Comic #111 : "The Night Traffic Grovel, Part 11: Address"

Having drawn all of the comic to date on my Galaxy Note 2 (which is an excellent piece of hardware) this is the first comic to date to feature art drawn on another device.

The background of the large central frame was drawn on my iPad 2, using the excellent Procreate app. Of course, the iPad lacks a stylus, so I fashioned myself one from an old biro, some aluminium foil and some sellotape. Despite looking rather botched, it works really well, and is as nice to draw with on my iPad screen as the S-pen is on my Note 2 (although it obviously lacks the precision due to the large tip, and has no pressure sensitivity).

The reason for using it is the limitations Sketchbook Mobile has on the Galaxy Note 2. This comic required a frame that was 2320x2080 pixels in size, and Sketchbook Mobile only allows you to draw at the screen resolution of the device - which, quite frankly, is nuts. In the past, when I have had large frames, I have simply drawn the elements separately and then assembled them together on my PC. This time though, the angle I wanted for the frame meant that would have been very laborious and would not have looked as good. While I still drew the components (the characters and the car) in Sketchbook, the rest of the scene (the buildings and sky) were drawn in Procreate.

Despite the iPad 2 being significantly inferior hardware to the Note 2, both in terms of processing power, memory and the capacitive stylus versus an active digitizer, Procreate was a joy to use and it is a shame that there is not an app on Android that comes close to it.

It did crash a lot - although given the fact I am using the iPad 2 with an aging CPU and less memory to the fancy newer ones I'm not really surprised - and given that when I reloaded my work after the crash, hardly any of my progress had been lost, it was not really that much of a problem.

My only criticism of Procreate is the lack of a floodfill. While I have seen comments from many Procreate users who talk about floodfill with derision, saying things like "It's not Microsoft paint, it's a serious art app" - a flood fill would save a lot of time and work drawing in a cartoon style. At present I have to shade in a large area with a brush. If I use a big brush I get huge overspill past the edges which I then have to erase. If I use a small brush to do the bits near the edges it takes ages. It takes about 3 minutes what flood fill would do in less than a second.

Fair enough, those who consider themselves 'serious artists' might not want to use it. But if it was added no one would be forcing them to use it, but it would increase the functionality of the app no end.

I also drew my hidden frame in Procreate, which you can see here me drawing here: