is because you haven’t installed the Wacom Software yet. You’ll see that the pen tracks right away, but it has one major problem it will not reach to all corners of the screen without having to be picked up for another swipe across the tablet. Well first of all, just plug the USB cord of your Wacom Tablet into your computer. We do not handle any support questions here at Go Media. If you have more questions about using your Wacom after reading this post, please reach out to Wacom directly. Specifically, this tutorial was written with the Intuos 3 6×11 in mind. We use Intuos 2s & 3s here at Ohio Website Designers, Go Media. In this post we’ll cover the basics of getting your Wacom working, some finer details of getting it to work well, and finally some tips for getting better at drawing with a Wacom. To learn more, head to .Ī lot of you have asked about how to set up your Wacom for awesome results like this. Hey designers, attend our all-inclusive soul-fulfilling three-day design retreat, WMC: Off-The-Grid, this October 5 – 7th.