Comicfarts To Try To Get Me To Think About Writing (it Wasn't Very Effective).

Comicfarts to try to get me to think about writing (it wasn't very effective).

May the Fourth be with you!

And try not to think a little too hard about where that lightsaber's been.

shitty hipster mary sue asshole an oc

Clone Wars is on Netflix guys so no one has any excuses now.

(And if you're like me and you get super impatient, skip to somewhere in season 2 or 3 and then go back to the earlier parts once you're hooked because the later parts are that good that they will do that.)

Tryin' to get back to basics for the time being. 

The review no one asked for (and not the one Gotham deserves, either)

The Surface Pro: a highly accurate review by a very serious person. (Full disclosure the first thing I drew on it was a stylized male sex organ)

If you're not familiar with Windows' marketing failure foray into the tablet market, the Surface Pro line is the souped up non-windows-rt version of the Surface line. The non-pro (amateur?) Surfaces are weird inbetween machines that lack the app market of the iPad or Android tablets, but the Surface Pros run regular windows 8 with better hardware specs. The Surface Pro 3 has just been announced, so prices on the original Surface Pro 1s are pretty low. It's basically a full version of windows, about 2lbs, with a wacom digitizer for a screen. So basically think a Cintiq and a Macbook Air had a child that runs Windows (...so has probably been disowned) and I'm sure there are actual uses for it but if you're like a lot of artists online that just screams for portable digital painting.

The verdict: If you happen to have an extra kidney sitting around to sell, or I guess more hypothetically if several years ago you saved up money to buy an Intuos except your Graphire 2 never died (it's gotta be 12-14 years old now or some shit), and you want a very portable Photoshop machine, the answer is yes.

That said everything you have read about it is probably true. It is always warm - a bit like having a cat that decided you were a good bed and it was fun but now it won't get off and you're getting overheated - and it is a bit heavier than you would reasonably expect it to be - also not unlike a cat. It also has only a few hours of battery life, but since you're going to have to buy it a keyboard anyways if you like your keyboard shortcuts you can fix that with the power cover which is part keyboard and part battery.

It's only got 4gb of RAM, but if like me you use photoshop versions 6 and CS2 you'll never notice the difference because those are both only 32bit programs and can't use more ram. The processor is only a 2-core last-gen i5 but it, bizarrely enough, does support hyper-threading so you'll get better adobe performance out of it than you'd expect. The Wacom Feel stylus... feels really Wacom. Not sure about that pun but the texture and the weight are right where they should be. There's 1024 pressure levels and the outer edges of the screen do not appear to track pixel-perfectly, but both of those are actually improvements on a Graphire 2 that's over a decade old and secretly a highlander.

All newer Surface Pro models have adjustable back stands which is probably an improvement since in lieu of one I've just taken to finding the least ergonomic positions for it. Including but not limited to: holding it up by squeezing the keyboard between my chin and chest, laying it flat on my knees, and laying upside down off the back of the couch with it on my chest. It's not really noticeable what I've painted in full or partial on the Surface Pro any more than it's obvious when I built my computer - it's just another system is all, but the last painting I did was mostly done on the Pro so there's that for examples.

I do not recommend it for someone who wants to do digital painting and doesn't have a home machine, because it's not necessarily the most useful for normal computery activities and it's not necessarily the strongest at what it does well either - but if you have a main computer and need a laptop or you live out of a suitcase, it's for you. If you live in a cave and eat 10,000 spiders a day you are an outlier adn should not be counted.

My "big" computer was built to overpower and decimate my photoshop needs, so there's not really a comparison that I can make between the two since my main budget constraint on the big machine was to avoid buying truly unnecessary things like an expensive video card. And full caveat here, I really fucking love computers and other electronics actually more than I like art. I just like having them, I like messing with them, etc. The first thing I did before I got the Pro was completely re-wrote a bunch of rainmeter skin code to build it a desktop tailored to a touchscreen, and the first thing I did with it out of the box was reghack it because windows 8 made me angry. The digital in digital art is really what got me into art in the first place. But you probably don't have to love computers to need one - and my mom isn't very tech savvy but she thought it was cute so there's that verdict too.