I bought a Microsoft Surface 3 tablet. The smaller one, not the Pro 3.

This little tablet ROCKS! It's wee. It runs full Windows. It charges off of micro USB, so I can take it anywhere and use it forever without running out of juice.

And it turns out to KICK ASS for making art. Its stylus works great. No parallax problems. Beautiful screen.

So with this painting... well, it started as a quickie test of a dragon head to see if sketching on a Surface 3 actually works. It did. Using Artrage, the result was IDENTICAL to what my real media sketching looks like. That's the first time that has ever been the case for digital sketching for me. I found it just as easy and natural as sketching on real paper.

I was so excited about that, I just started adding more to the sketch. Without any planning, I just started doing wild perspective stuff. This whole picture was creeping featurism starting from a quickie test head. I just kept haphazardly trying different things just to see if they would work, and they kept working!

Working with the Surface 3, I found that I could art anywhere at any time. No preparation needed. No ritual of getting out the art pencils and clearing off a space, etc. And thus no compulsion to work on the art for long sessions. I found myself just fiddling with the piece here and there for brief stints between doing other things just because it's so immediately accessible. It made working on it really fun rather than arduous.

This whole painting was done on my little Surface 3 tablet from the first sketch lines to posting on FA. The tablet was handling 18 layers with real media simulation at high resolution without any noticeable lag. (Which is more than I expected from the quad core Atom x7 processor. It's not a mighty Core i7 like in the Pro 3, but it still gets shit done)

The complex lighting in this painting was a lot of fun to do. Front and back lighting shading is done on separate layers and then mixed. The left wing is a whole separate set of layers so that it could be blurred to increase the 3D effect of the perspective.

This is the first full color piece I've ever done with a 100% digital process. And I think it may be the best painting I've ever done.