My first car sketch with the Wacom Intuos 5 drawing tablet

I recently had the chance to try out the new Wacom Intuos 5 drawing tablet, and let me tell you this: it blows my old Graphire 4 tablet out of the water! Well, that’s not really such a shocking revelation, but I was really surprised about how much better it was – especially for drawing cars.

First of all, the drawing surface is slightly tacky and rough which gives it the feel of real paper. That alone is worth the upgrade over my old tablet which has a drawing surface as smooth as glass. Combined with a soft felt nib on the drawing pen, it’s just like drawing in a real sketchbook. I also like the fact that the buttons along the left edge are completely customizable, so you can set up your drawing environment any way you want – you can even make the settings different among different software packages. For example, you can have a custom set of buttons and controls for SketchBook Pro, and then have them switch automatically when you move over to Photoshop. All of this is automatic – you don’t have to manually tell the tablet which software package you are using.

This is especially important for drawing cars. I usually sketch my cars in SketchBook Pro, then finish up all the little details in Photoshop. Sometimes (if I feel like it), I’ll do a little bit of color work in Corel Painter so it’s really nice to be drawing with a smart tablet that is aware of what you are doing.

But for now, I still can’t get over the fact that the drawing surface feels so real. Perhaps I’ve been using my old drawing tablet for far too long, but it’s truly a pleasure to draw cars on the new Intuos 5 from Wacom.