Wacom Intuos Art vs Wacom Intuos Draw

intuos art vs intuos draw

Intuos art vs Intuos draw: Drawing tablets, also known as graphic tablets or pen tablets, are useful input devices for anyone in the artistic field. Even if you are not a professional graphic designer or a digital artist, a drawing tablet lets you doodle, color scanned arts, create prints for t-shirts, take class notes, play OSU, etc. Nowadays, having a graphic tablet is as important as having a mouse, keyboard, or other input devices.

However, when it comes to buying one, it can be a daunting task for those who don’t know much about the device. If you have been shopping for one of these drawing tablets for some time now, odds are you have seen plenty of Wacom models, especially the Intuos Art and Intuos Draw.

Both are entry-level models and cost nearly the same, making it seemingly difficult to pick between one of them. But upon closer inspection, there are a few differences that distinguish them from each other. One is more suitable for experienced creators, while the other is a good start for beginners.

No matter in which category you fall into, the following in-depth comparison between Wacom Intuos Art vs Wacom Intuos Draw will tell you everything you need to know about these graphic tablets.

Side-by-Side Comparison Between Intuos Art vs Intuos Draw (Small)

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Wacom Intuos Art Wacom Intuos Draw
Active Area 152 x 95 mm
6.0 x 3.7 inches
152 x 95 mm
6.0 x 3.7 inches
Weight 290 grams 290 grams
Resolution (LPI) 2540 2540
Pressure Levels 2048 2048
Multi-Touch Support Yes No
Customizable Buttons 4 (ExpressKeys) 4 (ExpressKeys)
Pen Pressure-sensitive
Requires no batteries
Pressure-sensitive

Requires no batteries

Bundled Software Corel Painter Essentials ArtRage Lite

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Wacom Intuos Art vs Wacom Intuos Draw: Detailed Breakdown

Comparing the Wacom Intuos Art and Intuos Draw solely on their technical specifications isn’t useful at all. For a better understanding, we will explain every aspect of the drawing tablets one by one.

Weight & Design

Weight is one of the most vital aspects of a graphic tablet, given digital artists and students tend to carry their drawing tools everywhere they go. It isn’t that important if you plan to keep the tablet on your desk most of the time, but a heavier unit can make it slightly uncomfortable to hold.

Wacom Intuos Art
Wacom Intuos Art

Apart from weight, the tablet’s design and ergonomics are also pretty vital factors. It includes the thickness of the device, use of materials, and button placements.

The Wacom Intuos Art is sold in two sizes: small and medium. The smaller one weighs 290 grams, and the medium-sized version weighs 480 grams. Both are relatively lightweight to carry around.

Both variants of Intuos Art are available in black and blue colors. Its ambidextrous design is great for left-handed and right-handed users. The customizable buttons are placed upwards to prevent your hand palm from bumping on them.

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On the other side, the Wacom Intuos Draw also comes in small and medium sizes. The former weighs around 290 grams, and the latter is around 480 grams, just like the Intuos Art. The lighter weight makes both variants convenient to carry in a backpack and hold in hands.

Wacom Intuos Draw
Wacom Intuos Draw

You can buy the Intuos Draw in either white or blue color. Despite being an entry-level pen tablet, the use of high-quality plastic gives it a premium feel.

Unlike most other tablets where the connectors are on the sides, the Intuos Draw puts everything on the top, out of your hands’ moving range, so that you don’t accidentally knock something out.

Overall, there aren’t any significant differences between Intuos Art and Intuos Draw in weight and design. Both are reasonably light and easy to carry, and they share an ergonomic layout. Additionally, there are rubber grips on both Wacom tablets that prevent them from sliding off.

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The only minor difference between the two is the color choice, which is a personal preference. However, it’s worth noting that both models are prone to bend and flex under pressure due to their plastic construction and thinness. They are not made for rough handling.

Active Area

Another important thing to look out for in a drawing tablet is its active area. It’s the patterned part of the tablet that you interact with using the pen. The maximum stroke length and room for hand movements depend on the area size.

There isn’t any particular sweet spot for the “perfect” area size since it doesn’t affect the size of a digital drawing. It all boils down to the user’s personal preferences and requirements. Although smaller tablets are ideal for limited desk space and portability, bigger ones are usually the best for larger studio setups.

For full-time professional artists, a smaller active area on a drawing tablet is uncomfortable as their hands tend to reach the edges frequently. Bigger tablets resolve such issues, and it’s significantly better for those who have multiple monitors.

As we mentioned before, the Wacom Intuos Art is available in both small and medium sizes. The active area on the small version is 6.0 x 3.7 inches, and it’s 8.5 x 5.3 inches on the medium version. It should be more than enough for most creators.

When the Intuos Draw launched, it was only available in a small size. But the tablet received a medium-sized release later on. Both variants share the same active area as the Intuos Art, coming in 6.0 x 3.7 inches and 8.5 x 5.3 inches, respectively.

Hence, this concludes in a tie between the Intuos Art and Intuos Draw. We recommend going for any one of the medium-sized versions if you want more space for your hands. Those who plan to carry a pen tablet in their backpack should opt for the small versions instead.

Resolution

The resolution of a graphic tablet measures in LPI, which stands for “Lines Per Inch.” It gives us an idea of how many digital lines can fit into one inch of the tablet’s active area. The higher the resolution is, the greater the cursor precision gets.

The use of “LPI” dates back to the days of dot-matrix printers, where the print quality heavily relied on the number of dots that could fit into an inch of a paper. Even though printers and graphic tablets are vastly different, the term LPI similarly applies to both devices.

Some people think that they need the highest-resolution pen tablet for their digital artwork to look the best. However, it isn’t true at all. A 1000 LPI tablet is enough for a decent result, and one with double the resolution provides even better results.

Wacom stands as a monopoly in the graphic tablet business for a reason. The Intuos Art is an entry-level tablet but has a relatively high resolution of 2540 LPI, offering exceptional drawing precision for digital artists on a budget. It will allow you to fill in even the most granular detail in your digital creations.

Intuos Draw utilizes the same high resolution, addressing up to 2540 lines per inch. It roughly translates to 21600 by 13500 points on the active surface. This is plenty for accuracy-critical work and creating high-quality digital art.

Once again, we consider both Wacom tablets to be equally excellent for digital creative work.

Also, See – Acer ED323QUR Review

Pressure Levels

Pressure levels refer to how a drawing tablet decides the thickness or thinness of the lines you draw, based on how much force you put down with the pen or stylus. It’s like how a regular pencil leaves thinner, lighter lines on a paper when applied very little pressure, and thicker, darker lines when putting higher pressure.

The more pressure levels there are, the better a graphic tablet would realistically register your strokes. Almost every modern pen tablet has a pressure level of around 300 to 8000, but the lowest-end models entirely omit this feature. Fortunately, both of the entry-level Wacom tablets have solid pressure sensitivity levels.

The Intuos Art supports 2,048 pressure sensitivity levels, allowing you to make precise distinctions in the thickness of every stroke. As far as graphic tablets go, it isn’t the highest number, but that’s all you get with an entry-level unit.

Intuos Draw also has the same 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity, making it equally responsive to your fine strokes. Unless you are into professional creative work, having a tablet with any higher pressure sensitivity level would hardly benefit you.

In terms of pressure levels, there’s virtually zero difference between the Wacom Intuos Art and Intuos Draw.

Multi-Touch Support

The multi-touch function on a graphic tablet lets you interact with the active area with both the pen and your fingertips. It simulates touch input just like the capacitive touchscreens on smartphones and laptops.

You get to perform various gestures like click, pinch-zoom, scroll, drag, and more. It even allows for desktop navigation, eliminating the need to switch between two input devices. Multi-touch support is where we finally see a difference between the Wacom Intuos Art and Intuos Draw.

The Intuos Art does feature multi-touch, making it ideal for drawing and graphic designing purposes. You can use your fingertips to move around the digital canvas freely rather than using a mouse. The pinch to zoom gesture saves you plenty of time.

This Intuos Art also offers excellent palm rejection, letting you rest your palm comfortably on the active area while using the pen. The multi-touch input will unlikely add any stray marks on your drawing with palm rejection enabled.

Unfortunately, the Intuos Draw doesn’t support the multi-touch function. It’s still excellent for drawing and taking notes, but the tablet will only work with the included pen.

In the end, Wacom Intuos Art comes on the top in this field. The multi-touch feature is quite important to some artists, considering it offers seamless navigation and improves overall productivity.

Customizable buttons

Some graphic tablets have shortcut buttons that users can customize catering to their needs. Wacom calls them ExpressKeys. They make your creative workflow more efficient as you won’t have to switch to your keyboard for certain functions.

Customizing the ExpressKeys is possible through the “Wacom Tablet Properties” software. It even allows the usage of button combinations, just like you would do on a keyboard. It saves digital creators a significant amount of time.

For instance, you can assign ‘Ctrl’ to one ExpressKey and ‘Alt’ to the other. Pressing the buttons together activates the ‘Ctrl + Alt’ function. You can program the ExpressKeys to all sorts of functions, such as panning, scrolling, undoing the last action, opening specific software tools, and many more.

The Intuos Art gets you four remappable ExpressKeys. It’s not much but should be more than enough for beginners with basic needs. The software provides full customization options for this tablet, including profiles and modifiers on a per-app basis.

Intuos Draw also has four fully customizable ExpressKeys. Unless you are into graphic designing, having only four of them should be fine. You can always get a separate macro keyboard and assign more shortcut functions to it.

Again, both Wacom tablets come with programmable buttons and support extensive remapping via the software. There is no winner or loser in this regard.

Pen

The pen or stylus is the most crucial accessory included with a graphic tablet. Since you will use it all the time to interact with the tablet, it’s an absolute necessity to have a decent pen.

The last thing you would want is to end up with a crappy one that feels cheap in hands and is very uncomfortable to hold. It might even significantly impact your drawing style and make your digital creations look unprofessional.

Firstly, a perfect pen or stylus must have an ergonomic shape, balanced weight, and allow for a comfortable grip. It should also have excellent pressure sensitivity for granular control over the strokes. Lastly, the pen should have a few shortcut buttons or a built-in eraser function.

The Wacom Intuos Art includes a wireless, pressure-sensitive pen that requires no batteries. It provides 2,048 pressure sensitivity levels on the drawing tablet. Thanks to the use of electromagnetic resonance, you won’t ever have to charge the pen.

The Intuos Art pen also has two clicky buttons along the side. You can program them to perform the “undo” function or toggle the eraser mode via the software. There’s also a small fabric loop conveniently placed on top of the tablet to store the pen.

Once the preinstalled nib wears out, you can easily remove it with the nib remover on the back of the graphic tablet, then replace it with one of the supplied replacement nibs behind the tablet’s storage lid. The lid is pretty flimsy and easy to break, so be extra careful.

The stylus supplied with Intuos Draw is the same model as the Intuos Art. It’s cordless, pressure-sensitive, features two programmable buttons, and doesn’t need a battery to function.

Thus, it’s a draw between both Wacom tablets yet again.

Wireless Connectivity

Pen tablets that support wireless connectivity give users an untethered experience. You can move the tablet away from a fixed position on the desk at the cost of a slight input delay. However, the added latency isn’t noticeable at all to the human eye.

Both the Intuos Art and Intuos Draw lacks integrated wireless connectivity. However, Wacom offers a Wireless Accessory Kit that lets users use the Intuos tablets fully untethered. It comes with a battery that goes under the tablet’s back cover, along with the USB-powered transmitters.

According to Wacom, the battery can endure up to fifteen hours of usage, and it takes less than six hours to charge fully. The whole wireless kit is also plug-and-play and doesn’t require users to install any special drivers.

Bundled Software

Drawing tablets often bundle license keys for premium creative software, and Wacom’s products are no exception. Intuos Art comes with a copy of Corel Painter Essentials, which offers a mostly similar experience to Adobe Photoshop but has more graphic tablet-oriented functions. You can use it for both artwork creation and graphic design. However, it does have a steep learning curve.

Intuos Draw, on the other hand, includes ArtRage Lite. It’s a great piece of software for sketches and drawings, and it’s also quite intuitive to use, especially for a beginner. Intuos Draw also bundles a free 8 x 10 metal photo print in the box.

Depending on the software you plan to use for your work, the choice between the Wacom Intuos Art and Intuos Draw comes down to your preference.

Wacom Intuos Art vs Draw: Verdict

Now that we have gone through every small and big detail of the Wacom Intuos Art and Wacom Intuos Draw in this comparison guide, it’s difficult to give a final verdict as both of them share almost the same DNA in terms of features and functionality.

For new artists and graphic designers looking for an entry-level graphic tablet, Intuos Art is the best choice due to its inclusion of the multi-touch function and the Corel Painter Essentials software.

At a slightly less price, Wacom Intuos Draw drops multi-touch support but retains everything else from Intuos Art. It’s still an excellent pick for beginner artists and students because of its lightweight and ergonomic design.

Before you make a purchase decision for any of the Wacom tablets, make sure to go through their pros and cons below.

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Wacom Intuos Art – Best For New Artists and Graphic designers
Pros Cons
Perfect for professionals on a budget The plastic build is prone to bending and flexing
Supports multi-touch function
Bundles Corel Paint Essentials
Wacom Intuos Draw – Best For Beginner and Students
Pros Cons
Ideal for beginners Lacks multi-touch support
Bundled software is easy to use Average build quality
Comes in two sizes and fun colors

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Wacom Intuos Art vs Wacom Intuos Draw

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