Category: iPad Painting

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Pomeranian – iPad Painting

This is an iPad painting for a piece I’ve been commissioned to do.  It will end up as a fully finished painting in the next few weeks.

When it comes to using the iPad for paintings and drawing, I’ve come to think of it as an advanced sketching device, which is why I’m not putting colour into very many of these.  Since this will be brought into Photoshop, pasted into a higher res image, and painted over, spending a lot of time on colour for a commission like this seemed like a waste of time.

One of the reasons I love painting and sketching on the iPad is that it forces me to tighten up an image as much as possible at very low resolution, with fewer tools than are available in Photoshop.  That way, when I do begin to paint over it, the likeness is pretty solid.

This really is a lot of fun, and after trying a number of styli and apps, I’ve now got my preferred iPad tools down.  For this painting, I used the procreate app, the Wacom Bamboo Stylus, and the Nomad Mini Brush.

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Rocky Balboa – iPad Painting

This is my latest iPad painting, Sylvester Stallone as Rocky in the sixth and final movie of the series, Rocky Balboa.  Some critics scorned it as having too many clichés and being unbelievable, but it’s my favorite of the series.

This is as far as I could take the painting on the iPad, and I’ll be using this as a rough for a finished painting in Photoshop.  The finished painting will not be in black and white, but I find accurate colour to be incredibly difficult and a useless effort on the iPad, so I’ll do that in Photoshop.

I painted this with the procreate app, still the one I prefer to work with most.  Most of the work here was done using the Wacom Bamboo Stylus, but I also used the Nomad Mini brush for some of the nitpicky texture work.

This is by no means finished, and I can already see many things  I want to change and improve on, both in the painted details and the likeness.  But it’s a good start.  With each iPad painting I do, I’m getting more comfortable with it, and figuring out just what’s possible.  Still enjoying working with the device, tools, and apps and I plan to continue improving my skills.

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Ostrich – iPad Painting

Here’s another painting I did on the iPad over a period of three or four days.  This is the kind of thing I like to do while sitting watching TV, as it’s not on deadline and is just fun to work on.

This was painted using the Procreate app, the Wacom Bamboo Stylus and the Nomad mini brush, which arrived last week.  While I’m very happy with the Wacom, I’ve been seeing ads and reviews for the Nomad brush around the net and I thought I’d give it a try.  Because I like having everything portable, I bought the mini brush instead of the longer ones and I really enjoyed working with it.  It doesn’t really do anything I can’t do with the Wacom stylus, but when it came to working on the little hairs and some subtle shading, it was more enjoyable to work with as it glides over the screen a lot easier than a traditional stylus.

I wouldn’t want to be limited to only the Nomad brush, however.  While it’s great for painting, I don’t like it for drawing, but then, it’s not really designed for that anyway.  After finishing this painting using the Wacom and the Nomad, I’m going to continue to use them both.  They each have their strengths and I enjoyed using them both on this painting.  The only downside of the brush is that you want to be careful not to squash or wreck the bristles by leaving it lying around.  I was thinking that a little cap would have been a good thing to include with this brush/stylus.  But then again, I’d probably lose the cap, so it’s probably fine the way it is.

When I’m using the iPad, I have the brightness set to 50 percent.  Because I spend so much time in front of the computer, the brightness of my desktop monitor is set pretty low as well.  I plan to preserve my eyesight as long as possible, so I try to minimize my exposure to bright light.  The downside of working on the iPad is that it means making adjustments for that before posting.  There are a few apps out there that will make color and brightness adjustments but I’m still getting used to how far I have to push things to get them to look right online.  It’s an ongoing process, but I’m learning.

This close-up is actual pixels, 72 ppi, so you can see that this is one of the limitations of working on the iPad.  I have the first generation iPad, and I know the 2nd generation has better resolution, so you’ll be able to get a little more detail, but not a lot more.

So, in the interest of full disclosure, I did bring this into Photoshop for some color adjustment.  Every monitor is going to be different, but mine is calibrated and the color I saw on the iPad is not what it looked like when I emailed it to myself in order to post it.  So while all of the brush work was done on the iPad, I did do a Hue/Saturation and Levels adjustment on my desktop.  I also used a bit of Smart Sharpen.  Here, you can see the difference side by side.  While the one on the left is what I got from the iPad in my inbox, the one of the right (after adjustments) more closely resembles what I was seeing on the iPad when I was working on it.

The iPad will not replace my Wacom tablet and Photoshop anytime soon, so you might wonder why I bother.  It really is just for the fun and the challenge of it.  I’m enjoying seeing just how far I can take a painting before I can’t go any further.  This is equivalent to painting in low-res in Photoshop and that translates directly to my more detailed paintings because they all start in low-res.  Working on the iPad with limited tools and resolution does end up making my more detailed work better because it forces me to do my best on the foundation of the painting before working on the fine details.

While I intended this to end at being an iPad painting, I’m toying with the idea of bringing it into Photoshop, bumping up the resolution and making a full size, full resolution painting out of it, because I know I can take it further.  It’ll mean working a number of more hours on it, but I think the end result might be something I’ll be proud of.

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Golden Mantle Ground Squirrel – iPad Painting

This grumpy little fellow is a Golden Mantle Ground Squirrel.  They’re found in a number of places around here in the Bow Valley, and it’s usually pretty easy to get photos of them.

I painted this on the iPad using the Procreate app and the Wacom Bamboo stylus.

Even though I really like working on the iPad and using both the app and the stylus, I’m not able to go further than what you see here when it comes to real detail.  But I’m having fun experimenting with it, and if I wanted to take it further in Photoshop, this would serve as a decent foundation.

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Tech Stuff

Like many guys, I’m lured by gadgets, things that go click, whir, light up and basically are adult versions of the cool toys we had as boys.  But fortunately, I don’t make impulse buys.  I have a fear of buyer’s remorse, so I will very rarely buy anything without thinking it through.  Took me two months of going back and forth in my head last summer about whether or not the iPad was a toy or something I really would benefit from.  As I use it everyday,  I have no regrets and consider it one of the best purchases I’ve ever made.

Here are a few fairly recent buys that I’m pleased with.

ZAGGmate iPad keyboard – To find out all the details about this wonderful little device, head on over to their website.  I’ve known about this keyboard for at least six months and I’ve gone back to look at it every once in awhile, usually after typing something lengthy on the iPad screen, dealing with autocorrect and annoying editing issues.  Love the iPad, don’t like typing on the screen.  I’m quite a fast typist, comes from years of admin office work before I was a full-time artist, so I find typing on the touchscreen to be anything but user friendly.

The ZAGGmate works on Bluetooth, so contrary to what you might think from looking at their site, it doesn’t even need to be touching the iPad to work well.  I’ve often left the iPad in the Apple case, propped it up on its spine on a table and just typed with the keyboard as is.  I bought this great little Case Logic sleeve at Staples, which holds the iPad (in the Apple case), the ZAGGmate keyboard, plus it has a small pouch on the front for headphones, my Wacom Bamboo Stylus, a USB key, and the makeshift glove for drawing.

So whether I want to use the ZAGGmate as a case for the iPad, as a keyboard, or both, I’m very pleased with the purchase.

Canon PIXMA MX870 Printer – Bought this at the beginning of the year from B&H, as I realized I needed a colour printer.  To be honest, this has sat in my office, in the box for the majority of the year.  Finally unpacked it and set it up a couple of weeks ago, replacing my all-in-one Xerox PE16.  While the Xerox was only black and white, it did the job for a number of years, but in today’s terms, it was big, clunky, and finally outlived its usefulness.

I don’t do a lot of printing of my images as I send those out to be done professionally.  While I need to print off reference photos for sketching, and the requisite office documents that go with running any office, for the most part, my experience with color printers had been less than ideal.  Ink that dried out all the time, constantly doing print tests, all of the problems that have plagued home printers for years.  What I didn’t realize, is that over the many years I’ve been using the Xerox, technology has advanced.  Who’d a thunk it?

After checking with colleagues and reading reviews, I decided on this model and so far, I’m not disappointed at all.  Easy setup, very nice printing in both color and black/white, copier and fax work well (can’t remember the last time I faxed, though) and best of all, the scanner is dead quiet.  The Xerox scanner was horrible and loud, so I’ve just been taking digital photos of my sketches and importing them into Photoshop that way (don’t laugh, it works very well!).  But I’ve started using a scanner again, too, because the quality of the Canon is excellent.

Even the replacement ink cartridges are reasonably priced.  If anything changes with the quality or performance, I’ll be sure to post an update, but for now, very pleased.

Sony Cyber-shot Digital Camera H70 – While we have a Nikon D60, which is a great user friendly camera for anybody who wants to learn more about photography, but still wants the point-and-shoot option, it’s not exactly portable in a jacket pocket.  As I’m heading to Photoshop World in a few weeks, and don’t want to lug around the Nikon, I wanted to get a new compact point-and-shoot.  Our current model is many years old, a Pentax 3.2 Megapixels, so very obsolete.

While I normally would have done a lot of research before buying another camera, this one was almost an impulse buy on my part, because I did very little research and what I did do was on my phone while comparing prices at three different stores.  Retailing for $250 (much less than our first point-and-shoot cost years ago), I got a sale price of $219.00, and it’s a great little camera.  16.2 Megapixels, 10X optical zoom, takes two different kinds of data cards, and has a lot of options normally not found on a point-and-shoot.  I’ll need to spend some time learning the ins and outs, but so far, pretty pleased with the purchase.

I’m probably done buying hardware and accessories this year, but who knows?  Come to think of it, I really could use a zoom lens for the Nikon.

 

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iPad Painting and the Wacom Bamboo Stylus

Here’s another iPad painting that I just finished.  This is Marcia Gay Harden in character as ‘Mother Carmody’ from the Frank Darabont movie, ‘The Mist,’ based on the novel by Stephen King.  She is one of my favorite movie villains which made this a lot of fun to work on.  Frank Darabont is one of my favorite filmmakers and Stephen King is my favorite author, so it should come as no surprise that The Mist is one of my favorite movies.  How many times can you use ‘favorite’ in a sentence?

Darabont has made movies out of a number of King’s books.  In addition to The Mist, there was The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption.  He is also responsible for the breakout miniseries ‘The Walking Dead,’ which is one of the few television shows I would pay extra to see.  And if that weren’t enough, Darabont has used Drew Struzan (one more favorite) to create the posters for a number of his movies, including the ones I’ve mentioned here.  It’s no wonder I’ve chosen two of his characters to paint on the iPad.

I’ve already written a great deal about the process for painting on the iPad and the ArtStudio app, which is still preferred over all others.  If you’d like to see other iPad paintings and posts, there are links at the end of this entry.  The process is very much like other digital painting, with some limitations due to the nature of the iPad.

What made this current painting different is that I was taking a new stylus for a test drive.  Up until now, I had been using (and recommending) the Targus stylus, but I recently got my hands on the new Bamboo Stylus for iPad by none other than Wacom.  I’ll be honest, I had REALLY high expectations for this stylus.  Wacom has long been established as the go-to company for drawing tablets, and having owned more than a few of them, I’m a pretty big fan.  I couldn’t do my work without a Wacom tablet.

I already knew that the stylus wasn’t going to be reinventing the wheel.  Anybody expecting pressure sensitivity (something Wacom tablets are very well known for) should dismiss it now, no matter what stylus you’re using.   The iPad currently does not support pressure sensitivity, so that discussion ends pretty darn quick.

Without going into great boring technical details, I can sum up the Wacom Bamboo Stylus pretty easily.  It is the best stylus I’ve used so far.  Every other stylus I’ve tried, and there have been four of them, has been a little like drawing with a piece of chalk.  A large surface area with the tip, because the iPad is built to register a finger, not a pen.   What it looks like Wacom did, however, was take that tip size to the ultimate minimum.  The contact surface is significantly smaller than any other stylus I’ve seen so far.  It’s still not fine point tip, but it’s a definite improvement over all others I’ve tried.

What else did they get right?  Well, it’s longer than any other stylus I’ve used, so it feels better in my hand.  It has better balance, too.  They included a clip (something others have failed to do) and it looks good, too.  While I’m sure a lot of work went into the research and development of this stylus, it’s not a complicated device.  It’s a pen that allows you to write, draw, and paint on the iPad.

Many people will recall that I liked the Targus stylus, and up until now, it was all I needed.  Wacom, however, raised the bar with the Bamboo Stylus and it’s now my primary drawing device for the iPad.  I still have to use the glove so I can rest my hand while drawing without activating the app with the heel of my hand, but that’s a compensation for the iPad, not the stylus.

As with all of the stylus products out there, there are metal parts on them, so a little bit of care for your iPad is warranted.  Don’t leave your stylus sitting on the screen or push really hard at a very steep angle as there is always the risk of slipping and possibly scratching the iPad.  You don’t need to push hard with ANY stylus, and if you use the Bamboo Stylus properly, you should have no issues.

I do not have a screen protector on my iPad, so I can’t say how it works with one, but I used my iPad a LOT, do a lot of painting with it, and the only scratches I’ve ever got were from a brief test of the Dagi stylus which put three nice little scars on the screen.  Even those are hard to find, but it was enough for me to abandon it.  The Apple case is all I’ve ever needed for the iPad, so I don’t see the need for a screen protector.

Bottom line, I would highly recommend buying the Wacom Bamboo Stylus.  Yes, at $29.95, it costs a little more than others on the market, but I’ve always believed that you get what you pay for, and this one is worth it.  It’s a joy to paint with and after the first few minutes, I didn’t think about the pen at all, which is the best endorsement I can offer.  I find the best products (hardware and software) are the ones that allow you to think about your work, not the tools you use to create it.

As for those who are demanding pressure sensitivity, talk to Apple about it.  In the meantime, you can easily fake pressure sensitivity with most apps on the market by varying the opacity of the brush in the app itself.  That’s what I did throughout this whole painting and it worked very well.  I rarely use full brush opacity when painting, even in Photoshop.

One final note about painting with the iPad in general…

The iPad has limitations that prevent me from producing ready-for-market paintings.  Just the color calibration and resolution limitations are enough to put the brakes on creating finished work.  This ‘actual pixels’ image is as close as you can zoom in on the first-gen iPad.  Were I to import this into Photoshop, it would serve as a sketch for a painting, with many more hours required to create a finished piece.  Had I painted this in Photoshop, I would consider this to be about half done at this stage.

With that in mind, you might wonder why I bother painting with the iPad at all, when I can get much more detail and a tighter rendering with Photoshop and a traditional Wacom tablet.  The reasons are simple.  With the right app, and the right stylus, the iPad is a great sketchbook.  I also enjoy the challenge of seeing how far I can take a painting, and it’s just great overall painting practice.  Another reason is simply to show that you can create quality artwork on the iPad, despite the critics (fewer all the time) that say it’s of no practical use to artists.  One thing I’ve learned over the years by watching what talented and creative people do with all sorts of mediums in this world is that artists will decide for themselves what is and isn’t of practical use for their own creativity.

If you’d like to see other iPad painting posts I’ve written along and images I’ve painted, here are some links.

iPad Cartooning: An Ongoing Experiment

iPad Painting: Billy Connolly

iPad Painting: James Whitmore

iPad Painting: Daniel Day-Lewis

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iPad Painting: Daniel Day-Lewis


Here’s another painting drawn on the iPad for fun and practice. This is Bill ‘The Butcher’ Cutting from the movie ‘Gangs of New York.’ According to the DVD extras, Daniel Day-Lewis was so committed to the role, that he stayed in character while on set, even when the cameras were off. I’ve seen this movie a few times, and for me, the character of The Butcher is the best part of it.

Had a few requests for progress shots from the last iPad painting I did, but since I hadn’t saved any file copies, I kept that in mind while painting this one. Click on any of these images to see them a bit larger, although size is limited by the iPad resolution.

Image 1-3

Image 4-6

Closeup

Now that I’ve done a couple of paintings and a number of cartoons with the iPad, I’m aware of a few limitations, aside from the resolution, that make it difficult to ever really do any finished work.

First, the brightness of the iPad. If I paint on full brightness, it’s a little hard on the eyes, so I paint with the brightness set to about half or 60%. When I send the images by email to my desktop computer, they’re a fair bit darker than they are on the iPad, so all of these images have had exposure adjustments in Photoshop.

My desktop and laptop computers are colour calibrated, so it’s a little unnerving to paint in colour on the iPad, because it doesn’t look the same when I bring it into Photoshop. This is why I painted in black and white first, in order to get the values right. After that, I added a colour layer in the ArtStudio app, then I flattened it and continued painting. As you can see, most of the work, however, was done in black and white.

While I’m pleased with the way this painting turned out, I might have chosen a difference reference photo to work from, as I think I could have found a better pose for the character. But since this is as far as I intend on taking this image, no harm, no foul. It was good practice.

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iPad Painting: James Whitmore


Here is another painting done on the iPad, very different than my usual style. This is a value study of the great character actor, James Whitmore. If I were to title this piece, I’d probably call it ‘Brooks Was Here,’ as it’s not so much the actor that I wanted to paint, but his character, Brooks Hatlen from The Shawshank Redemption.

For every larger than life Brad Pitt or George Clooney on the silver screen, there are a hundred brilliant character actors like James Whitmore. The sort of actor that everyone recognizes, even if you don’t know his name, and have never see him on the cover of People magazine. I love rich characters in movies, but those characters can just as easily fall flat without the right actor breathing life into it.

This painting was a pleasure to work on, as Brooks Hatlen has always been one of my favorite film characters. It didn’t feel right to paint this as a caricature, and even with the resolution limitations of the iPad document size, I could have spent many more hours on it. It really was a joy to paint.

Once again, I used the ArtStudio app and the Targus stylus. In a reversal of my usual method of painting on a white canvas, I filled the canvas with black, and then painted in shades of grey. This next image is zoomed in to 100 percent, so making it any larger would have given way to pixelation.

I’ve recently realized that I need to always have a painting or image to work on that has no deadline. While I spend all day drawing or working on my business, this piece was done over two evenings while watching TV, and an hour at the coffee shop yesterday morning. It was a nice break from the commission work.

With no shortage of wonderful character actors to choose from, I would imagine I’ll be painting many more of these.

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iPad Painting: Billy Connolly


With my heavy workload lately, almost everything I’ve been doing has been for a deadline. Even the animal paintings have now become one more item on my ‘to-do’ list. It has begun to wear a little thin, so I wanted to work on something this week that was just for fun.

I’m really enjoying working on the iPad, and despite the fact that some people lament that it’s not pressure sensitive like a Wacom tablet, the drawing apps available are incredibly versatile. I haven’t painted any people in awhile, and I’ve been itching to get back at that, if for nothing else, than to improve those skills. Billy Connolly is on a growing list of people I’ve always wanted to paint, so he was as good a subject as any.

A few years ago, I read his biography, entitled ‘Billy,’ written by his wife Pamela Stephenson. I was already a fan of his comedy, but I’ve grown to become a fan of him personally as well. ‘The Big Yin’ is such a talented musician and actor, a brilliant comedian, and a dangerously intelligent man.

At one point, I had intended to do a full painting of him, and someday I still might. But for now, this was just an exercise to take drawing on the iPad a little further than just drawing a cartoon character. With the Targus stylus I recently acquired, I felt I could finally do some painting on the device.

I could have done this in colour, but I thought for this first go ’round, I’d stick with black and white. While I didn’t keep track of the time, as I worked on this off and on over the course of a week in the evenings, I would estimate that it took about four or five hours, working on the ArtStudio app. Somebody recently asked me on Facebook if I preferred this one over the Sketchbook Pro app. Having used both, I do prefer ArtStudio to Sketchbook Pro, even though the latter is still a very fine app to work with. I just find the tools in ArtStudio easier to use, and there are more of them.

It’s doubtful that I’ll ever do finished work on the iPad, because the resolution capability of the app doesn’t allow for extreme detail, but I will definitely keep stretching, to see how far I can take it. This is undoubtedly the first of many paintings I’ll experiment with on the iPad.

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iPad Cartooning: An Ongoing Experiment


Having done some finger painting on the iPad, I thought I’d be happy just continuing to do that. I was getting pretty decent results, having a fair bit of fun, and didn’t feel I was really lacking in any tools that would allow me to create the images I wanted.

I had heard the Pogo Stylus was a compromise at best, and many were using it simply because they couldn’t find anything better. I bought the Dagi Stylus after reading a good review, but it ended up scratching my screen in three places on the first day so I stopped using that right away. The scratches, by the way, are not obvious. I’d have to point them out to anyone wanting to see them. No real harm done, but enough that I wouldn’t use that pen again. I’d almost given up on finding a stylus, until I started hearing really good reviews about the Targus stylus (also sold as the Griffin stylus).

Since it was less than $20, I figured I’d give it a shot. Ordered one from Best Buy, with low expectations. I’m happy to report that I LOVE this pen. It works so well on the iPad screen. The rubber tip looks like it might have the consistency of a pencil eraser, but it actually has a fair bit of give, slides nicely over the screen and doesn’t require a great deal of pressure to activate the drawing apps.

You’ll notice that I’m wearing a glove on my drawing hand. While you can buy pre-fab gloves for this sort of screen work that look nice and pretty, I just bought a pair of glove liners from a local sports store. I cut the thumb, index, and middle fingers from the gloves, so that I can still use my fingers to activate the app features, such as tool presets, zooming, panning, etc. But by keeping the last two fingers on the glove, I can rest my hand on the screen while drawing, without the heel of my hand activating anything on the app. Works very well and as an added bonus, it cleans the screen as you draw.

It should be noted that I do NOT have a screen protector. I tried a couple when I first got my iPad and hated them. The installation was incredibly frustrating, and once I did get one applied well, I didn’t like how it made my images look or the feel of the screen so I removed it many months ago. It is my understanding that a screen protector will seriously decrease the effectiveness of some of these stylus pens, so be warned that if you have one on your iPad, your experience may not be as good as mine.

I do have the Apple case on my iPad at all times, and those three little scratches on the screen made by the Dagi stylus are the only ones I’ve ever had. Since I use the iPad every day, and have been using the Targus stylus quite a bit as well, I’m not worried about getting any more scratches at all, so I won’t replace the screen protector.

The app I used for this cartoon is ArtStudio. I also use Sketchbook Pro and like them both. While I will still do some finger painting for large brush painting, and less precise work, I am definitely going to continue to keep using the Targus as it’s a great addition to my iPad workflow.