One of the first downloads after getting my tablet was ArtRage. It was (and is) free of charge and seemed too good to be true. Not to mention that there aren’t that many tablet specific pieces of software around. Could ArtRage really let you (apparently) smear around paint or smudge pastels on rough paper–while creating a digital image on a tablet? Well to my untrained eye it certainly seems like that. Keep in mind, I couldn’t save my life drawing a stickfigure.

ArtRage has a very user-friendly layout. After installing and opening the programme anyone can start dabbling without having to scurry off to the help section. On the left of the programme is the palette with the various media (crayon, watercolour, pencil etc). You can also control the thickness and its pressure.
 

For a while I was doodling a lot! I pretended to go through a variety of periods: the blue, the red and the green. What great artists took decades I accomplished in a month! Amazing fun software.

My red period

My blue and green period

My blue (and yellow) period

Art Rage Tracing Paper feature

The Wellcome Trust very kindly had me along for their Summer School in Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society last week.

These pictures are from the balcony of my room at the new residences at St. Anne’s College.  

Fellow participants from England and Brazil scribbled down "TC 1100" on scraps of paper to take home after a particularly intense few hours of collaborative PowerPoint creation on the tablet.

What is it that’s so great about a tablet pc? What shifts the response from the "cool!" factor to need and finally to devotion? A few of our favourite things:

• Lying in bed reading the NYRB and NYT on the tablet (ooops, minus the NYT Select)
• Choice, choice, choice
• All these years I never knew I was a visual/spatial thinker forced to live in a linear tree-structured computer world
• Easily bringing the tablet to and from work without feeling that you carry a brick slab around (3 lbs w/o keyboard)
• Handing the tablet to someone else to read or write something
• Taking handwritten notes reduces the need for carrying around and organizing scraps of paper
• Access to email and web anywhere there is a friendly router 
• Having the computer at hand in a meeting — but not as a wall between me and others

Some of these features can only be realized most fully with a hybrid, and with our fave hybrid: the HP TC 1100. The ability to leave the keyboard behind makes it super-portable, and the beautiful quality of the screen brings the true end to the paper era finally in sight. What will happen to the hybrid model with the premature death of the TC1100? We shall investigate. After the mourning period.