Sketching on a Phone. Painting on a Tablet.

Touch screen painting
on tablets and phones
is nothing new

Drawing and painting directly on a hand held screen, however small, is a good deal easier than doodling indirectly on a desktop graphics tablet. Wacom and other desktop tablets are set at the side of your computer, so they never allow you actually to draw on your drawing up there on the screen.

As to doodling with a mouse, forget it!

Only a few years ago, even the crudest digital sketching on a phone or any kind of mobile screen was barely possible. Back in the mists of time, well, in 2003, I did manage to build a little owl by wiggling the tiny joystick on a Sony Ericsson T610 phone. Phew! Never again!

In the days of the Palm PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) using a stylus made drawing on a pocketable screen a lot easier. The resulting digital drawings were tiny. The coarse resolution of devices like my Palm Treo made drawings jagged and blocky. All the same, mobile digital painting was making a start.

Quite a number of add-on art editors appeared for Palms. Teal Paint was one of the best and earliest Palm painting apps.

Pocket PCs offered a more versatile range of add-on art apps. Pocket Artist and the older Idruna Photogenics at one time seemed almost mini-Photoshops in themselves! Painting on a mobile tablet was really becoming possible, even if still at very low resolution.

I called this abstract picture 'Golden Eggs', added the frame in Photoshop and sent it as a Christmas card. It was a made on a Pocket PC with various effects in Idruna Photogenics.

When you drew in Pocket PC Notes, which came with the machine, you were doing vector drawing, which allowed for handwriting recognition as well as artistic creations.

You could have fun making faces on a Pocket PC using vector drawing shapes.

Today at the time of writing - or rather, bringing things here up to date - touch screen smartphones and tablets like the iPad allow you to draw, sketch, doodle and paint with your fingers.

Finger painting does feel strange at first, but soon gets easier. Hankering after a stylus, I bought five and never used one. Touch screen styli have soft squashy tips, and the screen is more responsive to a finger.

A finger painting tip is to resist the temptation to set an offset distance, which places the point of your brush in front of your finger, making it visible. A bit of practice will train your finger to hit the spot on its own with increasing accuracy. Different offsets in different apps can upset this training process. The iPad/iPhone app Art Studio has a few lessons which are a great help in learning to draw and paint this way.

PS My new HTC Flyer tablet does have a rigid pointed stylus. It's more like a pen or the old sharp styli for the resistive screens of Pocket PCs and Palms. The Flyer stylus only allows you to draw with its own very limited drawing tools, but feels more accurate to use than the squashy styli for capacitive screens.

SKETCHING ON A PHONE
PAINTING ON A TABLET

Touch screen painting
on tablets and phones
is nothing new

Sketching on a phone. Painting on a tablet.

SKETCHING ON A PHONE PAINTING ON A TABLET

Touch screen painting on tablets and phones is nothing new

Sketching on a phone. Painting on a tablet.

SKETCHING ON A PHONE
PAINTING ON A TABLET

Touch screen painting
on tablets and phones
is nothing new