Digital Art

What if Wacom Built a Tablet Computer? They Are.

If you are a designer or artist working with digital tools like Photoshop or Illustrator, you might have had a chance to work with the Wacom Cintiq. If you are unfamiliar with the Cintiq, it is Wacom’s monitor/input tablet combined. It allows you to draw and paint right on the surface, mimicking an actual physical work surface.

If you are an iPad or other tablet user, you have probably installed a few creative apps like Procreate, or ArtRage and use your tablet for sketching, drawing, photo-retouching, etc. with some kind of input stylus. And while your stylus does a pretty good job, in many ways it is not a substitute for your Wacom tablet or Cintiq. The fact is most styluses, have larger input tips, and almost all of them don’t offer pressure sensitivity like the Wacom. So, why hasn’t Wacom jumped into the tablet fray? Well they have.

The Wacom Cintiq Companion, and Comanion Hybrid are two new tablets from Wacom. The Companion runs a full blown version of Windows 8 and allows you full access to all of your desktop creative tools. The Companion Hybrid runs Android and give you access to all of your favorite Android creative apps, like Procreate, Sketch, and ArtRage.

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Both tablets offer an immersive on-screen creative experience and take full advantage of Wacom’s pressure sensitive stylus on a high resolution portable screen. The Companion running Windows 8 is essentially a mobile workstation with multi-touch control, pressure sensitive input and cloud based connectivity allowing you to create and share you r work from anywhere. Frankly I find this to be very exciting, because it take what I do on my iPad and extends it allowing me to be more creative from anywhere.

The overall specs for both tablets looks pretty impressive, especially for a first effort. Screen resolution is 1920 by 1080, Intel® CORE™ i-7 processor, 2048 levels pen pressure, 256 or 512 GB solid state drive, 16.7 million color display, 8 gig of RAM… I hope that Wacom is successful with this, because competition is a good thing, and hopefully it means Apple, and stylus manufacturers will step up their game resulting in better products for everyone.

There is no word on pricing and or availability as of yet, but you can sign up for email announcements about the tablets as they get closer to a launch date and release pricing info.

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61 Solutions “Mischief” for Digital Artist Everywhere.

I am always on the look out for digital painting and sketching tools to add to my arsenal. 61 Solutions launched Mischief last month which is a vector based painting and drawing application that looks pretty slick.

Using both pixel-based brushes and the scalability of vectors, Mischief give you infinite zoom, and scalability, without loss of detail. This combined infinite canvas size makes this a pretty powerful tool for digital artist. With a cost of $129.00 it hits a sweet spot giving you big features while not breaking the bank. You can try it for free for 15 days before you have to commit to buying which is an added plus for those on a budget. Below is a list of some key features of Mischief.

Mischief Features:

Infinite Definition

Mischief uses a revolutionary new stroke representation. Get the richness of pixel-based brushes AND the scalability of vectors. Zoom in to any size and get a PERFECT edge. Export at ANY size and resolution.

Infinite Canvas

Mischief has a truly infinite canvas. Your artwork can grow organically without constraints. There is no need to preset paper sizes or resolutions or to resize the canvas during drawing.

Unprecedented Zoom

Mischief handles a zoom range of 50 trillion to one. Create artwork with extraordinary levels of detail or draw a story, within a story, within a story … the possibilities are endless.

Highly Responsive

Mischief exploits the massive parallelism of today‘s GPUs. Get unprecedented performance even for very complex artwork. Scale, pan, and rotate in real-time without compromising quality.

Small File Sizes

Mischief files are smaller than comparable Photoshop and Illustrator files. Sharing high resolution artwork has never been so painless.

No Manual Required

Get started instantly; just pick up your stylus and draw. Pen and paper styles, tool selection, layers, and all the essentials are right at your finger tips. No complex menus or hidden features.