New phone, Samsung Galaxy Note 3

My cell phone contract finally ended which means I can get a new phone.  I've been considering a new phone for a while now, so I knew what I wanted.  I've been wanting to do more drawing on the bus, but my current tablet just isn't up to the task.  Even with a good stylus there's no way to create nice lines.  Pencil and paper works, kind of.  The bus is rather bouncy and unstable which makes it hard to make nice lines.

This brought me to the Samsung Galaxy Note series of devices, they use a Wacom digitizer which promises much better precision.  Since it's digital drawing this means an undo button as well, which I so desperately need when drawing.

So for the new phone I went and got a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, and have been doodling on it for a while now.
It all actually works pretty well.  It's not very steady on the bus still, but since I can undo the big messes and try again its not a major concern.  It is compounded by the fact that I'm holding the phone in my hand, which also isn't rock steady.  Still though this amounts more to frustrating rather than crippling.  Obviously these can be quickly negated by using a better drawing area, which is almost anywhere that isn't moving.

A more difficult problem to overcome is the size of the screen.  At 5.7 inches diagonal it's pretty big for a phone.  It's still smaller than two post-it notes side by side, which makes for a pretty tight drawing are.  I've been using a Bamboo Splash for drawing, and the writing area isn't a whole lot bigger about a 7 inch diagonal.  It's still cramped though and confines you to using wrist movements instead of moving your entire arm.  I'm pretty sure this goes against best practices for artists in some way, but I'm stuck using the tools I have.

Thus far I've mainly stuck to doodles and quick sketches.  It's kind of like learning to draw again since it's a big change in the way I've been drawing so far.  It's more like drawing on paper than my Bamboo drawing tablet is, since your lines form under the pencil rather than some distance away on the screen.

As shown in these few examples my line art isn't wretched.  Its certainly not neat and clean either, but the same could be said of my pencil drawings too.  Once I get more comfortable drawing this way I'm sure the quality will improve.

The few attempts I've made at coloring drawings on the phone have gone poorly.  With colored pencils I seem to have enough control not to go outside the lines.  Working digitally I just can't do that, which never mattered before since I could set layer masks to keep me from being sloppy.  The app I'm using to draw in doesn't have those and I'm really missing them.

I should mention that the drawing app that came on the phone, SketchBook Mobile, wasn't very good; or at least I wasn't very happy with it.  It had a nice selection of brushes and could handle layers which was great, but it didn't let you rotate the picture.  You could rotate the phone around, but you couldn't ever get much room for horizontal lines since the screen isn't all that wide.  Mostly the frustration came from bumping buttons on the phone as I spun it around.  It could certainly work, but I found Infinite Painter which has all the same features of SketchBook plus lets me rotate the canvas.  Now I keep the phone static and spin the drawing, this makes sketching a lot more comfortable.

I suspect that my troubles with coloring will limit me to just doing line art on the phone, then bring the drawing over to Gimp to color it.  I had wanted to do this with my pencil drawings, but scanning them in just wasn't good enough.  I always had to start by tracing the drawing digitally, which was tedious and annoying.  Now that my line are is in crisp digital black and white it should be much easier to do that.  I haven't tried it yet, but it's something I really want to try.

Bottom line, its going pretty well.  I still need a bunch of practice to refine the process and this could really make it more convenient to do more drawing.