Wacom Inkling: Digital sketches on analogue anything
How many times have you done a cocktail napkin sketch you wish you could you could just magically transfer to your hard drive? If you’re like me, you use any of the imperfect but immediate means at your disposal; you snap a pic with your phone, which always looks terrible, or you tuck the napkin away until you’re near a scanner, which usually ends in futilly trying to scan a shredded napkin. Either way, you’re stuck tracing a perfectly good sketch in an application until you look at it and say “meh, close enough.”
Those days of futility and frustration appear to be behind us now, thanks to today’s announcement of Inkling, Wacom’s newest offering that appears to free artists from the tethers of their Wacom tablets and allow them to capture any sketch done on any surface, and upload them to a computer to be edited in Photoshop or Illustrator. Here’s a tutorial video on how it works:
Of course, this is Wacom, so it’s not without its caveats. Price is an issue; at $200, it’s not exactly one of those “I’ll just pick one up” solutions. The receiver requires direct line-of-sight, so those of us who tend to wrap our arms around the paper while sketching will find the experience more than a little frustrating. While you can use any substrate, the receiver will only work with Wacom’s pressure-sensitive ballpoint pen, and while it all fits together in a nice little carrying case, it becomes one more thing to carry around. The pen itself requires a battery, a first for Wacom, and while the case serves as a charger for the entire kit, it’s still one more thing to remember to plug in at the end of the day. Finally, this is not a post-sketch solution; you have to have the presence of mind to set up the device before you abruptly start sketching.
However, all said, the idea of having my lunchtime-pitch-session sketches automagically translated into digital art is undeniably appealing, and seems to be the best method available for must of us to capture our own work until the rest of the tablet-making community smartens up as Asus did and starts putting active digitizers in their devices.
The Inkling is live on Wacom’s site now, and is promised to be available in mid-September.
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