Page 456 - June 25, 2013

I promised to show the speed paintings I did on my new tablet PC while in Iceland, so here they are. The upper three were the first ones I drew, and I think it's pretty apparent that I was struggling a lot with both drawing on the tablet and with color choices. That's the mountain that I was able to see from our hotel in the first two and some of the lava fields between Reykjavik and the Keflavik airport. See, the last one's already much more natural than the first two. About 15-20 minutes per drawing:

The other three I did on a another day turned out way better, it basically took that one hour to get a hang of what I can do on this machine. These took about half an hour per piece to draw, and I used many of my photo's from the south shore trip as reference. The drawings are just made-up places though, so don't go looking for that particular waterfall. (Tee-hee, I drew sheep in the middle one.)

For those who are curious about what tablet I used: it's a Samsung ATIV SmartPC Pro 700t. It uses Wacom's digitizer technology for its screen so it's kind of like a small, portable Cintiq. In fact the screen is just as wide as the tiny 12wx Cintiq I use for all my other drawings, a little bit narrower. It has of course its limitations, and that's its processing power. It is after all a really thin, light tablet. In fact is far lighter and thinner than my actual Cintiq screen that' connects to my tabletop, how they fit all the computer stuff in there is beyond me.  I don't remember the specs right now, but it is able to run my Photoshop CS4 quite effortlessly, yet with very limited file sizes. I used a very standard Photoshop brush for these speed paintings, no layers and only about 1700px wide canvases, yet I was still able to detect a hint of brush lag when drawing. Not too much, but enough to be noticeable. I'm pretty sure the machine would die if I even tried to open one of my comic files, which are about a hundred times as large with all their layers and texts and stuff.

But for on-the-road sketching: it's excellent. Wacom even fixed a bug with their drivers recently which had caused the pressure sensitivity to be really unreliable when I first bought this thing and tested it, now it's all working like it should. Oh, and the stylus I bought for it is a Wacom Bamboo Feel, the stylus that comes with the tablet is far too small to draw with and a Cintiq or Intuos stylus doesn't work. That's the gist of it. If any curious digital artists in search of a portable sketching device have any more questions, feel free to ask me.

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