Pen Tablet Problems

A lot can go wrong when you’re trying to get some work done with a graphic design tablet. I have a Wacom Bamboo Fun Tablet and it works wonderfully! Usually….yesterday I encountered an issue with it but I think today I found a solution. This post isn’t technically about art itself but more about some tools you use and how they can go wrong. Learn about your tools and you’re work flow will be more efficient.

Wacom offers many different types of tablets. Wacom Bamboo Fun is probably the least expensive at $99 but it’s worth every cent. =) I’ll go more into different tablets in a later post, but what I want to say about the Bamboo Fun, and many other tablets, is that’s it’s not touch sensitive.  I can’t tell you how many times I work on my laptop with my tablet next to me and my brother or sister come over and touch the tablet int he hopes to mess up whatever I’m doing! lol It’s pretty funny that they keep doing it even after I tell them it’s not touch sensitive. Today, I actually found out that it’s actually works with magnets that are in the pen and sensors. I don’t know much about the hardware of technology like this but I learned about the magnets after my pen suddenly stopped working with my tablet.

Yesterday, I got angry with my sister and in my anger, I slammed my pen down on my tablet in mid work. Good news is, my sister and I weren’t really fighting, just playing around, bad news? In the midst of playing, I actually manage to break apart the magnet that allows my pen to connect to my tablet. The eraser part worked perfectly but the nib part would not respond at all!

How horrible!?! To a graphic artist, this is pretty much the end of the world! (Well to a broke graphic artist anyway lol, the pens are about $30 a pop!) I was so upset that my pen wasn’t working and I felt guilty that I wasn’t able to get drawings done for a few people on Fiverr, I had to message them asking for more time. And I spent what felt like forever trying to find a cure for my poor little pen.

I was really hoping that it was a software malfunction, so I tried uninstalling and re-installing the tablet software, I checked for driver updates, and changing pen nibs but nothing worked! Many other people asked the same question I was but there wasn’t much of a solution. And then something happened. Like an angle came down to answer my heart’s desire of finding a solution. Someone commented on a question that was just like mine and referred readers to a blog. What was the solution you might ask? I had to open up my pen and fix the magnets!

That was a pretty scary thought? Opening up my pen? Blasphemy! What if I broke it? It’d never work again and I can’t get a new pen right now! I’ve opened up electronics before but this was my beloved pen! But I had to try.

It wasn’t that hard actually, and, more importantly, it worked!!! I was sooo happy! But my pen movements are still kinda jerky and I’m working on getting those kinks out. The reviews on that tutorial was phenomenal! A lot of people had this method work for them and so did I.

If you’re having trouble with your pen, check out this blog post and see if this will work for you. =)

Fixing a Wacom Pen