It's easy to feel cramped when drawing on a small device. Or to miss out on what others are drawing on the canvas next to you in Magma's Art Jams. Some display tablets though, have features that really elevate the small-screen experience. The Wacom Movink is a great example thanks to its slim design, multi-touch support, and customizable on-screen shortcut menus.

About the Wacom Movink

The 13" Wacom Movink is the lightest and slimmest pen display that I've used so far. It weighs only 420grams, and is 4-6mm thick. That makes it a perfect companion for the traveling professional who prefers a powerful laptop over a standalone tablet.

It comes with its own variant of the Wacom Pro Pen 3 which has an excellent pressure response. There are 3 buttons on the pen which I've really come to appreciate in a multi-monitor setup. While two buttons are used for actions on the canvas, I keep the third for easy switching of displays.

The Wacom Movink also has an interesting style of express keys on the tablet. These are simple touch keys rather physical buttons, with one next to the display area on the top left, and then another on the top right.

This could, of course, be assigned to just a single type of action like Ctrl+Z for the frantic undoer. But you can get a lot more out if it by instead triggering on-screen menus for switching tools and various other actions.

Wacom on-screen shortcuts

I was not interested in on-screen menus initially. They simply weren’t useful for me when I had a relatively simple workflow and a preference for a shortcut controller or keyboard next to my tablet. But compact touch-enabled devices like the Movink are changing this for me. There are two things in particular that I like about them:

1. A menu can open other menus. This is great for creating your own sort of granular intuitive menu system only for the things that you actually use. On top of this, I could actually hide my main application's UI and dockers in favor of my own menu system.

2. Long-pressing on a menu item temporarily activates an action or tool. This is especially useful for briefly triggering between your brush and eraser or blending tool

These menus can have different layouts, colors and even icons so you can really play around around with it.

From one single menu, there are three other menus I have set up. Each can be pinned and positioned as I like them or simply closed after selecting an action.

Views and reference

My first menu handles only my viewport, and actions from the Magma View menu. These include

• flipping by view horizontally;

• switching to greyscale mode;

• opening/closing my reference window;

• and resetting my viewport to zero degree fit-to-screen.

Layers and Selections

Next are the layer controls. I bounce between different modes of working where sometimes I use many layers, and at other times maybe only two or three. So, I prefer to have a dedicated menu for this to use only when I need it. There are quite a few different layer actions but I keep things simple here and add selection tools to the other side of a radial menu.

• New layer;

• Clear layer;

• Merge layer down;

• and Delete.
  
  

  Then

• Lasso select;

• Deselect;

• Invert selection;

• and Transform.

Tool actions

My tool actions menu is the one I use the most and have pinned to the left side of my display. I find that this menu is better than switching tools by tapping on the Magma toolbar because you can press and hold these on-screen buttons to keep a tool active until you release.

When it comes to temporarily triggering certain tools, this is very useful for me, especially for something like the Smart Erase function on my Lasso brush. The shortcuts I have here are:

• Brush;

• Eraser;

• Blend;

• Lasso Fill;

• and Eyedropper.

The above image shows all of my on-screen menus set to a larger size for demo purposes.

Wacom Multi-touch

For touch gestures to be really useful and intuitive, they need to respond smoothly. The multitouch on the Wacom Movink is as smooth and responsive as what you’d get from an iPad, making it a pleasure to use, and easy to integrate into your workflow.

There are the standard gestures available for two-finger pinch for zoom and rotate, and double tap to undo, but also a range of 3- to 5-finger actions that fall under the Advanced gestures in the Wacom Centre.

You will, however, need to choose between Wacom’s advanced gestures being active or using Magma’s same gestures for certain actions. In order to make use Magma’s 3- to 5-finger gestures on a Windows machine, you will have to select Windows for the Advanced Gesture Recognition.

Magma Touch gestures

If you set the Advanced Gesture Recognition in your Wacom Centre to Windows, you can tap into (pun intended) the drag gestures for adjusting tool parameters in Magma. I set 3-finger drag up/down for my brush size, while dragging left/right will adjust the opacity of it. There are other useful things like hiding your UI or flipping your viewport as well.

Palm recognition within the browser can be a bit tricky sometimes, so when using Magma on a touch-enabled device with a stylus, we often recommend setting the 1-finger drag gesture to None. This will limit accidental panning or drawing on the canvas. It may be smart to do the same for 1-finger long press which typically activates your eyedropper tool.

Magma Super Simple Mode and fullscreen mode

The Wacom Movink’s compact size makes it great for professionals to work on-the-go. But a smaller screen can mean less space to draw if an app’s UI takes up too much of it. In Magma, you can free up space on your screen in a few ways.

First switch your browser to Fullscreen mode to hide the browser UI by pressing F11 on your keyboard or selecting the Fullscreen option in the View menu.

Magma introduced the Super Simple Mode to improve the experience for phone and mobile tablet users, but it’s great for those of us using smaller pen displays like the Wacom One or Movink too. Activate it by tapping on the gear icon on the right and select Super Simple Mode.

What you are left with is a fairly open workspace with only the essentials. You'll have both more room to draw and to see what others are doing on the Magma canvas with you.

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We hope this improves your Wacom and Magma experience. To make it even better, why not find some people to draw with in our public Art Jams… See you there!