Drawing on pen and paper is simple, but scanning and uploading a physical sketch takes effort and involves a lot of hassle. Drawing tablets are a great way to make your creative work digital from the start, but the best models can be too expensive for novices, while cheap options are often a huge pain to set up and use. After interviewing five professional artists, researching 64 drawing tablets, and testing eight tablets, we’ve found the Wacom Intuos to be the best drawing tablet for beginners. The Intuos is easy to install on Windows and macOS, and it offers the most precision and control for the least amount of cash.
The Wacom Intuos is the company’s second most expensive entry-level tablet, and we believe its extra features are worth the price for a tablet that will last for years. The Intuos comes with Corel Painter Essentials 8 for drawing and painting and Corel AfterShot Pro 3 for photo editing, which together make it an exceptional value. Its 6-by-3.7-inch drawing area is accurate and responsive, and it’s compact enough to use on your desk or to throw in a backpack with your laptop. The Intuos connects via USB; if you’d prefer a Bluetooth connection, we recommend the Wacom Intuos Wireless, which typically costs around $10 more, although we don’t think most beginners need that.
The One by Wacom is the company’s least expensive entry-level option, and it’s perfect for students looking for a reliable graphics tablet. It’s easy to set up, and the 6-by-3.7-inch textured drawing surface has the feel of paper, which makes for a seamless transition from analog to digital. Though the One is less expensive than the Intuos, our top pick, it has the same-size drawing area.
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Ellen Airhart, who wrote the most recent update to this guide, found the process of installing the eight drawing tablets she tested for this guide confusing, and if something's going to trip you up, it probably challenged her first. She has been a fact checker and writer at Wirecutter since 2019, and she is an amateur artist who likes to paint portraits and pets in acrylic and watercolors.
Senior staff writer Melanie Pinola and staff writer Justin Krajeski contributed to earlier versions of this guide. Melanie reviewed tech hardware and software for over a dozen years for sites such as Lifehacker, Laptop Mag, and PCWorld, and she has been engaged in drawing and painting as a hobby for much longer. Justin has been reviewing products for Wirecutter since 2016, spending time with all kinds of devices from ultrabooks to portable hard drives. As a kid, he drew mythical creatures around the ring holes in his notebooks; as an adult, well, he still does.
This guide is for anyone making their first foray into creating digital art or retouching photos. Writing your signature with your mouse or a laptop trackpad is bad enough, but trying to create a detailed sketch or to precisely retouch a photo with those tools is terrible.
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A drawing tablet, also known as a graphics tablet, translates the strokes from a pen or stylus to your computer screen with much greater precision. It’s far more natural and comfortable to use than a mouse or touchpad whether you want to paint, illustrate, animate in 3D, create a comic, or retouch photos.
You can attach a drawing tablet to any Windows PC or Mac, which makes it versatile and useful for years to come. If you’re interested in a graphics tablet but don’t want to spend a boatload of money on an accessory you might not use every day, our picks are for you.
A drawing tablet, also known as a graphics tablet, translates strokes from a pen or stylus to your computer screen with much greater precision.
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For beginners, we don’t recommend, and didn’t test, pro tablets (such as an iPad Pro or Microsoft Surface Pro) or graphics tablets with a screen (such as the Wacom Cintiq line) because they’re prohibitively expensive, and illustrator Victoria Ying pointed out that when you’re using a pro tablet, your hand can block parts of your art while you’re working. If you’re dipping your toe into digital art, you should try an affordable graphics tablet to see if it meets your needs. Many of the experts we spoke to used drawing tablets priced similarly to our picks many years into their careers. Screen-less drawing tablets have a “harder learning curve, ” Ying said, “but a lot of my friends working in feature films prefer it to the feeling of a Cintiq or iPad.”
We also didn’t consider any paper-based devices that convert your writing or drawing on paper to your computer, such as the Livescribe 3 Smartpen Moleskine Edition, other Livescribe pens and notebooks, or Evernote Notebooks. For this guide we were looking for a graphics tablet for drawing, painting, illustrating, and animating that could last for years without requiring any paper refills.
Based on our research, expert interviews, and testing, we found that the key features for a drawing tablet (in order of importance) are the following:
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Wacom is to graphics tablets what Google is to search, and every expert we spoke to recommended Wacom tablets for their reliability.
Wacom is to graphics tablets what Google is to search, and every expert we spoke to recommended Wacom tablets for their reliability. Some experts have used Wacom for decades. We also tested models from less well-known brands such as Huion, Parblo, and XP-Pen based on positive reviews and their potential value. Many of these tablets offer a larger active area and more shortcut keys for the same price as their Wacom equivalents do.
After speaking with our experts and researching 64 graphics tablets in 2021, we settled on eight to test: the Artisul M0610Pro, the Parblo A610 Plus V2, the Veikk A15 Pro, the Wacom Intuos, and the One by Wacom for starters, and on the more expensive side the Huion Inspiroy Dial Q620M, the Wacom Intuos Pro S, and the XP-Pen Deco Pro.
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We tested each drawing tablet on a Windows PC and a macOS computer, using the latest driver from the tablet manufacturer’s website. (We uninstalled the drivers between each tablet because multiple drivers can interfere with a tablet’s performance.)
We tested driver stability, input lag, and program compatibility. A tablet could feature more levels of pressure sensitivity than the most expensive competition, but if it doesn’t work with your animation or drawing program, it’s basically useless.
We tested each tablet with Adobe Photoshop 2021 and Pixlr. We drew and painted basic shapes to test input lag as well as line weight and consistency. We created nuanced shades of gray—from very faint to almost black—and drew strokes that tapered to a point by lifting the pen. And since people are familiar with their own signature, we signed over and over again to see how close the tablet pen matched handwriting on paper. We painted self-portraits to see the tablets in action. We also looked for any glitches, such as the cursor not appearing where it ought to or failing to move as it should. And throughout our tests, we observed how the pen felt to hold and draw with, and we noted the tablets’ customizability.
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The Wacom Intuos makes all the right compromises for an affordable drawing tablet aimed at beginners that feels capable enough to grow with your skills, and it’s our choice over any other similarly priced option. It was easy to set up and provided accurate and responsive lines from the get-go. The accompanying pen is comfortable enough for long drawing sessions, too. The Intuos is one of the most affordable of Wacom’s tablets, and its overall quality makes it a better value than any of the other graphics tablets we tested, including many with more features. It also comes with a few free software trials that may help you decide what tools are best for you (though we had trouble actually using some of these programs). The Intuos has a software and hardware warranty of two years, in contrast to the one-year warranties included with many other tablets.
Pitted against the non-Wacom tablets we tested, the Intuos offered more control, and we experienced no driver issues or input lag. Although some other tablets claim to offer two times as much pressure sensitivity—8, 192 levels versus 4, 096 on the Intuos—in practice we were better able to control line weights and thickness with the Wacom tablets. We found it easier to create consistently faint, medium, or dark lines (and to go from one extreme to the other) by varying the pressure we put on the pen.
The Intuos is a small tablet next to some of the competition, but many of our sources preferred the 6-by-3.7-inch active area. “It really helps to have a small compact tablet I can put in front of my laptop, ” said Dami Lee. Others, like Cher Threinen-Pendarvis, chose medium tablets for their homes or studios and smaller tablets for travel. Unlike most tablets, the Wacom models have a dot grid printed on the surface that comes in handy when you’re creating artwork
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