Holiday greetings and my first iPad painting

First of all, I would like to greet everyone. Merry Christmas! Santa gave me an Apple iPad! Sweet! And here's my first painting. I'm still learning the ropes. Painting on this kind of device takes a little getting used to. But I think it's only a matter of time before I figure out how to handle it.

I have a couple of painting apps installed on my iPad. One is Art Studio and the other is Brushes. Art Studio provides a lot of tools including a text editor and some filters. In a nutshell, it is very similar to Adobe Photoshop in terms of functionality. It even allows you to save and export layered PSD files. The only thing I didn't like about it is that it's not as intuitive as I expected it to be. The color picker tool in particular can get really tricky sometimes. I'd appreciate it if anyone could teach me the fastest way to switch between the picker and the brush. I also think that the memory management needs some improvement.

Brushes, on the other hand, seems to have a fewer set of tools compared to Art Studio. But it's a lot faster and it's a damn lot more intuitive! It even saves the entire painting process so you can review how you did your painting. For Mac users, I've heard there's a free app called Brushes Viewer that lets you save the video in Quicktime format so you can upload the process on YouTube. Unfortunately, I'm a Windows person so I'll be on the lookout for a Windows equivalent.

To tell you the truth, I am not a fan of Apple but I dare say that the iPad is worthy of my attention (and the contents of my piggy bank). It's as portable as a mobile device has to be, it has a decent-sized display, it responds quite quickly and you can come up with really neat ways of presenting your portfolio with it. And with apps like the two I mentioned, I can honestly say that you won't regret spending for this gadget.

*****

About the artwork: I painted the self-portrait on the iPad using the Brushes app. I didn't use any stylus and I think I'll be sticking to that method for quite a long while. It took me approximately 1 hour to do it from scratch. I began with a color fill and then some broad strokes to tone the paper after which, I blocked in the general shapes before refining the picture. That's how I would do it with traditional dry media. Robh Ruppel is right. The more you do art, the more you'd realize that it doesn't matter which app you use or which tool. It's really about the fundamentals of art. I'd love to include the video of the process here but I just don't have the means to transfer it to a Windows computer right now. I hope you like this post as much as I enjoy experimenting with the iPad! Cheers! :)