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Retiring my old arts tablet, time for a new one!
3 years ago
Good evening, everyone!
After over 5 years of faithful service and near daily use from someone who doesn't treat their things particularly gently, I retire my old art tablet, Zenobia (Yes, I do give all my computers names). Today, my new one has arrived and I finished setting it all up, ready for more drawing! I decided to call this one Draga. I know it's not really a big deal. Essentially I just traded one heavily used tool for a less worn and battered one. But I just want to use this occasion to talk a little bit about my experience with it and the tools I use. Perhaps it can serve as a useful recommendation for artists who are just getting started or maybe it's just interesting to read.
Zenobia is an old Samsung Galaxy Tab A I got back in 2016 during my apprenticeship. Before that, I had been doing all of my drawing in paper, scanning them in, and then doing all the digital stuff on my PC with Wacom tablets. You can still see that in my earlier comics, up to the first few pages of The Sand-Serpents Tomb. What I was looking for at the time was something that had it's own screen that I could draw directly on, with the secondary priorities being that it should be portable so I could use it during my lengthy commutes at the time, and that it should be as cheap as possible. Well, the only thing you really absolutely need for an art tablet is a pen that can detect pressure levels. Everything else is pretty much a nice to have bonus (which I couldn't afford at the time. (Still can't to be fair.)). For a little over 300€, this just so happened to be the cheapest device available at the time that fulfilled that minimum requirement.
It's certainly not a professional solution. It's a regular android tablet designed for taking notes and other tablettey stuff like that. It being able to do art is more of a neat side-effect than a core design goal on a device like this. Still, I loved what it did to death. For the first time, I was able to do a piece of art from start to finish on one and the same device. And I could even do it on the go. Drawing on the screen directly also felt so much better than having to look at the screen while drawing on an opaque plastic board in front of you. It made the entire process of doing digital art so much easier and faster for me. The only thing I really still needed a PC for is writing all the text for the speech-bubbles (which I still haven't found a good android app for to this day).
I eventually settled on ArtFlow as my main art program. It's a lot more bare-bones than the professional tools for PC, like PhotoShop or... whatever other artists use (really showing how much I know here...), but it's enough for my hobbyist needs. Also a lifetime premium version cost me about 10€... money well spent! All of this certainly isn't enough to meet the needs of an actual professional, but for me it was such an upgrade and exactly what I needed at the time.
But Zenobia has been starting to show her age. No real wonder considering I used her for drawing on a near daily basis, sometimes for hours on end. But the constant scratching of plastic pens on a touchscreen do kind of wear them down over time. About one and a half years ago, she started to refuse some of the inputs, making it a struggle to zoom or pan around. Worse though, it would start registering inputs I wasn't making, booting me in and out of my apps rapidly and sometimes even deciding "No, I didn't really want to save all these changes I made during the last 30 minutes before closing the program" for me. I was able to stop her from doing that by literally duct taping pieces of cardboard over parts of her screen to make sure not the slightest bit of input could be registered. That helped for a while, but recently even that sledgehammer approach wasn't doing it anymore. So after 5 years, well over what I'd usually expect a fragile device like that to last under heavy use, I decided I couldn't put off spending more money any longer. I needed a new one.
And... here it is! Honestly, I was so happy with how things went back then, I applied the exact same search criteria again. Android device, needs a pressure-sensitive pen, as cheap as possible. And by mere coincidence, I ended up with another Samsung Galaxy, whit time the much newer S6 lite. It's essentially exactly the same as good old Zenobia, just some of the numbers are bigger and it's working properly. Even the price range was pretty much identical. So... I guess from your perspective, nothing is really going to change. I am still using the same software and the same methods as before and working from the same templates I used to make for myself years ago. Apparently if someone were to ask me if I would do everything the same way again, my answer would be a resounding yes. So, welcome to the team, Draga, and a restful retirement as Youtube-watching machine to Zenobia.
So, for any new artist who find themselves in a similar situation as my own, this is the approach I would recommend. As long as you don't care too much about having the most professional tools or all of the complex and sophisticated options that digital art has to offer, if you're more looking for a convenient and simple solution to make your hobby easy and convenient and if money is a concern, Android tablets are probably the cheapest option you can go for. As I said, the only thing you really need is one with a pressure-sensitive stylus (it has to be pressure-sensitive, don't confuse them with the kind of stylus that are just a piece of plastic to push pressure on the screen... though I am honestly not sure if those are still being made with modern touchscreen technology), anything else is just kind of a bonus. It's still not cheap, the entire package can cost around 300-400€ or your regional equivalent, but if that's within your hobby budget, I can honestly heartily recommend it.
Not sure if this was interesting to anyone, but it felt good to write, so I guess it was worth it one nonetheless. If you made it to the end, thank you for taking the time to read, and I hope you have an amazing day!
After over 5 years of faithful service and near daily use from someone who doesn't treat their things particularly gently, I retire my old art tablet, Zenobia (Yes, I do give all my computers names). Today, my new one has arrived and I finished setting it all up, ready for more drawing! I decided to call this one Draga. I know it's not really a big deal. Essentially I just traded one heavily used tool for a less worn and battered one. But I just want to use this occasion to talk a little bit about my experience with it and the tools I use. Perhaps it can serve as a useful recommendation for artists who are just getting started or maybe it's just interesting to read.
Zenobia is an old Samsung Galaxy Tab A I got back in 2016 during my apprenticeship. Before that, I had been doing all of my drawing in paper, scanning them in, and then doing all the digital stuff on my PC with Wacom tablets. You can still see that in my earlier comics, up to the first few pages of The Sand-Serpents Tomb. What I was looking for at the time was something that had it's own screen that I could draw directly on, with the secondary priorities being that it should be portable so I could use it during my lengthy commutes at the time, and that it should be as cheap as possible. Well, the only thing you really absolutely need for an art tablet is a pen that can detect pressure levels. Everything else is pretty much a nice to have bonus (which I couldn't afford at the time. (Still can't to be fair.)). For a little over 300€, this just so happened to be the cheapest device available at the time that fulfilled that minimum requirement.
It's certainly not a professional solution. It's a regular android tablet designed for taking notes and other tablettey stuff like that. It being able to do art is more of a neat side-effect than a core design goal on a device like this. Still, I loved what it did to death. For the first time, I was able to do a piece of art from start to finish on one and the same device. And I could even do it on the go. Drawing on the screen directly also felt so much better than having to look at the screen while drawing on an opaque plastic board in front of you. It made the entire process of doing digital art so much easier and faster for me. The only thing I really still needed a PC for is writing all the text for the speech-bubbles (which I still haven't found a good android app for to this day).
I eventually settled on ArtFlow as my main art program. It's a lot more bare-bones than the professional tools for PC, like PhotoShop or... whatever other artists use (really showing how much I know here...), but it's enough for my hobbyist needs. Also a lifetime premium version cost me about 10€... money well spent! All of this certainly isn't enough to meet the needs of an actual professional, but for me it was such an upgrade and exactly what I needed at the time.
But Zenobia has been starting to show her age. No real wonder considering I used her for drawing on a near daily basis, sometimes for hours on end. But the constant scratching of plastic pens on a touchscreen do kind of wear them down over time. About one and a half years ago, she started to refuse some of the inputs, making it a struggle to zoom or pan around. Worse though, it would start registering inputs I wasn't making, booting me in and out of my apps rapidly and sometimes even deciding "No, I didn't really want to save all these changes I made during the last 30 minutes before closing the program" for me. I was able to stop her from doing that by literally duct taping pieces of cardboard over parts of her screen to make sure not the slightest bit of input could be registered. That helped for a while, but recently even that sledgehammer approach wasn't doing it anymore. So after 5 years, well over what I'd usually expect a fragile device like that to last under heavy use, I decided I couldn't put off spending more money any longer. I needed a new one.
And... here it is! Honestly, I was so happy with how things went back then, I applied the exact same search criteria again. Android device, needs a pressure-sensitive pen, as cheap as possible. And by mere coincidence, I ended up with another Samsung Galaxy, whit time the much newer S6 lite. It's essentially exactly the same as good old Zenobia, just some of the numbers are bigger and it's working properly. Even the price range was pretty much identical. So... I guess from your perspective, nothing is really going to change. I am still using the same software and the same methods as before and working from the same templates I used to make for myself years ago. Apparently if someone were to ask me if I would do everything the same way again, my answer would be a resounding yes. So, welcome to the team, Draga, and a restful retirement as Youtube-watching machine to Zenobia.
So, for any new artist who find themselves in a similar situation as my own, this is the approach I would recommend. As long as you don't care too much about having the most professional tools or all of the complex and sophisticated options that digital art has to offer, if you're more looking for a convenient and simple solution to make your hobby easy and convenient and if money is a concern, Android tablets are probably the cheapest option you can go for. As I said, the only thing you really need is one with a pressure-sensitive stylus (it has to be pressure-sensitive, don't confuse them with the kind of stylus that are just a piece of plastic to push pressure on the screen... though I am honestly not sure if those are still being made with modern touchscreen technology), anything else is just kind of a bonus. It's still not cheap, the entire package can cost around 300-400€ or your regional equivalent, but if that's within your hobby budget, I can honestly heartily recommend it.
Not sure if this was interesting to anyone, but it felt good to write, so I guess it was worth it one nonetheless. If you made it to the end, thank you for taking the time to read, and I hope you have an amazing day!
Including my servers
It's also just more fun.
All jokes aside, I look forward to seeing art soon again <3
And of course, you and everyone else is absolutely welcome to all the art I decide to share. It only gets better the more people I can share it with!
And thank you so much! It certainly works great for what I want out of this hobby, and I am happy you like the outcomes of it as well.
That aside, though, I'm glad the old tablet did so well for you, and it sounds like a pretty handy thing to have. Especially when it lets you draw pretty much when and wherever you want. It's good that it lasted for as long as it did under heavy use, too. With so many devices these days, you're lucky to get a year or two out of them, it seems. Here's hoping the new device treats you just as well, if not better, and I'm excited to see where you go from here!
I am absolutely amazed it lasted as long as it did too. I usually don't trust these ultra-compact touchscreen devices to really last that long either, so 5 years way exceeded my expectation. Even though the age started to show towards the end. I'd be impressed if the new one managed to last that long as well, but I am certainly hoping so.
Thanks for providing the info about ArtFlow!
ArtFlow is the one app I personally found the most useful, but you might want to look at ArtRage as well. For me personally it was a little too oil-painting-like for what I needed, but it seems to be getting really good reviews as well.
Basically, a slightly smart diary or notebook in electronic format.
But aside of Xournal I haven't seen any program doing half of that - aside of Evernote, but that can't cache and rsync with a private server, it seems.
As a result I still carry around a 2008 convertible laptop ( Lenovo X220 Tablet ) to use for sketching, note taking and stuff.
And I would seriously love to switch to an Android tablet, given they're cheap, ubiquituous and "mostly reliable" these days.
But yeah, it's a little bittersweet. I am excited about the new tablet and I know it does the exact same thing as the old one, but better. Still, the old one had a lot of great experiences and memories connected to it :)