The Best Drawing Tablets For Computer Animation and Illustration

Wacom is the largest, most reliable, and known artistic tablet brand on the market. And this particular model showcases the best attributes under the firm’s sleeves.

The Wacom Pro 16” is a 16 inches pen display tablet with an ultra high resolution 4K screen, battery-free pen (the only kind of pen you should be looking for), and built-in shortcut buttons to streamline your work process. 

Drawing on this tablet is an experience worth having if you are an artist looking to get the best partner in crime for your project. It has a 13.6 x 7.6 inches active drawing area so you can expand in demand on this Wacom, and a 98% color accuracy to ensure the color you want is the exact color you get.

One of the biggest strengths of this tablet is its Pen. You could travel the globe attempting to find a better one and you won’t find one more advanced and intuitive than the Wacom Pen. This almost feels like a pencil, but without the sharpener. The Pen has over 8,000 levels of pressure that allow you to go from as thin and as thick as you’d like with surgical precision.

The XP-Pen Pro it’s one of the largest tablets on the market, leveraging a 23.8-inch 2K screen that promises an immersive experience. The XP supports a 90% Adobe RGB color gamut, so you can go all in and fuel your creativity. This device aims to simplify the artist’s job, with the XP Pen taking a risk to show two red dial wheels and 20 customizable shortcut keys on both sides of the screen for those left-handed creatives that are typically left behind.

The Pen has around 8,000 levels of pressure sensitivity and 60 degrees of tilt recognition, a must-have feature in this price range. You can’t control the tablet with your hands, as it doesn’t have touch capabiliies, but a big screen like this is more than enough to act as a second monitor.

If you are looking for the best entry-level creative tablet, look no further than the Huion Kamvas Pro 12. It has a display of 12 inches with 11.6 inches of active area space, and a 120% sRGB color gamut, plus a 170° degree viewing angle, for those who like to stretch out in awkward positions while they draw. It also comes equipped with eight programable shortcut keys, which is much appreciated.

It has an overall good build quality and is great for teaching new artists in getting used to this specific kind of work. The pen has the same 8,000 levels of pressure sensitivity as its competitors, but don’t get too excited, as is nothing like the Wacom. The pen will not register lighter strokes, so it can feel a bit “spongy” at times.

If you’re looking for a tablet to do more than illustrate or animate, you can easily pick up the iPad Pro 12.9. On this occasion, Apple decided to opt for a larger screen, compared to more common tablets, so it fits nicely under this category. And it’s not only the 12.9-inch Full HD screen that makes it so appealing, it’s also the processing power of the tablet. It will guarantee hours of use without necessitating a charge and tons of multitasking, without even getting warm.

The pen comes separately, but if you decided to get it, you won’t have any regrets. Apple has made incredible upgrades to its pen component to give it a leg-up in competition with other big dogs in the industry. Besides, you’ll basically have a computer on your hands, a drawing tablet you can take – and use – practically anywhere without the need of a computer.