Welcome to Scribble Kibble, a show all about animation.
I’m opening up the smallest drawing tablet I’ve ever used, about 8 by 8 in size, and
the strangest thing about it is it’s flexible.
Look at it bend!
You can’t roll it up or anything, but it is flexible.
This is the Gaomon S56K.
It is definitely a tablet for beginner digital artists and you’ll see why soon.
The packaging isn’t complicated.
You get the tablet, the pen, manual and installation CD, the tablet’s USB cable, a battery for
the pen, and some pen tips.
The pen is battery powered.
Twist off the top, put the battery in plus side up, twist back on.
Press the button to turn the pen on.
Press to turn off.
To change the pen tips when they wear down, use this metal ring to grab and pull.
Then push in a new tip.
Before you install the tablet you do need to uninstall any old tablets before you can
set up the S56K.
If you have computer skills, you can get away with having multiple tablets by switching
out the wintab32 file.
It’s best to not use the CD and instead download the most recent driver for the S56K
directly off of the Gaomon website.
I don’t have the internet right now so I’m going to risk using the CD to install the
tablet.
Surprise, it works fine.
In Windows, you can change tablet settings by clicking the icon in the system tray down
here.
You can program the two buttons on the pen and adjust pen pressure.
Remember to click apply or the changes won’t update.
The S56K worked in every art program I tested it in, but it does much better in drawing
programs than it does in animation programs, specifically Toon Boom and Flash.
Performance was the worst in Toon Boom.
It is nearly impossible to draw a smooth line.
Over in Flash, it’s hard to control pressure sensitivity.
Lines are suddenly thick or thin.
It’s possible to animate of course, but not with a professional degree of control
over how each drawing looks.
The tablet works a lot better in normal art programs like SAI and Photoshop and free programs
like Krita.
Every so often you’ll get a blob when drawing.
Just undo it.
Overall, it’s not easy to make precise lines with the S56K, not because of its small size,
but because of its softer surface.
Even in this sketchy painting, as soon as I got down to details like the rings in the
tree, I couldn’t get the pen to make the movements I wanted it to.
You can see how the rings turned out flat instead of curving around the tree.
Instead of fleshing out the painting, I decided to try some character art to see how the tablet
handled outlines that needed to be accurate.
You can see how wobbly the line is due to the tablet’s surface.
Photoshop doesn’t handle lines well, but SAI was fine.
Even so, the S56K lines aren’t as pure as they would be if made with another tablet.
But you can’t really beat the price.
If you’re looking for a cheap, portable tablet to try out digital art, this may be
your new best friend.
You can definitely make art on it like this; just don’t expect to have the type of precision
you’ll get out of tablets that cost three times as much.
One more kind of funny thing.
The S56K makes a distinctive squeaky sound at the beginning of each stroke.
My microphone didn’t capture it well, but here are some squeaks.
For more product reviews, see the new category on the Scribble Kibble website.