Wacom have recently announced their next product in digital drawing and sketching, it’s called Inkling

Having pretty much abandoned my mouse completely, I’m constantly using my graphics tablet to navigate around, design and draw on my Mac. The only downside of this, as people have been saying for years, is that it doesn’t feel like you’re actually drawing.

There is nothing natural about pushing a plastic tipped pen around on another piece of plastic. Sure, you can get used to it pretty quickly, but nothing compares to good old pen and paper. This is where Inkling comes in.

Inkling is a new device, consisting of a special pen and a small receiver device. Basically, you clip the receiver onto the paper you are drawing on, no matter whether it is a single sheet of paper or an entire sketchbook, and then you draw…that’s it!

Once you’ve finished your drawing, you simply plug the receiver into your Mac or PC, and it transfers your paper sketches into digital format.

But wait, there’s more!

As you’re drawing, there is a button on the receiver to create a new layer. Which means you can do a basic rough sketch lightly on the paper (the pen has 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity), create a new layer, and then do the final drawing over the top. When you transfer the drawing to the computer, your drawing will be split up into those two different layers, which makes it super easy to just delete the sketch work and keep the final drawing.

It gets better! You can import your drawings or sketches to Photoshop as well as Illustrator. Now, you might be thinking, ‘But Andrew, Adobe Illustrator is a vector program! How would that work!?’. The answer is, I have no idea how that would work, but according to all the videos floating around the internet, your drawing is fully converted to a vector drawing, layers included.

Yeah, there’s a few more little sweet bits

Once you import your drawing onto your computer, you can watch yourself draw, kind of. The receiver not only tracks the drawing as a whole, but also the timing, so you can watch a video of your drawing taking shape line by line. I don’t know how this is useful in the slightest, but it’s still pretty sweet.

The best part about all this is going to have to be the price. Retailing at only $200, this device (providing it works as well as other Wacom products) is a must have for any designer or artist who’s best work comes out on paper.