Wacom, one of the design and illustration industry’s biggest graphics tablet companies, have just released their latest innovation – the Inkling. A digital sketch pen that allows you to draw with a real ballpoint pen on any paper – the device then tracks your sketch, recording every stroke with a receiver that attaches to your paper, so that you can import the artwork onto a computer to use with various graphics programmes or save as a variety of file types.

The Inkling’s ‘Sketch Manager’ receiver (the little black box that goes above the area you are drawing) allows you to draw onto separate layers, despite only using one piece of paper – when you then connect the receiver to your computer and import the sketches into Photoshop, for example, they are already stored as layers, keeping the artwork separate as if you’d drawn straight into a graphics programme.

It also has inbuilt pressure sensitivity; much like its tablet cousins, the Inkling allows artists to keep the feeling of hand-drawing whilst it records the pressure used and relays that back to the computerised artwork.

The other cool feature is that the Inkling device can be used anywhere: it’s wireless, so you can use it on the go, either at work, in a coffee shop, or even on a park bench. It uses batteries to power the pen and receiver, but can be charged via a USB connection, which is also how you transfer the images.

As an illustrator and digital artist myself, I personally think the Inkling is more of an addition to having an existing graphics tablet, rather than a replacement – it’s not something that digital painters could use to create the beautiful renderings that are out there. For a comic book artist or illustrator who likes to draw roughs and sketches by hand, however, it’s an absolute God-send! No more scanning in pencil or inked lines.

With the ability to import as both raster and vector images, Wacom have certainly thought about the needs of their consumers. My only gripe with the Inkling is that the largest size it can track a sketch on is A4, which a lot of artists won’t use due to its constrictive nature. That said, I can’t wait to give this new gadget a try – it certainly seems that it could save a lot of time and effort, and I’m sure many artists who are thinking of using it will agree.

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