Adobe Illustrator – Pressure-Sensitive Drawing with a Tablet

If you are drawing with a tablet, such as a Wacom tablet, you can select drawing tools like the Pencil, Pen, brushes, or shapes tools, and draw freehand using your tablet. By tweaking Pencil tool smoothness settings, you’ll probably find the Pencil tool and a tablet the closet thing in Illustrator to simply sketching on a drawing pad.

Only Calligraphic Brushes Have Tablet Options

Art brushes, Pattern brushes, and Scatter brushes can all be applied using a drawing tablet, but they do not have adjustable features that depend on pressure or other pen attributes.

To easily sift through available calligraphic brushes, you can view only calligraphic brushes in the Brushes palette by choosing only the Show Calligraphic Brushes option (and deselecting the other show brush options) from the Brushes palette menu.

Calligraphic brushes take on special attributes when you hook up a drawing tablet. When your operating system detects your drawing tablet, Illustrator provides additional pressure and pen stroke options for using your tablet’s pen. The most widely supported feature is pressure—the harder you press, the thicker the calligraphic brush stroke.

To define pressure (and other) attributes of a calligraphic brush, double-click on the brush in the Brushes palette. From the Angle, Roundness, or Diameter pop-ups, choose Pressure, or another tablet-based stroke attribute. Depending on the version and drivers you install, the Wacom 6D Art Pen set can support six dimensions of pressure sensitivity: X-axis, Y-axis, Pressure, Tilt, Bearing, and Barrel Rotation.
Once you choose Pressure (or another option) from either of the three pop-ups, you can define how much variation you want to allow. A large variation value for diameter, for example, means strokes applied with more pressure on your tablet are much thicker than strokes applied with slight pressure.
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