Hi Omar, thank you for your help as always. I was just looking at them and good reviews so I will give that a try.
For sculpting I use a little Wacom Intuos, as Omar has suggested. I love that the one I have is small and wireless. Makes it easy to place in front of my keyboard.
For Grease Pencil or actually sketching/inking in other programs I have a relatively inexpensive 15.5 XP-Pen display tablet. I actually "traded down" from a huge Cintiq and I like the XP-Pen much better. It's not as nimble as the Intuos but I need to see the stylus tip on the "paper" when I'm inking. YMMV and the Intuos might be the best first all around choice.
When using a tablet it's often easier to use the "Emulate 3-Button Mouse" option for navigation. Since I am always switching back and forth I made this little add-on that puts a checkbox on the toolbar and a hotkey combo to toggle emulation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F_48_Ouw414uooz1sIOzSaeSUXera2Am/view?usp=sharing
ya the cheapo wacom is awesome, its just tricky to get used to it at first but its like riding a bike , i practised with the game Osu as suggested by everyone online and now it feels super natural,
Literally anything you can get your hands on is pretty good these days. I've worked on Wacoms for years; I took a Surface Pro to BON-LA and sketched on it for about 5 weeks while abroad. Currently I am LOVING my XP-PEN Deco Pro as my stable desktop choice. As a brand, XP-PEN is worth looking at. They even have an affordable and quality range of Pen Displays. You want to look at pressure sensitivity, responsiveness, and resolution as your key areas. But as always, I recommend you look up independent comparison reviews, but definitely lean towards what people who are professional illustrators think, since they use this tech day in/day out.
I can also vouch for the Wacom intuos! Having not used a tablet before I can easily say I'm really satisfied with what this can provide as I'm learning. I agree with what Omar said about starting off with something that will benefit your current level of experience - and then upgrading if you see yourself wanting to do more. I think the intuos comes in wired and wireless (I'm pretty sure there's a wired option). I'd definitely recommend the wireless choice though as it's really helpful being able to put it easily aside and pull it back out when changing workflows. The battery life is also surprisingly good too!
Thank you everyone. Going to try out the Wacom Intuos and see how I get on 🙏🏻