I Love My Wacom Cintiq I Am Obsessed with My Wacom Cintiq

[Also check out our previous article - Which Graphics Tablet to Buy]

Since I have purchased my Wacom Cintiq 12WX, I have done nothing but draw. It was love at first sight. I know that some people like to see how expensive items are packaged so I had my husband, Josh, take pictures of me taking the Cintiq out of the box. The Cintiq 12WX was packaged very well and had a lot of foam protecting it from damage.

What was included with the Cintiq 12WX? Included in the Cintiq 12WX package:

* Cintiq 12WX Interactive Pen Display
* Grip Pen
* Pen Stand
* Five Replacement Pen Nibs
* DVI-I to VGA cable adapter
* DVI-I to DVI-D cable adapter
* Converter Unit
* AC Power Adapter
* Power Cable
* USB Cable
* Quick Start Guide and User Manual
* Installation CD (includes driver software and electronic manual)
* Application DVD (includes application software):
o Adobe® Photoshop Elements (6.0 WIN / 6.0 MAC) for editing, retouching, enhancing, organizing, and sharing digital photos
o Corel® Painter™ Essentials 4.0 for creating natural media art and turning photos into paintings
o Nik® Color Efex Pro 3.0 WE6 for selectively applying lighting and photo enhancements with the pen
o Wacom Brushes 3.0 for 81 customized brushes for use with Photoshop CS+ and Photoshop Elements 4+

If You Love to Draw and Paint, You Have to Get The Cintiq

I don’t think that many of you know this about me, but I am a muralist as well. I have probably painted at least a 100 murals. I used to run a charity that provided free murals to children’s hospitals, shelters, homes of sick or abused kids, etc. So I Love to Draw and Paint. I still paint a few murals a year and I try to draw whenever I have free time. If you love to paint or draw, you are going to love the Wacom Cintiq. The Cintiq comes with Corel Painter Essentials. When you get it, use it…it is the best software out there for drawing and painting (in my opinion) because you can really get the effect of natural drawn or painted projects. Also, I suggest taking the terrific Lynda.com (Link to a Free 1 Day Pass) Painter X course. I hadn’t used Painter since college, so I was a zillion levels behind on Painter. Wow has it come a long, long way.

I’ve Been Having Too Much Fun Drawing with the Cintiq & Painter X

My friend, Carolina, has a really cool cake business where she makes the most beautiful cakes. She has been fiddling around with trying to make a web site and I offered to help her. Well, I knew right away that I was going to use Painter X and my Cintiq to design her site. I even put rollovers on every link. I had way more fun than a person should ever have ‘working’. Check the site out…it isn’t completely done yet, but you will get the feel of it. The woman in it is a caricature of Carolina … isn’t she cute.

How to Set Up Your Wacom Cintiq 12WX

Calibrate Your Pen to Work With Your Digital Tablet

After you install the software (this is self-explanatory), you will want to calibrate your Cintiq. If you try to use your Cintiq tablet without calibrating it, you will notice that your pen is a 1/2 inch or so off the mark every time. I know this because for some reason, I woke up yesterday and all of my button functions I had set up had disappeared along with the calibration being out of whack. This is the only problem that I have had with the Cintiq so far. Either way, take the time to calibrate your Cintiq or you will be very disappointed with it.

First, find the application on your computer that is called Wacom > Wacom Tablet Properties…mine is in my startup menu (I’m on a PC). Click on the ‘Calibrate’ tab (I have circled it in red below).

Below, you can see what your screen will look like while you are calibrating your digital pen and tablet.

What the screen will ask you to do is to touch your pen in the center of the cross hairs. It will only calibrate to the top left and the bottom right of your screen, and then you are all calibrated. It is that easy.

Setting Up the Functionality of Your Digital Pen Eraser / Back of the Pen

If you didn’t realize it, you can turn your digital pen around and use the back end of it as an eraser. I didn’t change the settings on the eraser and it works perfectly fine for me. However, if you don’t like the way that the eraser is set up, there is a tab in the Wacom Tablet Properties window that allows you to set up the feel of the eraser (whether it is firm or soft) and if you click on ‘Details’ a window opens up where you can test out which firmness works best for you. You can even set up the back end of the pen to not work as an eraser, but as another function such as a double-click or as a keystroke function such as ‘undo’.

Set Up the Functionality of Your Digital Pen

There is also a ‘Pen’ tab (circled in red below) that opens up another panel. One thing that I found annoying about the pen was that I kept clicking on the button accidentally which is a problem when the default action is to right click. So every time I hit the button accidentally a menu came up (what happens when you right click on things). So the way to deactivate the button, is to drag down until you click on ‘disable’. Check out the picture below. I believe the picture below will make changing your pen’s settings easier for you to understand.

Basically, there is only one button on the pen, but it can click either forwards or backwards. Change the settings of the back and the front button click by dragging down on the menu. Like I said above, I prefer to deactivate the button’s functionality.

The Tip “Double Click” Distance controls the Pen Tool’s sensitivity to double-click inputs, adjusting and calibrating the speed that you are accustomed to double clicking, and the accuracy with which you can aim the pen when clicking on an icon or link. The default setting for “Double-Click Speed” is the midway point between slow and fast.

The Tip Sensitivity is a setting to change the pressure sensitivity of the pen’s tip. If you are someone who is always laying your pen upon the surface, you will want a lower sensitivity setting. If you are someone who tends to draw with lighter pressure, then you will want to set up a higher sensitivity or the tablet might not catch all of your strokes.

The Tip Feel is a setting to change the way the tip is set up. When a pencil tip is soft, such as the Tip Feel, it will allow your line, brush stroke or anything to become wider and the sharper a pencil tip is, firmer the Tip Feel, the more control and smaller the line and brush stroke will be. If you are confused, try to think of non-digital drawing items. If you are using a pencil, the tip would be thin and hard, while a soft brush would be softer and lighter than a pencil. Right? Try to think of it in this manner.

Do All of These Settings Seem Confusing to You? Don’t worry about it, just press the ‘details’ button and try it all out to see which works best for you.

Set Up the Functions on Your Wacom Cintiq Tablet

I really love the function buttons on my Cintiq. I have a laptop, so being able to sit back in my chair with my feet up is something that I like to do. I can’t hold both the laptop and the Cintiq tablet in my lap, so I don’t use my keyboard when I use my digital tablet. That is where the function buttons come in handy. Take a look below for more details on setting up your function buttons.

You can set up the functionality of the buttons to do almost anything that you would do on the keyboard (other than type). You can select ‘Keystroke’ from the drop down menu and then type in a shortcut in the window that comes up…such as Ctrl-X for Cut. You can see how I made one of my buttons represent ‘Undo’ by using Control-Z…all I do is press control Z on my keyboard and this ‘Define Keystroke’ window types in {Ctrl}z for me.

Set Up the Touch Strip Functions on Your Wacom Cintiq Tablet

I use my left touch strip all the time for zooming in and zooming out. However, I turned off the right touch strip because my right hand kept touching it. However, everyone is different. Check out the Touch Strip tab to create your own settings. You can also click on the ‘Advanced’ button to set up more complicated functions for your Touch Strip.

Typing / Writing with Your Cintiq

There are a few ways that I can write with the Cintiq. I usually just write with the pen and then click the insert button.The 2nd box below also uses the pen for handwritten script, but for this one, you put a letter in each square and then if the computer doesn’t recognize the letter, there is a drop down box to choose the right letter. And the bottom box is a keyboard…just click the right key.

Where to Buy the Wacom Cintiq 12WX

The Cintiq 12WX sells for just under $1000. The best price I was able to find from a reputable dealer was at Amazon for about $50 less. I don’t suggest buying this from ebay or somwhere that doesn’t have an excellent return policy, since in researching the Cintiq before I bought it I read about people getting them without the glass properly affixed. This is too delicate and expensive a product to deal with someplace shifty for the purchase.

Also, if you don’t currently own Photoshop, the version of Elements that comes with the Cintiq does qualify for an upgrade price to the full version of Photoshop using a special deal Adobe has with Wacom. This gets you Photoshop for around half price. Of course most people who are looking at getting the Cintiq probably already own Photoshop, but if you don’t this is a great bonus.

Want to Know More? Ask Me

I don’t know what else to write about, so if you have any questions…Ask me and maybe I will write about it.

Also check out our previous article - Which Graphics Tablet to Buy

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