I’ve been maintaining, ever since the iPad was released, that I see no need for one when I have a perfectly good laptop for serious work and a smartphone for managing smaller tasks while on the go. When I’m working from my home office, I even have my Wacom graphics tablet, which I absolutely adore, to help me digitize my artistic hand more easily in graphics programs like Illustrator and Photoshop.
It is true that more expensive graphics tablets have been available for a while on which you can draw directly. That is to say, the input area and the screen viewing area are one and it’s even more like drawing on paper. I have always dismissed this option simply because I can’t afford such fancy machinery. But now, as I should have realized from the start, the iPad is incorporating some of this technology so that it can be used as a creative tool that is at least as effective as my method of graphics tablet and computer screen.
After watching this video from lynda.com, which shows artist Bruce Heavin’s brushstrokes as he works through this illustration of a monkey in a race car (with his fingers) on his iPad, I have to admit that this looks like a pretty powerful piece of creative technology that I’d be thrilled to get my hands on!
Do check it out. The Brushes Viewer application for Mac OS X is what allowed Bruce to record his brushstrokes and replay them to recreate the process of making the artwork. It looks really awesome in the video, where the speed has been increased to create a cool time-lapse effect.
