My first month with the iPad Pro

For many years since the iPad first came out, I didn’t see how it could be a useful device for my workflow. I’ve always been a fan of single-purpose devices that do one job very well, and tablets seemed to fall into a middle ground, doing lots of things decently well, but not really any particular thing better than a laptop, smartphone, or eReader.

But a few months ago, I returned to an illustration side project I started several years ago. My process up to that point had been to find reference images on the Internet, print them out, trace them on a portable light table to get the proportions generally correct (I am not particularly good at freehand sketching), and then making my own alterations. Once I was happy with the design, I would then trace over my rough sketches to create the final illustration.

Illustrations done by hand, requiring a lot of starting over.

While this was a fun excuse to play around with Prismacolor markers, it became pretty tedious. Any time I made a mistake, I would have to start the illustration over from scratch. It also made me reliant on having a printer, and I sold my last printer before moving to NYC.

At the same time, I started getting involved in illustration work for my job at Glitch, and while…