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David F. Kyte (Detroit) –

  

The entire concept of the Wacom drawing tablets has been to get the process of creating art on the computer as close as possible to traditional methods and tools. Well a mouse is all but useless, but the pressure sensitive tablets like the Wacoms makes the art of drawing on a computer a reality. If you are lucky to have one of the Wacom Cintiq LCD tablet displays you are as close to the real thing as it gets.

The Wacom 6D pen does only one thing different then the standard pens that come with your tablet and that is it senses Rotation. To anyone who has done traditional art using a flat paint brush or a flat piece of charcoal its such a natural thing to rotate the tools in your fingers to vary the thickness of the stroke. If that sort of control is what you miss then this pen is for you. With some software the 6D pen can be set-up to mimic this same quality. I says some software because not all support this feature, in fact I have found that Corel Painter is the only one that does it in a meaningful and useful way, and even then you will need to do some tweaking of settings in Painter to get it to your likeing. Photoshop does support rotation but I can’t seem to get it to react in a way that feels natural to me no matter how I set it.

My only gripe I have with the pen is it’s a little on the thick side and I don’t like the angled nibs and would prefer a straight nib option. The 6D pen does seem to be made more for the LCD tablets due to the fact you can see the angle of the pen in your hand as you draw, but it will work in any of the Intuos3 Wacoms. The felt tip nibs do have the feel of a marker

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J. Hughes (Mendocino, CA) –

  

I bought this pen to use when painting in Corel Painter X. As others have said not all of the brushes make use of the “rotational” feature that this pen provides but it’s really nice to use it with the ones that do.
In addition to the rotational aspect, what I find really cool is that you can switch off between this and your other wacom pen and Painter remembers what paintbrush was last used with that pen so if you’re switching between two brushes frequently, it’s just a matter of putting down one pen and picking up another.
Kind of expensive and I waited awhile to indulge myself but I’m happy to have it.
Though I’m also a frequent Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop user, I haven’t tried it yet with those but my regular pen works fine there so I don’t really care. Like I said, I bought this for Painter.

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