As the popularity of drawing tablets keep on growing with each month that passes, we have noticed more and more people reaching out to ask a wide range of different questions covering a range of topics on drawing tablets and digital art. With the growth of the more popular drawing tablets such as the Wacom One constantly increasing, we can only see more people asking the same old questions over the coming years.
Due to this, we have decided to start publishing more and more dedicated articles going over the more commonly asked questions to try and help as many of our readers as possible. Although we do see a large number of different questions being asked, we have noticed more people specifically asking if drawing tablets are worth it or not recently so we have decided to make this the topic of todays article.
We are hoping that this article will be able to help as many of our readers as possible who are looking to add a drawing tablet to their collection of arts and crafts accessories as well as improve your digital art skills. If you do need help choosing the perfect tablet for you then we would recommend you check out our ultimate comparison article where we go over the most popular drawing tablets from the four best tablet brands too.
Are Drawing Tablets Worth It?
A drawing tablet can make an excellent addition to any artist’s accessories as it can drastically improve what you are able to achieve with your digital artwork with ease. Drawing tablets tend to be cheaper than most people think too meaning that many of our readers will be able to add one to their collection without having to break the bank.
Although drawing tablets do offer you a wide range of advantages over traditional drawing, the main one is that the whole process tends to be easier and considerably quicker than using paper or canvas for your artwork. We go into this in much more detail in our article on if digital art is easier than traditional art if you would like to know more. That said though, the short version is that the majority of people seem to be able to get to grips with a drawing tablet in a short period of time and produce some excellent quality artwork considerably faster than it would take with traditional mediums.
On top of this, although the initial costs for a traditional art set is much lower than the initial costs for a decent drawing tablet, over time this normalizes and your drawing tablet can workout to be much cheaper than a traditional art setup. This is due to your paper, brushes, paints, oils, and other materials needing to be swapped out on a regular basis quickly building the total cost up over time. On the flipside of this, once you have your drawing tablet, all you really need to replace is your stylus pen if the nib starts to have issues.
Depending on your skill and experience level, the undo button on a drawing tablet can be a major factor in opting to take the digital art route over the traditional art route. This can save you a ton of time and easily help you remove any mistakes that you do make with your digital art. This single feature is often one of the main points of any discussion on if digital art is cheating or not as many of the traditional artists tend to look down on people who use a drawing tablet.
What Is The Point Of A Drawing Tablet?
The main point of a drawing tablet is to offer you the sensitivity and control of drawing or painting on paper or canvas while also acting as an input device for your computer at the same time. Depending on the specific drawing tablet model that you have, you can often save your work directly to the tablet itself but some of the cheaper ones are strictly an input device for a computer.
Although the older drawing tablets tended to perform poorly and failed to really take off, the advancements in touch screen technology, as well as the development of better stylus pens, have really helped to surge the popularity of drawing tablets. The Wacom One was one of the first-ever drawing tablets to launch with supply issues due to the number of pre-orders the tablet had prior to even being released and we only expect this to become more popular as time goes on.
Over the years, digital tablets have had a bunch of new features added to them that have helped to push them to a level where digital art is actually growing at a paster pace than traditional art. This is due to a number of factors but things such as multi layer drawing systems, advanced digital brush options, extremely sensitive stylus pens, more responsive active areas on the tablets, and a textured drawing surface have all come together to make a drawing tablet a popular accessory to your equipment.
Due to an intermediate level drawing tablet usually costing less than $200 and offering the vast majority of things that our readers could ever need and a more advanced drawing tablet usually starting at $400 offering everything a professional artist could need, we feel drawing tablets are well worth it. With the rapid growth of the sales, popularity, and reputation of drawing tablets, it would seem the a huge number of people within the community see the point in them and we only expect this to continue to grow over the coming decade.
Is A Drawing Tablet Better Than An iPad?
A drawing tablet is considerably better, and often cheaper than an iPad when it comes to using it for actual art related tasks. Although the performance of the more recently released iPads has helped them catch up, an iPad is more of a general use tablet rather than a specialised drawing tablet so they tend to under perform. An actual drawing tablet will usually have a better active area to draw on helping the artist get much better end results when using one over a general tablet like an iPad.
That said though, there are a number of very popular apps on the iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab that are starting to become more and more popular. Although these tend to be more feeder apps to get people interested in digital art and then move them over to a dedicated drawing tablet, they do show lots of potential. If the development on these apps continues and the sensitivity of the activate areas on iPads advances at the pace it currently is then we would imagine the competition between to two to become much more fierce in the future.
The main advantage of a drawing tablet is that they tend to be much cheaper than an iPad though as they don’t need the other features that a general use tablet needs for its target user base. This alone can be a major factor and make the drawing tablet worth it over an iPad or Samsung tablet as at the end of the day, keeping your costs as low as possible is an important buying factor for a larger number of our readers.
Conclusion
That brings our article going over if drawing tablets worth it or not to an end and we hope that it has been helpful. In our opinion, a drawing tablet is an essential accessory for anyone interested in digital art as it can drastically improve the results that you will be able to get for yourself when drawing on them. Thankfully over the last few years their prices have fallen meaning that most of our readers will be able to pick up an intermediate level drawing tablet without their budget taking too much of a hit and improve the quality of their digital art.
