Tag Archives: surface pro 4

Ever Want To Learn How To Draw?

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Digital Art

Have you ever wanted to be able to draw decent-looking artwork for your website? One of the things I’ve had a fledgling lifelong desire to do is learn to draw. However, I never took the desire seriously. Somehow I’ve always been convinced that in order to be able to draw well you have to be born with some mysterious “drawing talent” which I somehow never had much of.

I recently purchased a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, which comes with a high resolution touchscreen and a precision stylus called the Microsoft Pen. I was drawn to the Surface Pro 3 strictly by the ability to run a full version of Windows 10 on an ultra-portable touchscreen tablet equipped with a powerful processor that doubles as a laptop running full Windows 10. The Microsoft Pen stylus was a curious extra packed in the box. The first couple of weeks I left the stylus in the box because initially I didn’t have any secure place to put it. Once I purchased a protective case from Amazon that has a loop to securely stick the stylus in, I finally dug the stylus out of the box. Only then did I start to play with it a bit, initially looking at it the same way I look at the stylus that came with my Note 4 – potentially useful on occasions, but parked in the holder the vast majority of the time.

Curious about how other people were using their Surface Pro’s, I watched a bunch of Surface Pro YouTube videos. I ended up running across a very detailed video by an artist named Riven Phoenix reviewing the drawing capabilities of his Surface Pro 3. As often happens when watching interesting videos on YouTube, I ended up watching some of his other videos, and I quickly discovered he is a veteran 20-year art teacher and has quite a few art training videos posted to YouTube. After following along with several of his videos, I was quickly convinced that his teaching methods could teach me the skill of drawing. I had always assumed that drawing was a mysterious ability you had to be born with, but in fact the ability to draw is a skill to be learned if one is able to supply the motivation and is provided with the proper instruction. Riven Phoenix teaches with the powerful approach of inventing concepts and then constructing sentences with those concepts.

After watching several of Riven Phoenix’s videos, I went to his website www.alienthink.com and ended up purchasing full access to all of his instructional videos. He gives free access to the first 19 videos of his 225 video course on how to draw the human figure. He currently has full access to his entire website priced at $45 dollars, which includes 77 hours’ worth of video lessons. The first free 19 videos posted to YouTube contain a lot of material and completely convinced me I CAN learn the skill of drawing whatever I want.

His teaching skills come across very well in the videos. He breaks the task of learning to draw realistic-looking human figures down in a very formulaic way so that virtually anyone motivated and following along with his instructions in the videos will successfully learn how to draw realistic-looking human figures.

I am absolutely convinced that anyone with the motivation can use these videos and begin to learn how to draw. To my complete surprise, I’m now finding myself spending an hour or more each day practicing with the videos. I had no idea that purchasing the Surface Pro 3 would end up leading me in this new and fun direction.

Though devices such as the iPad Pro and Surface Pro 3 have something called “palm rejection” that enables you to rest your hand against the screen as you draw or write with the stylus, there are products for sale called “digital artist gloves” that cover the part of the hand that naturally rests against the writing or drawing surface. They are designed to electrically insulate the part of the hand resting on the capacitive touchscreen. I ordered the Huion Artist Glove for Drawing Tablet priced at $17.99 on Amazon. I have yet to receive these and will write a future article once I’ve used them for a while.

With the popularity of the Surface Pro and Apple’s newly-released iPad Pro, here is an opportunity to learn the skill of drawing and put that new equipment to work.

 

Pickup Trucks

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When the late Steve Jobs introduced the iPad a few years ago, he made the analogy comparing the iPad to cars and conventional computers to trucks.

h3tAt its essence it is a good analogy. Cars provide comfortable transportation for a limited number of passengers. Trucks can haul massive payloads. There are a myriad of vehicle sizes in between that serve many different functions. Overall in this blend, there are more cars on the road than trucks, but there are plenty of vehicles that fall into the hybrid category.

What would happen if we press the analogy farther? Where do vehicles such as pickup trucks and the ever-popular SUV variants fit in to Jobs’ vision? Vehicles of different sizes perform different functions

Modern computers also come in many different shapes and sizes. We started out with massive mainframes in corporate and government computing centers, and we have ended up with extremely powerful miniaturized computers that are so inexpensive and useful they are virtually everywhere.

If smartphones could be considered the computer equivalent of the chopped-off looking “Smart” two passenger car, and iPads and other tablets could be considered normal four and five passenger sedans, while desktop and laptop computers are trucks, then where does the ever-popular pickup truck fit in?

Enter the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 and 4 tablets that are also powerful PC’s in their own right. After buying and using a Surface Pro 3 for a variety of computing tasks, I’m sold on the Surface Pro 3 form factor. This category of computer – the convertible – has legs.

The Surface Pro 3 and 4 could be considered pickup trucks in Steve Jobs’ analogy. It functions well as a capacitive touchscreen tablet media consumption device, but it also is a full-fledged, no compromises PC that can handle real-world productivity tasks. This is the computer I’ve been looking for since becoming intimately familiar with my first iPad.

I feel the need to reiterate once again that I am a fan of technology. I own many Apple devices as well as Windows and Android devices – I feel no monolithic loyalty to any of them. Setting aside irrational emotional reactions for or against companies or operating systems, the convertible tablet PC is a fantastic computing concept that through blood, sweat and tears Microsoft has made into a reality.

Will the convertible tablet PC catch on? My prediction is yes. Will Apple produce the Mac OS/X version of the Microsoft Surface Pro? Again, my prediction is yes, though they may stubbornly resist for a while the same way they resisted producing larger-screen iPhones — they pivoted when they realized they were leaving money and mindshare on the table.