Tablets are virtually useless to half the people who end up buying them, no kidding.
Finding a drawing that looks better done digitally than it would’ve looked done on paper is about as infrequent as meteor shower or something. Not that digital drawings are generally bad, just that they tend to look worse and regularly seem to lose some of their spark. This applies to most novice art and professional alike.
Although I’ve seen some very appealing works composed entirely on the computer, the vast majority of these were paintings. And not just paintings – very sophisticated paintings, done in hours, if not days.
Point is, people who are interested in tablets usually are not into coloring a masterpiece painting. The majority, the leading trend among today’s aspiring artists is simply into drawing nice appealing forms and shapes, without too much effort. In contrast this means studies, concept art, sketching and illustration. And those are the same people who are most hyped out about Wacom, the ones who quite bluntly, don’t need it. Or a little more bluntly, waste 400$ on a toy that temporarily fulfils their desire of groundbreaking technology, until they finally come to their senses and look beyond the coolness factor of this tool, they realize not only that this tool is much less proficient at delivering the results they’re looking for, but also this tool directly deducts their ability to draw something appealing, which would’ve otherwise looked ten times better if the tool was swapped with another tool, a thousand times cheaper, called a paper and a pen.
Drawing, whether a quick sketch or a finalized piece, is all about throwing random marks on a slick surface. Somehow during this process of jiggling your hands, you make it look good, even though most of those lines you just splattered make no sense. Such semi-automatic drawing is the core of each work of yours, more apparent in the initial drawing process but remains true throughout the entire thing. I’m not sure about the science of this phenomenon, but I do know it cannot be achieved properly using your 9 inch tablet. You simply cannot throw random lines in your favorite drawing software without making them look ridiculously… dead.
Subsequently, many artists would cease to believe the notion that there is no such thing as a bad line. Lines, being the fundamental building blocks that they are, exist to guide your imagination, from rough to tough, and when you cease to believe in their effectiveness of doing so, you simply cease to draw well. And this exactly what happens given time. Take a pencil and scribble something onto a blank paper, it wouldn’t look particularly good, but it would make sense. Conversely, do the same with a tablet and a new file in Photoshop. Now it kills you to even look.
Anyway, don’t get too excited about tablets, especially if you see yourself drawing with it. It wouldn’t blend. As to other pros and cons of tablets vs. pencils, I wouldn’t even go there. Let’s just say CTRL+Z is more a con than it is a pro. (for drawing.)
P.S. I’m not one of those traditional art gratifying conservative hooks, I never used a tablet, and the statistical analysis above is based on my opinion.
