Digital Drawing Tablet in Contemporary Society

Digital Drawing Tablet in Contemporary Society  ( by  Xin Jin | 301033136 | xja1@sfu.ca )

Digital drawing tablet is one of the daily necessary tools for contemporary digital graphical artists, who are working in the fields such as digital illustration, game design, animation, advertising and lots of other graphical media industry. As an input to the computer, it allows people to “draw directly into the computer”, which means recording the tracks of cursor’s movement onto the “canvas” of graphical software, instead of using mouse actions. It should not be defined only as a media infrastructure, but also a combination with personal technology, because it requires users to have more or less of basic drawing ability.

 
One digital drawing tablet contains two parts: an individual “pen”, and a “pad” with a USB wire which can be connected to the computer. Inside the pen there is a “lead” made of special conductive material, which can give signals to the sensors built inside the pad. Therefore, the pad will not be affect by other subjects like human fingers or normal pens. It can only capture the action of its special pen.

 
There are three kinds of pad with different functions: the basic regular one is solid without any additional assistant tool except simple buttons and signal light,Every point on the tablet maps to a point on your screen, so it’s a cinch to navigate user’s desktop (Wacom,para2) ; The second one has a layer of transparent material (either plastic or gel piece ) onto it, which is able to transfer the pushing power from the pen to the pad. This is specially for users who need to trace a photo or other pictures, to insert a photo or other sample picture between the pad and the transparent layer then trace it more accurately(Kolle, 2003); The third type of tablet pad is quite expensive, which is built on a flat monitor screen, to let users directly draw on the screen without watching the computer’s monitor. 

 Not only limited in digital graphical industry, drawing tablet and other similar tablet PC are widely used in  education. In fall of 2006, the College of Engineering started to require all 1,400 incoming freshmen student to study by using tablet technology; DePauw University offers dozens of courses each semester using pen-based technology to allow students collaborate their work on the shared learning system, especially on the subjects such as economics and graphical analysis(Prey, Reed & Berque, 2007). In  ZheJiang University of China, 2005, the tutorial video of Japanese language teaching required instructors to show the character writing by using digital tablet, which was directed projected onto the lecture screen.

  
The advantages on using digital tablet are highly recommended. Firstly, it saves process time, space and cost. Instead of scanning images from paper then spending lots of time on fixing the image quality, users can draw directly onto the software canvas by using tablet. This avoids the cost on purchasing scanners , huge amount of paper , pencils, different kind of brushes and other unnecessary materials, which also protects the eco-system. Secondly, it allows users edit the images more conveniently just by loading the same digital brush tool and redo,undo, resave the projects. It is much easier to interact with pen-like input device than using mouse cursor, which can reduce the stress on wrist and provides better usability. The function of brush pressure helps users to control every step of drawing in satisfied detail.

 
However, there still existed a few negative effects on using digital tablet from my personal experience. When it become habitual to rely on using digital drawing technology, some of people’s real drawing skills are getting degenerate. For example, the skills on using water color, painting and other physical experience will become rusty. Although it is easy to simulate water color or painting effect in some computer software, it does not help people to improve their real drawing skill. This may be reserved by other digital technology such as Internet Youttube, which allows people to upload their process of real drawing as a tutorial teaching.

 

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References:

  
Kolle, I.C(2003).Graphics Tablet Solutions,Muska & Lipman Publishing

Prey, J, C , Reed, R.H & Berque, D.A (2007) The Impact of Tablet PCs and Pen-based Technology on Education, Purdue University Press

Wacom  (2009, January 31) Pen Tablet , Retrieved January 31,2009, from http://www.wacom.com/productinfo/index.php

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~ by xja1 on February 3, 2009.