I am sure most readers will have heard of Wacom and maybe other graphics tablet makers. These offerings were always rather large and certainly enabled exact work to be conducted. However the market for these tablets is not exactly huge and once you have one why should you need another?

Then Wacom started bringing out smaller and cheaper offerings and somewhere along the line at least one other company decided to join the fun. Here I am looking at a product from AceCad. Called Art Pad. It consists of a small graphics tablet around 20x20x1cm with a 17x9.5cm area towards the middle that works with the supplied special stylus that comes with a single AAAA battery to transfer your image through the unit and down the USB lead to software in the PC.

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Installation is quick at only around three minutes and the provided Art Dabbler software needs only around 33MB of hard disc space. The graphics tablets stylus will work as a mouse and the tablet as a mouse mat however there is a learning curve and most may decide to work in tandem with a mouse as for the stylus to be used with left and right buttons as a mouse takes training.

Certain graphics products do take advantage of a graphics tablet and items such as Corel Painter will work with it. The main use may not be straightforward tracing of an outline that you can place under the transparent top layer of the Art Pad, but when using the stylus as a pencil and depending on the amount of pressure applied the thickness and or darkness of the line produced on the screen varies.

If you have absolutely no artistic skills then tracing outlines may be the extent of your worthwhile work however should you have some skill then practice and the Art Dabbler software provided will produce output others will approve of.   

The Art Dabbler software provided is what most people will first use to try out the hardware. It is quite straightforward select what you want your stylus to be Pen/Pencil/Brush etc. Then just go ahead and use it on the tablet, the default colour palette is 18 colours but click on it and you can mix almost any colour you wish. Next to this is the textures palette and while only three are shown by default there are a whole array hidden behind and you can paint/sketch with a pattern with ease.

There are a number of tutorials to teach the novice how to produce viewable work in just a short time. Of course for anyone serious about working with a graphics tablet the Art Pad will be just a stepping stone.

There is a small manual and my only gripe is that it does not discriminate between the Driver CD and the Art Dabbler CD. It's the Driver CD first and then the Art Dabbler one, or things will not work.

For those happy to just produce something for fun or for the family then this package may well be the answer. The package is stated to work on a PC or Mac. For Windows 98 or later and Mac OS 8.6 or later.

Certainly easy to install and easy to use, in this format it is stated to have an accuracy of + or - .01 of an inch and resolution of 2540 LPI.

Two links below, to purchase in the UK for £35 click the second link.

http://www.acecad.com.tw/flair2504.html

http://www.selwyn.co.uk/Pen+Input+Solutions/Art+Pad+Products/Flair-II+GT-504