In this lesson video, we are going to cover how we can set up our drawing tablet to fit our drawing style and our illustration workflow. Currently, I am using a very old model of Wakeham drawing tablet. Now, I understand that not everyone use welcome tablet. So this video may not be suitable for everyone, but I will try to explain this in a generic way so that you should be able to follow even if you are using different drawing tablet product or brand. Before moving on. Some of you might be wondering, why is using pressure sensitive device is very important for graphic artists.

To answer this question, let me just show you how it is like drawing with only mouse versus using pressure sensitive tablet such as Wickham. Currently, I am using my mouse. Let me pick this brush and do some strokes. We can see the width of the stroke is always uniform. Now I'm switching to my webcam pen and tablet. Notice that I can control the width of the brush strokes by applying different pressure on the pen.

And not only the brush width, the pen pressure can also control the opacity of the brush. For this, we need different Brush Preset. For example, this one, if I do random strokes like this, we can see different opacity levels in the result because I applied different pressure on the pen when drawing them. Another advantage of using drawing tablet is well, the pen shape, our hands are likely to be more familiar drawing with a pen than with a mouse. Having something in the tip of the fingers allows us to have more control than something that we grab in our palm. So from this example, we can see the differences when working with a mouse versus working with a drawing tablet.

If you use welcome tablet, you can start adjusting it by opening the welcome Tablet Properties application. Now this application should be included in the box along with your product. If somehow you don't have this application included in the product, you can always download it from webcams official website if you are using different brands such as XP pen quien, or Microsoft Surface, etc. I believe there is a software included also where you can adjust the settings, you can open that software and just watch and try to find similar settings like what I'm about to show you. After you have it open. In welcome Tablet Properties app you will see something like this.

Let's discuss this area with three rows of panel first. The first row is where we have all of our welcome devices listed. I have one plugged in to my PC now which is this instance A tree, I own this model for more than 10 years now, and it's still working great. Even the pen nib, or the plastic tip of the pen is still the original one for 10 years, it doesn't degrade or anything like that. So I guess my old welcome tablet is a living proof of welcome tablets quality. Okay, now depending on your device, you will have different settings down here.

Basically, this row depends on this row up here, we can see these two components down here, because up here, I have selected this device. So in here, we have this hierarchical structure in the UI. If for example, I pick the function panel in here, everything below this row will change. Now we are talking about these buttons in my tablet, but if I click the span, everything down here is all about the span. Okay? I'm sure you'll get the idea.

Let's pick the pen for now, as the pen setting is more general than the tablet buttons, okay, after selecting the pen, in the third row, we can specify the application if none are selected, or if you haven't specified any application, these all other option will be applied. So using this row in here, we can have different tablet behaviors for different applications in our computer. If, for example, we want to create a profile for creator, you need to make sure that creator is opened first, so the work and properties app can detect it automatically. Notice if I click this add or a plus sign button in here, creator will be listed in here selected and click the OK button. As we can see, the app are now listed as custom app in this role. Okay, now if I select this Krita app like this make changes down here.

All of the changes later will only applicable or active when we are working inside Krita outside Krita the settings will not be used as welcome, we will use the settings we have in all other preset in here instead, let's discuss the settings for the pen and the pen tab, we can see that I set the field setting to almost firm, the third from the right. This actually controls how sensitive your pen to your pressure. If you want to go even further, you can click this Customize button and we can see the curve. By default the curve is straight. Basically, the harder you press which is this way to the right, the higher the output, which is up here. Now there are two things I want to change because I tend to use drawing pen lightly meaning I don't want to press too hard on the pen just to get thick lines are over Quick brush strokes.

Therefore, I direct this node to the left a bit. With this, to get full output result, I only need to press until maximum at 80 or 90% of the pressure level. Perhaps it is this setting that keep my pen nib still in good condition even after more than 10 years of usage. Okay, next, select this point and drag it slightly towards the bottom right area. You might be wondering now, why am I doing this? Well, because with this curve, it will be harder to get high pressure, thus making my line drawing looks better.

I found this curve suitable with my hand characteristic. Feel free to try it out and make your own custom curve if you want to. for double click distance setting, I set this at the Center for the sensitivity. I generally don't use spam filtering in my workflow. So no This setting will do what I left the setting at normal. For the pen rocker button, the upper one is set to right mouse button, and the bottom one is set to the middle mouse button.

This way we can navigate the canvas later easier using the bottom rocker button. This is my setup, but feel free to assign them to other settings if you want to. Next the eraser setting. I don't typically use eraser tape on the pen because I find it too slow compared to pressing e in the keyboard to switch to eraser mode. So I left the settings to its default. Let's move on to mapping now.

For mapping. Of course, you always want to have landscape in here unless you have spatial monitor that can be tilted and you like walking in portrait mode. Next is the mode. There are two modes here, pen and mouse. You always want to use the mode for tablet devices. If you use mouse mode, the pen will behave exactly like the mouse or a trackpad.

So there will be no absolute mapping between your tablet and your monitor. If you move your pen on a tablet surface and then lift it up and move again, the cursor will continue moving from where it left off before. Now this condition really is not ideal for drawing in the pen mode, the distance ratio between the screen and the tablet will be consistent. And this will make our brain and hence muscle able to coordinate better and become accustomed to it much faster. So again, I recommend you to use the pen mode and not the mouse mode. Okay, set the screen area and the tablet area to full but turn on this forced proportion option.

This will help also to improve our hand coordination. As you can see, I have a variable webcam tablet that has four by three size ratio. Because back then like more than 10 years ago, most monitors screen has four by three resolution. Currently, my display is a modern high resolution monitor which has 16 by nine size ratio, basically much wider than the old four by three standard monitors. Therefore, we can see some area of my tablet not being used and that is totally fine. If you own newer release of drawing tablets, most of them are available in 16 by nine size ratio, so you shouldn't lose some of the tablet part like what I have here.

Okay guys, I think this is enough. We will cover more in depth about tablet buttons customization in later section inshallah.