I found out what I did wrong with my Inkling, and now it works like a charm.
To be honest I’m pretty sure it worked like a charm before I had my epiphany, it’s just that the two of us didn’t understand each other. Communication is always the problem.

So, as I said last week, I made a few experiments with my new Wacom Inkling, and they all went wrong.
The main problem was about some lines being horribly misplaced.
Also, the misplacement didn’t seem to follow a specific pattern.

If after a few minutes the lines started to be consistently skewed to a certain angle, then it would have been clear that the sensor had been moved from its original position.
Instead, in all the sketches I imported the lines were somehow scattered, and the whole drawing disfigured beyond recognition.
Sorry if I can’t produce any evidence, I deleted them. I didn’t think I would have needed them, just trust me.

Anyway. I tried to change different things to figure out a bloody pattern. I tried to clip the sensor as steadily as possible, I tried to draw on a horizontal surface, to create a new layer before I started, to switch it on before I clipped it and so on. All to no avail.
Then I thought of removing my silver thumb ring and – ta-daan – the Inkling started to work perfectly.

The sensor uses infrareds to detect the position of the pen at any given moment. Infrareds can be reflected by shiny surfaces (I used to change my sister’s TV channel from another room, for the lulz, using mirrors to direct the beam. Lol). My ring is shiny. It scatters infrareds around. Mystery solved.

And here’s a sketch I made without the ring on.

There are still some tiny discrepancies. The eyebrows of the woman on the left hand side have been moved upwards by a couple of millimiters. But who cares, that’s good enough for me.
The linework of the drawings imported with an Inkling are much clearer and neater than what you could achieve with a scanner; you can customize the line thickness and the pen sensitivity, and you can also playback your strokes and edit your layers.
As you can see below.
Still temperamental, but once you know what your Inkling doesn’t like, then it’s all smiles.

by Paolo Puggioni