Björn Öberg - Illustrator/ Designer

Work & Life

Trying out the new #Wacom #inkling

So, roughly four months since I placed my order, it finally arrived in the mail yesterday - the Wacom Inkling digital pen. And after having waited half an eternity to get your mitts on one of these I was of course quite eager to try it out...

After having gotten past the somewhat tedious process of charging the batteries (I actually fell asleep before being able to try it out yesterday), it was finally time to give it a go. Having heard that the precision would not be that great I was quite positively surprised (make no mistake - this is first and foremost a sketching tool and nothing you would use for things like precision line art, etc.)

My first doodle - along with a photograph of the original image (I could not be arsed with scanning it, after all that's the part of the creative process this tool is supposed to let you skip, so it looks a little bit squished as a result of being photographed at an odd angle).

Having doodled around with it for a while you realize that the main issue has not that much to do with getting the angles and weights of the individual lines right (it handles those elements quite nicely) - it has more to do with them sometimes getting a little bit misplaced (although if you convert the image into vector graphics these can be moved around and put in their proper place). Apparently this has something to do with how you tilt the pen (since the sensor unit is not located at the point of the pen but rather a few millimeters above it, lines will not be recorded with a 100% accuracy in relation to one another). Although if you, like me, like to sketch a lot and try out many different concepts before going digital, the Inkling is a great tool that will save you a lot of tedious scanning labour.

Inklingsketch2-color-small
Inklingsketch1-color

...Finally some rough colouring.