SKETCHING AND PAINTING
ON TABLETS AND PHONES
FACES . EXPRESSIONS . SYMBOLS . ICONS
DRAWING . TOUCHSCREEN PAINTING ON iPAD, iPHONE OR GALAXY NOTE
PALMS
I bought my first ever mobile tablet, alias PDA in April 2000. It was a Palm Vx and an object of adoration, even though it only ran in two colours. Not exactly black and white. More sludge green and grey.
It didn't last. The Vx was ousted by a Palm 111c the same year, offering sparkling colours on a bright white ground. The built in stylus made doodling easy, though results could be blocky on the 160 x 160 pixel screen. This face was doodled in the excellent Palm drawing and painting app Teal Paint.
Improvement arrived in 2002 with a Palm Tungsten T. Drawings sharpened up a bit on a 320 x 320 pixel canvas.
A small screen is good for drawing tiny images. This giraffe phone message picture was drawn in Palm Notepad on the Tungsten T. No add-on drawing app was needed. Note Pad is part of the Palm.
Palm Note Pad drawings regularly synchronised with the desktop. The desktop version of Note Pad allowed me to paste my drawings into a paint or photo editor, or even into Word or Excel. Here is a preliminary Note Pad sketch for the giraffe message picture above, as it was copied into Word.
Palm Note Pad drawings are bitmaps, which means they can't be edited with the drawing tools in Word. Mind you, this can be a good thing. This owl was drawn on a Pocket PC, which is run by a vector engine said to be compatible with Word. After synchronisation with the desktop, the bird ended up with an unexpectedly off-the-shoulder outfit.
My final Palm was a Treo 650 in 2004. Now my Palm included both a camera and a phone. A complete mobile pack in a pocket size and handy for sketching and all sorts of uses besides.
I discovered that snapping labels was easier than writing the words, especially in freezing weather. (This Royal Horticultural Society label seems to be describing a vulgar purple cable car, but if that's what the experts call it, who am I to argue.)
The Treo 650 camera phone did not yet have the pixel power to show both a readable label and the whole plant in one frame, but things were coming along.
SKETCHING AND PAINTING
ON TABLETS AND PHONES
SYMBOL DRAWING a skill you never lose
DIGITAL DRAWING AND PAINTING
GIF or JPEG . Draw or Paint . Keep enlarged pictures sharp
DIGITAL DOODLING THEN AND NOW
Palms . Pocket PC. First camera phone
(c) Valerie Beeby 1998 - 2012
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