Before anyone gets carried away, I know mobile tablets aren't the same as pen tablets. I have an intuos 4 at home. But with my phone broken and my laptop no longer mobile, I was looking into android tablets for drawing and shows.
Have any of you bought a tablet for drawing on the go? Whats the best option for pixel accuracy and performance?
Hi, this is my first post on /ic/ so I hope I'm doing it correctly. I bought an android tablet recently (Galaxy Tab A) for several purposes, but mainly art. I haven't bought any others, but I heard the Note 12.2 is good for art as well. Definitely get one with an S-Pen, you'll want the pen pressure.
I am very happy with my purchase. I have a Cintiq Companion and while it's more fully-featured, this is much more convenient to bring around and easier to hold up while painting in the open. Also, as android apps are based around the touchscreen, you won't have to use a keyboard, unlike the cintiq companion, which has shortcut keys but Photoshop isn't built around a touchscreen, so either way the workflow is slower.
I have used a bunch of programs, including sketchbook pro, infinite painter, layerpaint, serious paint, artrage and clover paint, among others. The one I found to be the best is Clover Paint. This is due to it's amazing amount of customization options. You can map pretty much anything to any button, and you can create and edit your brushes to a higher degree than any other android art program. (It has a lot of extra stuff, for example adding perlin noise to a brush to make sure each one is different). Unfortunately, it has the steepest learning curve and the UI is butt-ugly.
Artrage and sketchbook pro are quite similar to their desktop versions (of course, they're less sophisticated) but ArtRage lags a lot, so I can't recommend it unless you paint slow. Sketchbook Pro is nice, but it feels lacking in brushes and the workflow isn't as quick as Clover Paint. If you want extreme speed in brushes, you can get LayerPaint, but it's quite barebones.
By the way, if you're into animation, I recommend RoughAnimation and if you're into pixel art I recommend Pixly.
I hope this helps! Attached is a picture I painted in Clover Paint and touched up in a few seconds in Photoshop. By the way, does anyone know of any android painting communities?
>>2343780
Ah, sorry, I would like to correct something I wrote. I said the workflow with the Cintiq Companion is slower, but that's not true. I just meant that without a keyboard, the cintiq companion gets much, much more cumbersome to use, at least for me.
>>2343780
Thank you so much for your detailed post. Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou.
I'm researching the tabA now. It seems the tab2 is the newer model but may not include the same pen features as the artist model. Trying to find out how many levels of pressure it detects as well, I've heard 1000ish is fair
>>2343821
No problem! I'm not sure about the levels of pressure, but it's definitely less than wacom levels, though that didn't affect me too much, since after 100 you're just getting diminishing returns anyway. Here are some reviews on the Tab A from an artist's perspective:
http://www.tabletsforartists.com/galaxy-tab-a-with-s-pen-review-affordable-drawing-tablet/
http://www.parkablogs.com/picture/review-samsung-galaxy-tab-s-pen
And if you lose the S-Pen, Wacom came out with a stylus a few days ago that has pressure sensitivity (from what the articles say) and has support for Tab A. I'm unsure if the pressure sensitivity is only for the listed apps, but I thought you might want to know just in case you were afraid you might lose the pen, like I was.
http://www.wacom.com/en-es/products/stylus/bamboo-smart
>>2343828
So after a bunch of research the results are kind of upsetting.
First off, the tab A that comes with the s-pen and the sensors required to use it doesn't exist in my region ;_; second I guess it has some pretty awful resolution by mobile standards. The information on the pen sensitivity isn't advertised anywhere so ots likely not one of its striking features.
Then there's the fact the specs are quite a bit lower than even some of the last gen smartphones. There aren't even any real compareable options for tablets besides the Microsoft surface series which are both quite expensive and incompatible with term plans at least where I live (Canada)
Meanwhile the current and last gen note smartphones have 2000-1000 pressure levels respectively and much better specs. Along with great resolution.
Why can't phone companies just give me tjr best of both worlds ;_; Thank you again for your insight though.
