LICENSE TO ILL

MONOPRICE TRIP REPORT

My new tablet came in! After a little fiddling with drivers, everything works like a dream. While I was looking for advice on if I should purchase a monoprice tablet or not, someone told me something along the lines of “the monoprice handles like a ferrari after driving the intuos ford.” 

They weren’t kidding. This thing is crazy sharp, which has positives and negatives.

The monoprice compensates for the natural wobbliness of the human hand by just making the lines veer to the smaller end of the spectrum. The above is what you’d get with a monoprice in SAI using the default brush with the stated settings, using light pressure. On an intuos, I’d say that the lines would probably be thicker.

The thing is, you DO have to lay down some pressure to get heavier lines.

I had to press down fairly hard compared to my old intuos to get the brush to go up to maximum thickness. However, when trying to go from the thinnest end to the thickest end of your brush setting spectrum, the response is overall smooth and responsive.

Blending is a little odd, however:

Because the tablet tends to favor harder, smaller settings, it’s a bit more difficult to get nice, even transitions between your colors using the light pressure you’d usually use with a wacom brand tablet. On the left, you can see my attempt at blending with my favorite flat brush with a light touch. On the right is the same attempt, but with heavier pressure. 

Overall, I’d say for the price and quickness of shipping (three days!!!) the monoprice is absolutely worth it. However, it WILL take some time getting used to, just because the hardware has a completely different method of operation.