One Possible Fix For Annoying Line Artifacts with a Wacom tablet

Earlier today, I plugged in my Wacom Intuos 6″ x 8″ tablet to begin working on inking and coloring another PC Weenies ‘toon. Much to my dismay, nearly every line I drew in Painter displayed annoying jittery artifacts as shown below:

My Wacom tablet (an Intuos3) had never before shown this problem in its 3+ years of use. I was concerned. Was it a hardware problem? A software problem? Would I have to plunk down more cold, hard cash to get a new tablet?

After attempting to deal with the problem for about 20 minutes (redrawing lines over and over again was crippling my workflow) , I switched nibs. The problem didn’t go away. So I opened Photoshop. I was seeing a different type of artifact occurring when using the paintbrush tool. Lines that were normally continuous had abrupt breaks in them.

I became concerned. The first step I took towards troubleshooting the problem was to run some Mac maintenance utilities. For that task, I chose MainMenu (freeware). MainMenu rebuilt the system caches, repaired disk permissions, updated my pre-bindings, among other tasks.

One reboot later, I relaunched Painter and discovered that the problem had completely disappeared. Conclusion: the problem was software related – most probably OS related. I’m very glad the issue is completely cleared up – my next steps would have involved reinstalling the drivers, or testing the tablet on another Mac I have in my studio.

So, if you’ve run into a similar problem with your Wacom tablet, try running some routine maintenance utilities first to see if the problem goes away. It’s much cheaper than buying a new tablet.

-Krishna