XP-Pen Deco mini7 Review: A Budget friendly Beginner Art Tablet for Digital Drawing and Writing

graphics tablet is a device that lets you draw digitally, but it simulates the feel of traditional media, and most digital artists use them! There's the body of the tablet, which is the “tablet” part , and there's a special pen/stylus that goes with it.

tablets have this thing called a Driver, which is basically a kind of software that lets your tablet work on your computer. You need to download a specific driver for your specific tablet make and model. Without the driver, you can't use your tablet on your computer at all.

A digital art drawing pad tablet would make things easier, and is very comfortable to work with. Wacom is considered the best but tends to be pricey. There are other brands such as xp-pen. You can get the kind where you draw on the tablet but look at your screen for around $30 on the cheap end.

I recently got my first drawing tablet to try out, the XP-Pen Deco MINI7. I have no previous experience with drawing tablets, so wasn't quite sure what to expect. And given I have a lot of time at home, now seems the perfect time to try it out.

First Impressions

The XP-Pen Deco MINI 7 is the entry level spec gadget. It's roughly the size of an A6 sheet of paper (Working area: 7 x 4.37 inches). The pen has 2 configurable buttons. It's a basic pressure sensitive tablet, so not one with a built-in display.

The XP-PEN tablet is a really neat concept. It doesn't require any batteries for the pen and the tablet itself just requires a USB connection. The supplied USB cable was about 1.5metre long. The pen itself seems to use some kind of magnetic coil technology to work (i.e. magic).

Installing drivers from the XP-PEN website is pretty painless. they seem to offer drivers for Linux , Windows and Mac OS. On mine, after installing the latest windows drivers, the tablet is mapped to the entire screen (going outside the canvas).

Windows 10 needs a restart and once that's done, I can instantly start using the tablet. Windows also helpfully enables its Ink API without any difficult configuration needed.

When first using the tablet, I'm a bit unsure of how much I'm supposed to be pressing on it. I've turned the sensitivity all the way down for now, which seems to go quite high ( 8192 levels ), so I guess I can press a lot harder.

The digital pen lacks an eraser on the back end . The missing eraser isn't a big deal for me because I rarely use it. Many artists prefer to use an eraser brush rather than flip their pen over to erase.

XP-Pen Deco mini7 can recognize pen tilt which allows an artist to use the tilt of their pen to control the expression of a brush while painting. Drawing with the side of a pencil is one such example.

The Deco mini7 also feature 8 express keys which can be found on the sides of the tablet . These express keys can save an artist loads of time by placing commonly used tools and features at the push of a button.

The first program I tried using it was with the Microsoft whiteboard app. There's also OneNote note-taking app . They both work very well.

A drawing tablet is a good investment even if you don't end up using it for art. I use it to make presentations, teleconferencing meetings etc. It's a cheap and useful thing to own.

Drawing Experience

For testing actual, decent drawing, I have a bit of a problem – I cannot draw. My sense of proportion, shape, colour, whatever are all completely non-functional . That's why I wanted to get this tablet – to help me learn.

There are many software for digital art such as Paint tool SAI, Corel Painter, Krita , Gimp, Mypaint ,Clip Studio Paint, Medibang Paint, Artrage... etc, but the most famous and used in the industry is Photoshop. My main drawing software of choice is Krita, and it seems to play well with the tablet input. It has pressure sensitivity support. It has a decent quick selection menu on right click, but I need to practice a lot more to be able to use it to its fullest capabilities.

Drawing and painting with mouse is not as intuitive as with tablet stylus , it will give you much worse results and possibly wrist pain which called RSI. With a mouse you wouldn't be able to do realistic brush strokes and it would take long to make a precision line.

a stylus is more natural and won't be such a strain on your wrist, and styluses have pressure levels so you can do subtler strokes than with a mouse, that has only an On-Off behavior.

Even the pen tablet needs some getting used to even for experienced traditional artists. It's also better if you paint a painting, not try to do lineart. But linearts are not easy even with tablet without a screen. It's just always good to start from a painting, because they're easier to make digitally (on paper on the other hand it's easier to draw).

The tablet can also act as a substitute pointing device for a mouse. That works reasonably well but there are some applications where buttons don't press properly, and trying to drag invokes scrolling instead. I suspect these are more likely limitations of the OS or applications than the driver or device.

It's really going to require a lot of practice to figure out the correct way to use it, and learn how to draw. My immediate next steps are just to keep using it and getting used to it, maybe trying it out with some point & click adventure games – it seems ideal for that.

I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 . when I connect the XP-PEN tablet to mine it works and it works fine with krita. The main problem with Android OS tablets is the apps are just decent. Autodesk Sketchbook is really the only app I've liked. It has an okay variety of brushes and a good layer system with effects like overlay and such.

Conclusion

The XP-Pen Deco mini7 is an entry level drawing tablet, but seems like really good value for money. It's very slim and comfortable to draw on, the Medium is big enough that my hand never really overhangs off the surface. I use it for graphic design, online teaching , photo-retouching and video editing.

It is really easy to set up and get started with . I don't use the shortcut buttons or the touch ring a lot, I kind of prefer to just keep one hand on a keyboard, and another on the pen, but I do still have a handful of useful, but difficult shortcuts mapped to them.

For its price it fulfills its purpose and I'd say it's a good tablet for a beginner digital artist.

As for learning digital art, YouTube is an amazing resource. I've found several artists that do digital art tutorials that I've really enjoyed and that have helped me immensely.

Lastly: practice and imitation. Find artists you love and try to re-create their work, try to copy it. There is no shame in copying artwork for practice. And practice, and more practice, and still more practice. And of course having fun.

official site de XP-Pen Deco Mini7: https://www.xp-pen.com/product/613.html