Pen tablet, compared to a pen display

Support and Advice General Questions
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I would like to know why some users prefer to work on a pen tablet, compared to a pen display. This while they do not see the work itself directly, as is the case with a pen display.

I myself work with the XP-Pen 24 Pro pen display. As I understand it, some users prefer a pen tablet, not weighing that it is cheaper to purchase however what I understand because it works better for them. My question is why does this work better? What advantage do you have by working on a pen tablet, if there is any?

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I worked with a normal (screenless) graphics tablet for over a decade and the one advantage it has over a screen tablet is that you don’t have your arm and hand in your way of sight. You can always see 100 % of the screen, which is especially handy if you only have room for a small screen. In addition you can rest your hand and arm on the desk/tablet which is not always possible with screen tablets, this lets you work longer without your arms and hand getting too tired. These are the things I noticed most after switching to a screen tablet. Screen tablets also takes more space on your desk when you use it in addition to a normal monitor.

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I can easily travel with my pen tablet. Also it’s better for my posture if I don’t have to look down where my hands are, but can look straight ahead at a monitor that’s at eye level. And yeah, hands don’t get in the way of my view.

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I guess it comes down to personal preference. Maciej Kuciara, for instance on one of his streams told that he “just loves” to work with a screen one.

Me personally chose the pen tablet due to the price. Cheep screen tablet are usually have poor dpi or whatever that thing that stands for precision. Or they just small sized.

I do have Samsung Book but it did not really caught me to draw on screen much. I guess it is because it is a bit laggy to use Krita there.

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Both @Takiro Takiro @Rebecca mention "that you don’t have your arm and hand in your way of sight. That’s what I also noticed after working now for almost a year with the screen tablet. My hand is often in sight, also I can easily switch and work with my other hand .

“You can rest your hand and arm on the desk, without your arm and hand getting to tired” Also interesting to hear that, and I was not directly thinking about this, because I am used to paint on canvas also the whole day, and by that my hand and arm have no rest point on a desk.

And your right “you can always see 100% of the screen”.

@Takiro “I guess it comes down to personal preference.” I think that is true.

My question, brings some answers I did not think of directly. So the answers help me to new idea’s of working environment.

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In certain way classik tablet is more healthy:

  1. It easy to setup posture that don’t stretch you neck muscles.
  2. Screen tablet is a monitor, to have a monitor within 15 centimeters are not always comfortable for eyes.

Actually, major problem of classik tablet for me is scaling factor. I often sketch traditionally, so conflict with muscle memory is an inevitable when going to classik tablet. And it leads to stretching of a hand muscles. Still I think it is possible to trick your brain, like blind-typing in two keyboard layouts. Moreover some artist consider scaling factor as advatage, e.g. Ahmed Aldoori likes that he not need to wave over the large space to draw/paint.

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I don’t mind a pen tablet for painting, I used those for a long time and still do. But one thing that I’m way more confortable with when using a pen display is line drawing. I’m not capable of achieving a similar feeling to traditional drawing on paper in a pen tablet no matter how I try. I’m not saying the pen display feeling is perfect, but is better for me. For painting is similar.
Being a traditional artist myself, I don’t mind the hand/arm getting in the way.

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Does anyone here have any experience with the accuracy of drawing compared to the display and pen tablet? I have a wacom intuos pro m and work on a 27" screen. And I have the feeling that I can never draw as well as on paper. Even after 2 months I still can’t get a vertical straight line. all the other lines are okay. but curves are still not easy for me.

Will it really be possible for me to draw a comparable with a pen tablet as on paper?
Painting is not an issue, but i really lack in drawing with this tablet. A 30min sketch digital is done in 10min on paper for me… :upside_down_face:

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I did the test now, first i sketched on paper (12min), then i sketched in krita (looks not really better, but also good as paper) and took me 25min, even it is the second sketch for the same thing…

And i have to say that i never really sketched on paper before, only random stuff maybe 10-15 drawings, and for digital more.

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Again it is scaling factor issue. If you are not willing to get screen tablet and you have a place on the table I would recommend you to buy A3 intuos (Intuos 3 A3 wide or Intuos 4 XL, used, since wacom abandoned developing of XL formats of classic tablets).
David Revoy and Borodante use them. Boro has a video on his channel, and I think you may ask @Deevad directly about this.

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My drawing is not better if i change to precision mode who the scaling is 1:1, but only a small active aera. Beside the smaller aera it is like on paper for the scaling factor for the feeling. if i sketch something that has the size like an A5, i am able to sketch it digital with 1:1 feeling… no change in feeling, digital takes longer

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Did you use some other tool and do other operation while drawing digitally besides drawing? I mean zooming, change brush size etc.
Hmm, I think I understand what you mean. I also noticing similar you talking about: when you just have pencil and paper all mind is focusing on the drawing processing, and when digitally I need more concentration to do only drawing since task in certain way begin more broader - left hand use 20+ commands on the keyboard parallel to drawing, even if I not need them currently the behaving of mindset is changing.
Or may be it is only question of experience.

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By the way is this precision mode from the wacom software not supported in linux? I’m just curious.

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It’s been a while since I was on windows but there’s at least no option called like this on Linux, not that I’m aware of.

You can map the input area to the screen area which usually results in parts of the tablet being basically useless (about a centimeter broad on my large intuos pro) because tablet and screens have different aspect ratios but that didn’t bother me. Without it you wouldn’t be able to work precisely. It’s easy to check if the tablet is calibrated correctly by putting something round on it (a coin or the pen stand) and trace its outline. If it’s not a perfect cycle on the screen, its not calibrated and that makes drawing hard to control.

Everything else is just a matter of practice. However I have to admit I find it a bit easier to connect lines on a screen tablet, while doing outlines for example and I use tilt a lot more. But maybe it’s just that I became a better artist after a decade working digital, for example I rarely find myself using the stabilizer anymore.

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I think it’s best to think of digital as its own medium that you need to learn from scratch. How many years experience do you have with pen and paper? I bet 2 months is nothing in comparison. I can really recommend to do the Lesson 1 exercises from drawabox.com with at tablet, stabilizer off. It’s extremely frustrating, but also extremely valuable.

I can draw well on a pen tablet after years and years of practice, and I too rarely use the stabilizer nowadays, but it will always feel different from drawing on paper. There’s at least one thing I can think of that I do differently digital: overshooting lines and erasing the overshot bit afterwards I rely on pretty heavily. There might be more things that I do subconsciously.

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The pen display is not friendly to people’s necks. And its “intuitive” in my opinion is not a big advantage (I have used ipad, which is similar to a small pen display)

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My drawing experience on paper is a month and digital three to four month since beginning of the year. Had a few big breaks. To me it looks like the Medium Intuos Pro is a bit to small for a 27" screen. And i don’t use stabilizer or weighted in the brush tool settings, it feels weird to me.

Maybe i will buy the Wacom Intuos Pro L (14" active aera), cause the older ones aren’t available here, also no second hand.
And the second option is to buy a Wacom Cintiq 16 (not pro), it is just 10% more expensive here than the Wacom Intuos Pro L. But mainly to have even a larger active aera, and more important the same aspect ratio than my iMac. Would use it mainly like an intuos, watch to the iMac while drawing on the Cintiq, and sometimes also look on the cintiq if i struggle with some parts. What do you think about this idea?

Aspect Ratio for Wacom Intuos Pro L is 1,44, and for my screen and the cintiq is 1,77.

By the way, the precision mode is that you can switch with a shortcut to an limited drawing area on the screen, and on this limited aera (around your actual pen position on the canvas) is the whole tablet mapped in 1:1 size and ratio. And you see the mapped drawing aera normal, and all arround slightly darker. It is nice to have this 1:1 and size ratio and see the whole canvas too. It works better and other way than just zoom in the canvas for more precision.

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I myself work with the XP-Pen 24 Pro pen display. As I understand it, some users prefer a pen tablet […] why does this work better? What advantage do you have by working on a pen tablet, if there is any?

Hi @KritPopCha,

I +1 the feedback here. You can find many arguments over the ergonomic, the room it takes, the budget for the device, the hand hiding part of the canvas, the comfort of drawing, the resolution and distance to the monitors, etc… And this arguments will have variation depending models and setup. In my opinion, all this devices and method are still far to be perfect and the technology for them hasn’t really improved much over the last 10 years… So, it is easy to get as many point of view about them as there is users.

On my side, I’m known to prefer non-display tablet as already mentioned on this topic, and I logged my tablet history over the last 20 years. I had many devices and tried display pen many time too and rarely could adapt to them.

But, since a couple of week, I’m also trying to get out of the comfort zone again and I’m trying to re-adapt to a XP-Pen 24 Pro pen display and I posted photos on the blog on monday about it. I’m switching mainly because of an aspect I never seen or read, but something that grew strongly in me:

It’s an internal feeling: I disliked a lot how was looking my workspace. It was looking like the workspace of a computer centric user more than a the desk of an artist. It wasn’t matching with what I had in mind when I started my carreer (when I thought I would spend my life on a drawing board, before Internet and digital-everywhere) and this fact made me sad about how evolved my work.

Getting back to a traditional drawing board wasn’t really an option, so I found the compromise of trying to transform my workspace around the 24 Pro, always ready on my desk. It matches better what I had in mind about my work; and this vision helps me to spend another 10h drawing/painting day.

Right now, I’m still slower than with my non-pen-display tablet… So it’s clearly not a productivity advantage, but I’m also out of my comfort zone. I’ll eventually catch up.

The workflow changes a lot: With the eyes so near of the surface of monitor; displaying a picture on all the width become useless for speedpainting; my cone of vision is limited to a square that cover only half of the monitor. So I tend to work with lower zoom, spending more time on thumbnails, then coloring at a postcard size; before really zooming in the details. It influences the brushes I’ll tend to favor for this task.

I’ll continue a bit on this experimentation, if I change my mind by the next month; I still have my Intuos and changing the setup can be done in less than an hour. I’ll see and I hope this long reply was interesting.

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I am surprised with the overwhelmed spontaneous reactions of everyone. I need some time to read through everything and come up with a response.

There are many valuable reactions that help me to develop my work even better. Thanks for all the comments so far.

KritPopCha

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It would also help me a bit to hear your opinion if I should buy the wacom Intuos Pro L with 14", or the Cintiq 16", or maybe even the Cintiq 24" Pro for more precision. Because in my opinion the Cintiq 16" Pro is not worth the price, then better directly the 24".

However, I don’t know if it’s a good idea if I only want to look at the cintiq display for details or quick sketches, and then mainly look at the pc monitor for milling and use the cintiq like a pen tablet.

EDIT: Only Wacom is really available here in my country, that is why i don’t want to buy another brand, no support and hard to find one.