Anyone use other wacom pens like artpen, airbrush?

[KenC]

I'm thinking of getting either the wacom artpen or the airbrush pen for the pen twist detection.

Don't know if I should get the artpen or the airbrush. It would seem that it would be easier to turn the artpen all the way around in your hand just using the fingers because the airbrush is more bulky.

There's nowhere around here that has these pens in stock so I can't try them out before buying. Maybe someone here has tried them all and could offer an opinion?

[Fabrice]

hmmm, just ask to Lemec in this forum he is used with the 6D art pen

[Paul Fierlinger]

I used to have the airbrush pen (probably still do somewhere) and came to the conclusion that it's just hype -- at least in TVP it did nothing our default airbrush couldn't already do. Maybe now Wacom has changed something about it's inner working but something tells me it'll most likely be the same animal, so watch out.

[KenC]

Yeah the airbrush looks kinda bulky and I'm not sure what I would need the wheel for realy.

What I'm realy interested in is the twist feature and the artpen has that to. I'm no good at using the pen angle to change parameters because it's so awkvard drawing while holding the pen at an uncomfortable angle, but just twisting the pen to get different effects I wouldn't have to change how I hold the pen so that will be much more usefull.

EDIT: btw there's a new pen type called inkpen. It has actual ink like a ballpoint so you can place paper over the tablet surface and draw for real while also drawing on the screen.

[Sewie]

I've worked with the Intuos 4 artpen for a few days now (it's just been released).
So far I think it's great. It looks and feels like the regular pen, slightly thicker. The feedback on screen in TVP (you can see your cutbrush rotate on screen as you rotate the pen) is wonderful. Painting with it is likewise.

The only problem I have with it is that for some reason there are no nibs available at the moment. You get about ten of them with the artpen, but the felt nibs wear down pretty quickly. The plastic ones will probably go a little slower but don't feel as good as the felt ones.

[Paul Fierlinger]

I've already noticed that the regular plastic nibs go much faster than they have in the past -- makes you wonder, doesn't it?

[KenC]

Great that the rotation is smooth, I was worried that it would be hard to control or not worth the effort. I can see rotating the pen to control the angle of the tip or jiggle to get airbrush spray effects will be very usefull.

The wear on the nibs was worse when my tablet was new and the surface was rougher like paper. Now that I've worn it smooth the normal nibs doesn't go as fast but still way faster than my old intous3

I use the nib with the little spring now, the sensitivity is so much better and it's realy hard, been using it for about a month or so and there's no sign of wear. It also helped tons switching to tvpaint so I can tweak the pressure profile and not have to press like a gorilla to get to the max pressure.

[Paul Fierlinger]

Hmm... I've never had a problem with having to press like a gorilla... the Wacom4 settings for pressure are very responsive; actually so were the Intuos 3 ones.

[KenC]

In photoshop I had to press realy hard to go to the max pressure. From low to medium pressure is easy to get to, then there's a hump in the curve where I had to press realy hard to get it the rest of the way. Hard enough that had it been a normal pencil I'd have broken the tip.

You can manually edit the wacom driver .dat file but everytime you load the wacom driver setup applet to change someting or add a new program it resets everything so it was a pain to keep doing that since you have to restart the driver service to reload the .dat file.

I realy love the profile editor in tvpaint for all the parameters, I can get my brushes to react just like I need it by tweaking the profiles.

[KenC]

I just got the artpen finally, was out of stock.

It's really nice, about the same size as the standard pen with the rocker side button and eraser.

Twist is smooth and easy to control with a little practice. It's awesome that tvpaint brush ghosting shows you every dynamic parameter changing the brush in real time. I've already come up with some cool ideas, for example a tree/branch brush. I have pen size set to twist, now I can start out with a large brush and twist and wiggle the pen as I draw and voila, very dynamic trees in notime

It comes with some different pen nibs which are a bit thicker than the normal pen. Some rounds and some marker/chisel like nibs.

Twist is also (For me at least) much easier to control than pen angle.

The only problem so far is that when switching back and forth between the default and the artpen then the current pen sometimes stops recognizing input, I then have to tap once with the other pen to get it to work again. Probably a driver issue as it happens in all drawing programs.

Everything works great in tvpaint especially since you can setup different profile curves for all the parameters, photoshops brush engine however has very little support for twist, you can only set a few parameters to twist so the artpens use in photoshop is limited.

[Sewie]

The only problem so far is that when switching back and forth between the default and the artpen then the current pen sometimes stops recognizing input, I then have to tap once with the other pen to get it to work again. Probably a driver issue as it happens in all drawing programs.

Hmm, I 've never noticed this...

[KenC]

Code: Select all

Probably a driver issue as it happens in all drawing programs

Whoups... except tvpaint

It happened once in tvpaint but I'm fairly sure that was because I had tab'ed from ps to tvpaint. Maybe it's some issue with wacom tool id's?