Blob brush not working properly with Wacom Intuos Pro

Question

I'm an illustrator and the main way that I use my Wacom Intuos Pro M (model PTH-660) is with the Blob Brush tool in Adobe Illustrator. I utilise a lot of dotwork/pointillism in my work and usually that means that, ideally, when I draw a dot with Blob Brush, with the pen pressure settings on and the size variation set to maximum, the dot changes size depending how much pressure I put on the pen.

My problem is that all of a sudden, when I draw a dot, the dot is a uniform size and shape in line with the brush size, unaffected by pen pressure. Instead of a pressure-sensitive dot, I basically get a circle. If I draw (using Blob Brush), the pen pressure works fine, if I move my pen a tiny bit while drawing a dot the pen pressure works. This problem only occurs when making dots using Blob Brush (note that I don't use the regular Paintbrush or Calligraphic brushes ever, but I do like to set them to use pen pressure just in case). This issue is rather annoying.

Recently, the pen pressure settings for the Blob Brush were greyed out, so I decided to check if I needed a driver update. I have Adobe Illustrator 2020, running on macOS Mojave version 10.14.6. I updated the Wacom driver to 6.3.42-1. In the Wacom preferences, the dot-pressure functionality works as it should, so this seems to be a problem with Adobe Illustrator.

Katya5D34 · Accepted Answer

Hi there. Yes that sounds very similar to my problem. I seemed to have solved this for now by going back to a much older driver for my Wacom Intuos Pro - driver 6.3.38 from 2019.

Various other suggestions I've seen that you can try:

- Go to your Wacom Desktop Centre>My Devices>Pen Settings>Options and untick the the "Tip-Up Assist" box.

OR

- Reinstall your driver.

OR

- Go to System preferences>Security & Privacy > Click the privacy tab> Scroll down to Accessibility> Click the lock to make changes and enter your credentials> Make sure that Wacom, Illustrator and Photoshop are all ticked (or add them using the "+" sign).

Hope this can help you

DougKatz17096006 · Answer

I'm on OS Catalina and AI2020. Drawing blob brush dots with a Wacom stylus and tablet is erratic when the brush is set to pressure. Some light dabs with the brush produce smaller dots. If I continue, however, the dots become the set size of the brush with no pressure-induced variation. Sometimes, I can tilt the stylus to alter the dot size (even though I've set the brush to respond to pressure, not tilt). At other times no amount of tilt- or pressure-variation will give me variable size dots.

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