Wacom Intuos Pro Paper Edition – Unboxing & First Impressions

This is the Wacom Intuos Pro Paper Edition, which was very generously given to me by the awesome folks over at Wacom! Playing around with this tab for a few days already gave me a bunch of cool ideas for future tutorials, so I’m super excited to see what I can do with it!

Thank you Wacom!

This tablet can turn traditional pen and paper art into digital ink right in front of your eyes! How cool is that?

As I familiarize myself with this awesome new toy (*ahem* medium), you’ll see me use it in a lot in upcoming video tutorials. It’ll help me speed up my work flow which means I can finally create content for you guys on a more regular basis! Yay!!

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post.

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Unboxing the Wacom Intuos Pro Paper Edition Medium

Before delving into my first impressions on the tablet, I wanted to share a snippet of my unboxing experience with you because… it was AWESOME!

To skip the unboxing, click here.

It opens like a book!

These are the goody boxes!

The first box contains a pencil case, clip, ink pen, extra ink and paper. The paper is packaged so beautifully – I just can’t bring myself to open it!

The pencil case is really soft inside. There’s a lot of room for additional drawing supplies and even fits the tablet clip.

The ink pen has a soft rubber grip which feels comfortable to write with. I tested the pen on a notebook and the lines came out very fine without any blotches. The ink dries almost instantly.

I was pleasantly surprised when I found three extra ink refills in the small rectangular package. The method for removing the ink cartridge is genius! By the way, I love how their instructions are all visual!

The second box contains the tablet, stylus, stylus holder and a USB charging cable. The tablet was so beautifully packaged that I felt bad removing it from the plastic cover haha.

The surface feels cool to the touch. It’s thin but doesn’t feel fragile at all.

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There are programmable buttons on the side and one of them is magical! I’ll tell you about it later.

 

Here’s what it looks like with the clip.

Everything else was hidden under the tablet. I immediately thought of Iron Man’s arc reactor when I saw the stylus holder. It’s such a cool looking holder!

The stylus comes with a silver decorative ring near the tip and there are four other metallic colors to choose from. The rubber grip on the stylus feels a lot more comfortable to hold than the pen and it’s also a little plushier.

Besides looking cool as heck, the stylus holder has other uses as well. It helps with removing the stylus tip and also holds extra tips inside its body.

Here’s the difference between the ink pen and the stylus:

Ink Pen: It writes like a real pen with real ink. When used on the tablet, anything you draw can be digitized. It can be used to trace under-drawings.

Stylus: It’s a digital drawing tool which can be used to paint, draw or even replace a mouse.

First Impressions on the Wacom Intuos Pro Paper Edition

I plugged the tablet into my laptop and got a few prompts to download the software: Inkspace and Bamboo Paper.

Inkspace: As the name suggests, Inkspace is for turning paper sketches into digital ink. I’ll go more in depth down below.

Bamboo Paper: It’s a notebook app that you can draw in! The app looks like a notebook and has flippable pages. I LOVE writing notes, lists, plans and sketching out my ideas on scrap paper. But I always end up losing them! This app is really going to come in handy.

Wacom’s Inkspace app has a really cool live area where anything drawn with the ink pen can be instantly viewed on the screen in real time and a copy is automatically saved in the app. I had so much fun playing with this feature!

 

I haven’t drawn for leisure in a very long time but for some reason this makes me want to draw more! There’s something about seeing the ink appear on the screen that makes it so much more satisfying. I can’t really explain it.

Side note: When I put my laptop into “stand mode”, the tablet replaces the touchpad and this setup works quite nicely. Bonus point.. The tablet is exactly the same width and length as my laptop which means I can put them both in one travelling case!

All saved drawings are conveniently stored on the main screen of the app. From here, they can be exported into several different formats such as: Text, JPG, PNG, SVG or PSD.

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The app can even convert handwriting into text!

Remember that magical button I was talking about? Whenever I hit the small circle button on the tablet, my drawing gets saved. I don’t even need to be connected to the computer or internet since it can save to the internal memory. So that means I can work on the go even without my laptop and 8 pound scanner! Score!!
Usually when I scan my step by step tutorials, it takes anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes per scan depending on the quality I want.

This only takes about 5 seconds!

Every time I save my progress, it actually saves it in layers. This is going to come in handy for capturing step by step drawing tutorials! When I want to turn this into a full image, I simply stack them on top of each other:

 

Here, I tried tracing a face from a 3 millimeter thick coupon book. It came out exactly how I traced it.

I tried it again. This time focusing on pressure sensitivity. The ink pen doesn’t seem to have pressure sensitivity (not that I know of anyway). If you compare the shading of the nose bridge from one image to the next, you’ll see what I mean. So if I want to shade, I’ll need to overlap lines or play with stroke spacing.

I wanted to test if the stylus had pressure sensitivity, and it does! On the right side, I tried to shade a nice gradient and it worked beautifully! It can almost pass as real graphite!

 

Here, I’m using the stylus to color the Iron Man drawing I made earlier:

With the stylus, I can only see what I’m doing by looking up at the screen. It’s a completely different experience from using the ink pen but it was just as enjoyable!

I’m really excited to play with this further and see how I can create realistic drawing tutorials using a combination of pen and stylus!

This is going to speed up my work so much! Once I figure things out, I’ll be able to quickly pump out more tutorials (most likely on fundamentals)! Don’t worry, I’m still going to do traditional pencil art as well.

Have you used a drawing tablet before? If so, how was your transition? Also, is there anything you’d like to see me try?