All the septuagenarians in my art class will be fascinated by the method used to draw this, thus distracting them from the fact that it’s a lousy drawing! Thanks to Mom for continuing to pose with the phone long after my sister hung up.

Did I mention I bought the iPad Pro?! And the Pencil! I’ve had it for over a week, but after a busy Thanksgiving week in California I feel like I’ve barely put it through its paces.

Tonight I attended a figure drawing session and spent the entire 2 hours sketching in Procreate. For the final, 25-minute pose, I decided to turn off my pesky left brain and paint with colors that weren’t necessarily there. It’s something I should do more often; most of the rest of my sketches tonight looked pretty stiff by comparison. Here’s the condensed version:

So far I’m very happy with the way the iPad Pro and Pencil feel as drawing tools. When paired with an app as snappy as Procreate, the disconnect I sometimes feel when drawing digitally has been largely minimized. Downside: all the blame for clunky art now falls on the artist!

Just in case my niece and her friends can’t entertain themselves, I’ve been enlisted to draw some animals for a birthday party game.

Is it sad that I’ve gone into the Apple Store four times just to play with the iPad Pro and its heavily-backordered “Pencil” stylus? It’s frustrating that I can’t walk out the door with it. I mean, I could try, but I’d probably end up at the wrong end of an iTazer.

The demo models don’t even have the drawing apps I want to use (like Procreate), but I can already tell that this hunk of tech is the next-generation Wacom Cintiq I’ve always wanted. The huge advantage of the Cintiq is that you can hook it up to a desktop PC, or even get one that has a PC built-in. This allows you to use it with professional software like Photoshop and Illustrator.

But there are a few disadvantages: Even the sleekest Cintiq weighs over twice as much as the iPad (3.75 lbs vs. 1.57). The screen is objectively worse (you can–gasp–see the pixels!), and there’s a noticeable gap between the LCD and the surface of the glass. Somehow, Apple has minimized this gap on their Retina displays, and the upshot is that drawing on the iPad Pro feels a lot more like putting pencil to paper.

But surely, you think to yourself, Mark can’t be in the target market for a creative appliance christened “Pro”. After all, the fact he was paid $10 to draw a guy’s bulldog (not a euphemism) doesn’t make him a professional artist!

Well, you’re right, but I still think Apple truly had people like me in mind when designing this thing. Plus “iPad Pro” has a nicer ring to it than “iPad fer Dorks.”

Off to Southern California in a couple days to see my pal and his gal, who are much cuter in real life, get hitched.