Using a Cintiq now (Destiny)

by Leviathan , Hotel Zanzibar, Saturday, September 12, 2015, 01:44 (3359 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Truly great work.

I am also working on a few things, but it's been slow progress.

As a side note, what do you use for your art, Leviathan? I have an older Intuos pad, which I like, but after playing around with a friend's Surface Pro 3 and PS, I really love that. Drawing on the actual screen seemed much better than on a separate tablet, so I'm going to get one. I was going to get the SP3, but with the SP4 mostly likely coming next month, I'm trying to wait and see what it's going to be like.

My girlfriend and family pitched in and bought me one a few years ago and it's amazing. You're absolutely right. Drawing on the screen is a LOT more intuitive than the disconnect of a graphics tablet (I had an Intuos 3 before that). The Brothers In Arms piece I did for DBO's Twitter background was the first piece I tried on the Cintiq. It was immediately... just... funner. It's that much closer to the pen and paper that I feel the most at home with.

I've played around with a Cintiq Companion (generation one). If I'm understanding correctly, that's essentially a Surface that's been optimized by Wacom from the ground up. I feel like I can sketch on it, but it's harder to move around a big, detailed image and finish rendering. That might just be me not used to the smaller screen real estate. But it also might be more of a problem with Photoshop being compacted into a smaller screen. You press a few millimeters right or left in the wrong direction and suddenly you've deleted a layer or accidentally minimized the window. Blarg!

I tried the Photoshop CC free-month-trial this summer and it has an "experimental interface" that optimizes the screen for mobile/tablet uses. But I don't know if that's really worth the cost of buying into that model when my PS CS5 does almost everything else the same and I don't have to put any more money into it every month.

I'd love to have something more mobile to work with so I'm not stuck with an aching back in the same room all the time, but I don't know if the devices and software is primed for that yet - at least with the way I draw. Or perhaps I just don't have the money to throw at the problem yet. :)