Adobe Ink & Slide on sale.

Well they have been showing vids on these two tools for ages but now you can buy it for $200 US only. Can't remember what their development names were but it was Napoleon and something else but it always looked promising. Had a look at the videos and it still looks good but $200 it's a lot for a portable sketching aid to use with an iPad. have a look here: http://helpx.adobe.com/ink-and-slide.html

I like the idea of using a tablet as nearly waterproof paper where you could sketched where you were then take it back home where you could carry on using the tablet or import it into to PS or AI. Now there were a few problems with this continual zoomimg was one, the heal of you hand/underside of pinky touching the screen an other, to use a finger or pen, the one that I thought was the most important.

Take the pen/finger problem as I could never get the line to draw where I wanted it when I used my finger and the pens on offer were as bad as the majority of the had huge nib points. The only two that got near solving the problem was Wacom Bamboo (small stylus tip) and the best was Adonit Jot Pro. The Jot Pro had a transparent disc as its tip and you could see the results as you drew and it was pressure sensitive, as well, but the disc sort of skittered over the surface unevenly so quite hard to control.

With all these problems I gave up using the iPad to draw landscapes and went back to paper which I thought a sin but as I live in the West of Scotland which is wet I am now back to only sketching in dry days. Would still like to paint and colour digitally using PS as the software of choice so I am still looking but will have to wait till Ink & Slide come to the UK. The good thing about Adobe that they do spend money on promotions and I should have the choice in August to try it for 1/2 day. I really think that this is a piece of hardware that I can use!

Albacore, watched all the videos, looks very interesting. Unfortunately I cannon afford it. Does have some interesting tools, such as the perspective, and, circle tool, and the way they work is interesting I think many raster art apps could benefit from those. However I am a Xara man through and through and our tools work extremely will. I have to admit though that I have been working on a project that looks like it will require something like Blender, I just have to figure out how to do it. All I will say about it is it will have an animated ocean, and blender has the tools necessary for this project.

Larry all of these lines are vector not raster and can be imported to AI & PS but Adobe has made these apps and hardware for Ios. If I thought I could use a vector programme to paint digitally I would use it, it would be OK for buildings and the like, but still later you would want to get it back into a raster programme to get it dirty. Using transparencies are OK but they can't get the same effect as you get in PS.

Hi Albacore... I'm retired now, that price is a bit too much for me these days. But having fun just drawing on 5" x 8" file cards, with a pencil and ballpoint pen anywhere i go, and then using the iPad camera to photograph the drawing and e-mail it or put it in Dropbox. Otherwise, can sketch right on the iPad screen with inexpensive apps like Luminance ... and one called Inkpad, that allows export as an .SVG file. But I like drawing on paper so much more than drawing on the screen...

they do look interesting, but like the others too expensive for me, and as I have an Android tablet not an Ipad I'm out of luck anyway. I will just keep dreaming of a Xara vector app for Android :)

I have found Jon for me that taking a picture flattens the textures and colours and like you it is the spontaneity of drawing I like which gives me pleasure. I tried Inkpad which was OK but I prefer Sketchbook Pro and Adobe Ideas, maybe Paper by 53 as well, these are the ones installed on my iPad. I still don't like using my finger as a drawing tool give me a pencil shaped thing and I am happy. Frances SketchBook Pro and Express are available for the Android tablet, the Pro ver. cost in UK £3.41 and the Express ver. is free. You get a 30 day trial for free and just over $6 can. seems not a large price to pay for a paint/vector programme.