Sunday, December 15, 2013

Santa Thing is Comin To Town


My first real attempt at drawing and painting with the Surface.  I think it turned out pretty good.  I'm getting a hang of the tools, and I still absolutely love this thing (and this Thing). I wish I could add the full sized version on here, because the detail is great.  I think it would blow up the site's layout if I did.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

New tablet; New sketch !


I just finally picked up a Microsoft Surface Pro (the original, not the 2) tablet PC, and here is a (very) quick sketch I did while watching A Very Sunny Christmas special (Always Sunny in Philadelphia).  It is loosely based on Charlie, but I wasn't going for accuracy.  I just wanted a little inspiration for something to draw, in order to start playing around with the brush and paint tools in the program that I just bought for it, Manga Studio 5 (which is incredible, so far).  So this is really more of a learning exercise than a proper "sketch" but I thought it turned out OK for what it is.  I didn't have a whole lot of time to spend with it, and I am super slow with both the new hardware and software, but it is worlds beyond drawing on my iPhone or Nexus 7.  This little PC/tablet is pretty much the perfect little drawing tool (/toy), and something I have always dreamed of.

Hopefully, I will get some free time soon to spend exploring the software and new interfaces, and get some more sketches to post.  I am so excited! (it's a little ridiculous how happy this little thing has made me so far.)

A few things about the Surface - It doesn't really work very well as a straight-forward tablet.  I didn't have the keyboard for the first day or two, and man was it frustrating.  After picking up the keyboard cover ("touch" cover, really, but I am still batting around maybe trading up for the "type" one), it was night and day.  As a tiny laptop, with some touch capabilities, it seems to work great.  Windows 8 (a tiny bit less-so, 8.1, which I upgraded to after a few days) is really a bit schizophrenic.  The best way I could describe it is that it tries really hard to make you interact with it like a tablet, but then still presents everything like a PC would, stuck with vestiges of the "Windows" paradigms, but if you try and use it like older Windows versions, it's incredibly frustrating because everything is hidden behind layers of tiles, or swipe menus, or somewhere you can't find (although, getting into the habit of "searching" for everything helps alleviate the frustration some).  It's sort of stuck on the way to being a tablet PC, but as a (very) small laptop, it's great.  (And did I mention how much I love the drawing interface??)