Drawing Tablet W/Pen

[Tycoonbrad]

Would a drawing tablet with pen make it easier to trace images with Adobe Illustrator?

[mahuti]

:/  Not really. I have one, and it sometimes makes it a bit easier, but since most of the tracing involves very tight controlled lines defined with bezier curves, it's just easier to use the pen tool, and methodical control of the mouse.

The one time that my tablet really came in hand was in tracing a whole bunch of little wiggly details on the Q-bert marquee that I traced. Other than that, it is somewhat detrimental. It would be great to use for starfield images like those on the defender bezel and galaga bezel.. but those are the best uses for one.

[Tycoonbrad]

Thanks!

I found an 8X6 pad onsale for $40 bucks and thought it might be useful on a arcade project.

[Veinman]

I agree with mahuti, with vectors I don't see it coming in very handy.

[Crowquill]

I love my tablet in Photoshop and especially Corel Painter. After a period of adjustment, doing freehand artwork becomes much more natural. For placing specific points and manipulating them (Illustrator), I still prefer a good high-resolution mouse.

[zorg]

no need for a tablet, a mouse is just enough for the kind os tracing involved in reproducing arcade artwork.

[Nannuu]

I thought it would so I got a pad and pen but found it much harder that way.  Stick with the mouse as they have said.  Most of vectorizing requires manual manipulation anyway.

It works well for Photoshop though.  The downside (for mine) is that when I press down it pauses for a second to adjust the sensitivity and usually creates a blob.  This is when using the pressure sensitive portion of the pen.  Actually that is a major downside as it is extremely annoying to try to put a shadow on something 8 times to get it right.