Making Drawrings

I write this blog post as Samsung is on the cusp of releasing what the media (other bloggers) are calling "the most powerful tablet ever".  The Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition.  You'd think they'd have come up with some cool name, like the X-99 Velocirapter Diesel Face Punch, but I digress.  To do my part in maintaining the perpetual tech-hype machine, I've gone and bought... a good condition unit of last years model.  Dude, I'm not made of money, what do you expect?  I ain't one of those chumps what camps outside the Apple store because they're releasing a new thing that's the same as the old thing, but with color options.

But I didn't start this to talk about planned obsolescence and Apple and all that noise.  I just wanted to do a quick rundown of a pretty cool app called Layer Paint that in my opinion, was the best solution for drawing on the go with a fairly slow android tablet.  Layer Paint doesn't have quite the feature set that Sketchbook Pro does, but I was on a Le Pan II and the lag in combination with the crayon-sized stylus was just too much to overcome for most purposes.  Not so with Layer Paint, which at a mere three bucks from Google Play gives you layers, canvas sizes up to whatever your device can handle, and a decent selection of brushes, along with the basics like fill and gradient.  Here's two of the better drawings I squeezed out of the Le Pan II / Layer Paint combo:

 

Both of those are from requests at a sub-reddit I frequent: /r/redditgetsdrawn  It's great for drawing practice by the way.

After upgrading to the more powerful processor of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, I still used Layer Paint and to scrawl this image:

5 Layers, 1800 x 1800, the Galaxy Didn't stutter at all.

Truth be told, I intend to start using Sketchbook a little more now because the horrible lag is gone, but I'll still fire up Layer Paint for quick sketches.  It's just simplistic and doesn't get in its own way, like those weird word processors that have minimal features and just edit text, looking like an old DOS screen.  It remains to be seen if the current setup is good enough to maybe try a page of An Arrow in the Moon.