I used to use ArtRage on my old TabletPC with a Wacom pen and it worked great, but when I got a ThinkPad Yoga 12, with a Wacom EMR pen and a touchscreen, I stopped using it for two reasons.

  1. There was no way to disable touch from drawing on the screen. While the pen disables touch when it's close to the surface of the screen, if I lifted it just a tiny bit too high (1-2cm), my hand would make random marks on the canvas. Same thing happens when trying to use touch to zoom and rotate the canvas if you don't time it just right.
  2. There was a weird lag where lines would start randomly late. If I drew a vertical line, and then tried to quickly draw multiple horizontal lines staring at the vertical line, most of them would miss the vertical line by up to 1 cm. It's not just me, as I have no problems with this in other drawing programs.


I wanted to get back into painting, and I love how the oil paint works in ArtRage, so I dug into this a bit and found a solution that, while not perfect, works for me.

To fix the accidental touches, I simply disabled touch entirely on my machine while using ArtRage. Having to use keyboard shortcuts to rotate the canvas is better than having accidental dabs of paint all over my work. To do this:

  1. Open the file browser and right click on This PC and choose Manage.
  2. In the left sidebar select Device Manager
  3. Expand Human Interface Devices and look for your touch screen. Mine shows as HID-compliant touch screen, but yours may be different.
  4. Right click it and choose Disable (make sure you have a mouse or pen, so that you can still interact with your PC).
  5. When you need it again, simply right click it and choose Enable.



To fix the delayed lines, do the following:

  1. In ArtRage choose Edit>ArtRage Preferences... from the menu.
  2. Under Input Devices, disable everything except Use Realtime Stylus
  3. Restart ArtRage.


Hopefully this is helpful to others, as I believe this affects more devices that have both a pen and a touchscreen, such as the Surface Pro.