The new iPad is a fantastic performer, way better than I expected – and the price is, well let’s call it acceptable. My 3rd generation iPad is such an ancient tablet device, people were surprised it didn’t support cuneiform script as input. When the new 9.7” iPad came out with Apple Pen support I got one right away.
#ASTROPAD FOR SURFACE PRO MAC#
So I kept on drafting my sketches with pencil and paper, scanning them, tracing them on my Mac and doing the colouring on the Mac (mostly using Affinity Designer) and I gave up on an entirely digital workflow. And with a plastic pen on a glass surface the tactile experience will be probably worse than the previous plastic on plastic one. When Cintiqs burst onto the scene I really wanted one, but I couldn’t justify spending over 1000 bucks just for a geeky toy that doesn’t really do much more than a few-hundred-buck drawing tablet, except for improving the experience. This lack of control simply drove me insane. This causes strange squiggly line starts and endings. Not only does it feel horribly wrong and awkward, the tip of your pen will move ever so slightly when starting to draw due to the applied pressure and the lack of friction that paper would provide to keep the tip in place. It’s a slippery plastic pen tip on another piece of plastic. What I found even worse, though, was the tactile experience of graphic tablets. Drawing down on the desk, but seeing the drawing and interaction on the display is just awful. Before the era of Cintiqs, they were simply a bad experience. I’ve been trying to use graphic tablets for a long time, I never even remotely liked them. I’d never thought I’d quote “The Last Jedi”, but here we go.