I had my Wacom Inkling delivered three days ago. It is an awesome piece of technology, blurring the line between analog and digital drawing. Still it is far from being perfect. A lot of people already asked me about it, so here are my real-life hands-on experiences.

Please do not expect a complete review, there is plenty to read about the Inkling‘s features and technology on the web.

Inkling?

The Inkling is a digital pen just released by Wacom, a company well-known for their digital drawing tablets. Unlike the usual tablet configuration, it works exactly like a real pen, on real paper. In fact it does not have to be connected to any computer while drawing. The strokes are recorded by a receiver attached to one side of the paper. The drawings can then be transferred by USB and converted into vector or bitmaps files.

First look

On unpacking the box it is pretty obvious that Wacom took a lot of inspiration from Apple‘s packaging and product design. Which of course is not a bad thing, although they did not fully succeed. A lot of thought however went into the handy plastic box where the pen, the receiver, cables and other stuff can find a home when not used or when they need to be charged.

Drawing

After charging the batteries and reading through the quick start brochure the first drawings were fast and painless. While drawing – away from the computer – the interface consists of only some LEDs in green in red color. Still turning on, drawing and switching layers and files is rather intuitive. When a stroke is recorded, a green LED lights up on the receiver. So you can see “if it works” to some extent.

Still I did not always recognize that some lines were not recorded in my drawings. Of course I did not concentrate on the receiver‘s light while drawing because I needed to look at the pen. Lines were sometime missed or misplaced because I accidentely blocked the line of sight between pen and receiver. Also sometimes some lines were missed when I started a new drawing. The pen automatically shuts itself down after some idle time. It switches on again when it touches paper, but not absolutely reliably.

Data Transfer

You connect the receiver with a short USB cable to get the drawings on your computer. It mounts just like a USB-stick does. (It can also be used as one.) The installers for Mac OS and Windows are saved on the volume so you always have it in reach. No installer CD, no download. I found the drawing data – called “sketches” – in a sub-folder. To open them, I needed to install the “Sketch Manager”. I already had some experience with Wacom‘s wonky tablet drivers. So I was not surprised that the provided software feels rather crappy. Buggy, unintuitive and plain ugly, also totally detached from the OS. Still I managed to get the data out into Illustrator and Photoshop as intended, so this is no critical flaw.

Only now I recognized that some strokes were missing or misplaced. There is no way to see recording errors any earlier. Unfortunately this will be too late for re-drawing or correcting errors in most cases. I need to correct and complete the drawings in Illustrator.

Precision

Misplacements happened when I revisited older parts of the drawing. For example when I first drew outlines and later filled them with patterns. The precision declined measurably further down the page, at a greater distance from the receiver. Also the receiver seemed to shift just a little bit when I moved and rotated the page on the table. Unfortunately only a very small tilt of the receiver results in a clear misplacement.

Please see the images below for details.

The width of the stroke is also precisely recorded and results in different stroke widths in the vectors. The strokes are brought over into Adobe Illustrator with the “Calligraphic pen” tool. I don‘t think there is any way to change the width of parts of the drawing in Illustrator afterwards. You can only change the color or width of the pen for the whole image.

Conclusion

If you want to do vector drawings – naturally and on paper – and get them into your digital workflow fast and easy, the Wacom Inkling is the way to go. But you need to be aware that the vectors and the lines on paper differ significantly. I recognized missing lines and misplacements too frequently to be able to ignore them. There will be cases when I prefer the scan of the real drawing over the Inkling data. Still it is a very good way to get that hand-drawn feel into your digital artworks. As a designer, this tool might have a huge impact on my graphic work.

Test drawing