Photo by Bonus Action
I have been drawing since I was old enough to hold a pencil. I can remember, vividly, the little worlds I would sculpt from Crayon and wonder on my bedroom floor at five years old, trying to capture ideas I found so genuinely magical. This love of art grew with me into adulthood, until a series of life-altering events threw my illustration career into the bin, leaving me emotionally empty and overwhelmed at the mere concept of creating. I was almost certain my ability to draw had been destroyed until I picked up the Wacom MovinkPad Pro 14.
So many artists have been rocked to their core over the past five or six years. I’m not the only one who has experienced events that have not only thrown my world out of balance but also challenged the joy and natural curiosity that drove my creative mindset. Recovery from such a slump feels impossible unless you have the right toolset to overcome it.
Wacom Devices Have Peppered My Creative Journey
As a young artist, I wasn’t particularly talented or privileged. I grew up very poor, and despite loving art with an intensity that powered me forward on rescued Crayola pencils and salvaged Uni Ball pens, I wasn’t wowing anyone. In fact, compared to my art-loving peers, I was a weak illustrator with a poor grasp of anatomy and no real eye for design. I wasn’t winning any middle school art contests, and I was dramatically overshadowed by other students in my high school art classes.
A lack of access to materials, education, and time was the primary culprit. I was the caregiver to two younger siblings when I wasn’t at school, and drawing was typically done far too late at night when I should have been prepping for school the next day.
But I didn’t let that stop me. I was voracious. I devoured paper, drawing horses, then characters I made up, and then fanart. By the time I was finishing high school, I was drawing at least four hours a day with a collection of supplies I’d managed to purchase from hours of yard work and horse stall mucking in the summers. However, 2011 had seen a large shift from traditional art to digital, and no matter how badly I wanted a tablet, it just wasn’t an option. They were far too expensive, and even some of the most dated screenless options were hundreds of dollars I just didn’t have access to.
I headed off to college that same year, dragging all of my art with me. For the first time, I had access to drawing classes, figure drawing sessions, and feedback in a way I hadn’t before. I wasn’t taking art as a major, but I found myself stuffing in as many classes as I could. I took every one that was available to non-majors.
Through college, I remained very broke. It wasn’t until after I’d left school, when I took my first real job, that I finally had the money to get a real digital drawing tablet. With my first paycheck, I went out and purchased a Wacom Intuos Pro in the biggest size they had. I remember sitting in my apartment, having spent an eye-watering amount on the thing, and I couldn’t bring myself to open it for nearly three days because I was so intimidated by it.
When I finally took it out of the box and plugged it in, I was in for a wild realization. Digital art was nothing at all like my lifetime with pencils and paint brushes. I struggled with the disconnect between the computer screen and my hand. I wrestled with Paint Tool Sai and found myself longing for the ease of my physical art studio. I felt very silly and unhappy. But I’d also come to a point where practice had made my work decent, and I was interested in drawing for conventions and maybe even my own comics. I knew if I wanted to do these things, I needed to master the tablet.
Over the next several years, I worked on both my traditional art and my digital illustrations. Eventually, my partner helped me get my very first Wacom Cintiq. The 13 Inch HD completely changed my interactions with digital art. I was illustrating book covers and children’s stories, and working on my own web comic. I was greedily drawing D&D characters and original art, and I was beyond proud of it. Hours in childhood had expanded, and there were days when I spent six to eight hours at my desk, contentedly clicked in. And then everything fell apart.
Creative Depression Destroyed My Drive
The whole of 2020 broke many people for a variety of reasons. For me, March of that year held a slew of life-altering events that changed everything. The first was a positive pregnancy test, and the second was shutdown.
I never thought I’d be the person who stopped drawing. I never thought that I would be the artist whose desk would accumulate dust, pencils left for weeks in the same cup, tablet abandoned to host cat fuzzies. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened. My tech career came to an abrupt halt, my son came five weeks early in November of 2020, and then, less than a year later, I lost a family member to Covid.
Weeks turned to months, and months to years. We moved house, and in the new house, my painfully collected studio made its way into boxes, pushed into the back of the closet, forgotten.
I would go in, pull out a sketchbook and my purple pen case, I’d put pencil to paper, I’d try to sketch, but working two jobs full-time and juggling being a stay-at-home parent lit a match under the creative worlds I used to capture in vivid pigments and bold lines. I became so overwhelmed by my own materials that I would freeze up when I tried to pull them out. I sold my Cintiq for rent.
As the years went on, I faded. I yellowed at the edges, forgetting the person I was when I created. I longed for a moment in which something would grip me, and I’d find myself able to finally start again. But the more I wanted it, the more I toppled. The more I struggled. The more I become miserable and angry at myself. Why couldn’t I do it? Why couldn’t I have it?
It was like someone had turned out every light in my heart, and nothing could pierce that darkness.
Opportunity Comes In Strange Places
Throughout 2025, I have tried repeatedly to open my Copic Markers, yank out my sketchbooks, or fiddle with my liner pens. However, it was when I had the opportunity to try the Wacom MovinkPad Pro 14 that something very strange clicked on.
Despite always struggling with digital art and never feeling completely connected to it like I had with watercolor or Copic, when I turned the MovinkPad Pro 14 on for the first time, a strange giddiness itched under my fingers. I will never forget picking that stylus up and pulling it across the surface, and marveling over how it responded.
Just like my first time using a sharp, blue Prismacolor pencil when I was thirteen.
Over the span of several weeks, I kept picking up the tablet and forcing myself to draw. To draw anything. There was no studio. No overwhelming drawers of tubes or containers. Just me and that damn tablet. And the MovinkPad Pro 14 looked up at me like the biggest challenge I’d ever faced, daring me to do it. To make something beautiful. To do something amazing that I was absolutely sure I had completely forgotten how to do.
And then I did it.
I drew a character. I put flats down. I shaded. I began thumbnailing. I pulled out a sketchbook. I doodled during the day. I took the sketches to the screen. I began imagining, thinking, blossoming, breathing. It was like someone had turned on the lights in the dark world I had been trapped in.
The thing is, the MovinkPad Pro 14 isn’t a tool I’d normally have access to. Like so many poor kids, I’ve struggled through my adulthood running away from the poverty I was born into. This isn’t something I would normally ever let myself think to have. But the portability of a full art studio at the tip of my fingers freed me. I could draw anywhere. I could draw with my son, at the park, in my bed, or on the sofa. I had everything I needed, and the quality of the device was like working on a full tablet hooked to a PC, or even my sketchbook. The beloved sketchbook that I had abandoned out of pure anxiety and overwhelm.
I can’t begin to explain the joy I have felt drawing on this tablet in the past several months. It has been, without a doubt, one of the most incredible experiences. While I am still overwhelmed most days, I know that I can pick the MovinkPad up, I can draw, and I can create. It’s reconnected me to something critical to my foundations. It is pure, artistic freedom.
With the MovinkPad Pro 14, I am finally thinking forward again, and I don’t know where it will go, but I know I wouldn’t be here without it.
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