Pablo
By kidBoard Inc.
$99, Windows 95
612-941-1905
www.kidboard.com
Minneapolis-based kidBoard’s drawing tablets, designed originally for grade schoolers, move into the adult world with this superb hardware/software package that boasts an extremely accurate and full-featured computer drawing tablet along with a couple of highly diverting computer art programs, Kai’s Power Goo Special Edition and Art Dabbler.
The 8-by-6-inch plastic tablet comes with a pressure-sensitive pen that not only takes over all the functions of a mouse but also produces brush strokes of varying textures and contrasts simply by pressing harder while running art software.
The tablet worked like a charm using Microsoft’s Windows 95 plug-and-play feature during installation. The bundled software, particularly Art Dabbler, quickly produced drawings that take on some of the same qualities of materials such as crayon, pastel chalk and acrylic paint.
The tablet greatly enhanced the process of doing detail work in Photoshop and even the Paint program built in to Windows 95.
The board connects to your PC via two wires. The first is plugged into the PC/2 keyboard port and includes a plug to daisy chain the keyboard’s own wire back into the loop. The second requires a free serial port, which might make it unusable if you’ve connected an external modem. Once set up, your regular mouse or track ball remains active, but you’ll be surprised at how little you go back to using it.
