| Cult of Mac

Expand your creativity with this big new drawing display

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Now that's a canvas fit for an artist.
Now that's a canvas fit for an artist.
Photo: Xencelabs

We’ve all heard of tablets you can draw on — looking at you, iPad lineup — but how about a 24-inch drawing display?

Xencelabs Technologies unveiled its new Pen Display 24 Studio Series at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, which ends Friday.

If you’re serious about your art, it could be for you.

Turn iPad into professional drawing tablet with Astropad Studio for PC

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Turn iPad into professional drawing tablet with Astropad Studio for PC
Artists, grab your iPad and Windows laptop. Astropad Studio for PC is here.
Photo: Astropad

Astropad released the first Windows version of Astropad Studio, software that turns an iPad into a drawing tablet wirelessly communicating with a laptop or desktop. With it, artists can mirror their favorite professional drawing or painting apps on the tablet, including using an Apple Pencil with Windows software.

The software has been in beta testing for a year.

Let Apple teach you to draw yourself as a Peanuts character

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Let Apple teach you to draw yourself as a Peanuts character
Kids of all ages can enjoy learning to draw themselves as a Peanuts character.
Screenshot: Apple

Free training sessions at Apple Stores ended with the pandemic, but have now moved to YouTube. The first of these online Today at Apple sessions shows how to draw yourself as a Peanuts character.

It’s not complicated — Peanuts characters are relatively simple shapes. Even so, there’s plenty of room for customization. Plus, all the software is free and not even a stylus is required.

Master techniques to draw attention-grabbing comics

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This bundle will help you grow your artistic foundation
With these courses in comic book drawing, even beginners can whip up amazing art.
Photo: Cult of Mac Deals

Want to take your art and design skills in an unexpected direction? You can learn to create characters of all sorts with The Learn to Draw Comic Book Characters Bundle.

Whether you already love to draw, or always wished you could, these courses will show you traditional and creative ways to render your vision. With lifetime access to the coursework, you can learn at your own pace. But you’d better jump on this deal right now if you want to take advantage of a massive 97% price cut on the four-course bundle.

How to draw a portrait with Apple Pencil

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Are you drawn to draw with your new Apple Pencil 2?
Are you drawn to draw with your new Apple Pencil 2?
Photo: Graham Bower/Cult of Mac

Got a new Apple Pencil? Once the initial novelty wears off, you might find that it spends most of its time magnetically clipped to the side of your iPad Pro or, worse, stuck in the back of a drawer. After all, there are only so many PDFs to annotate and screenshots to mark up.

Which is a great shame, because what your Apple Pencil really wants to do is create art. You only appreciate the true joy of owning one when you draw with it. So, why not follow this handy how-to guide and start sketching lifelike portraits of friends and family? It’s a really fun hobby.

As Kate Winslet once said in Titantic, “Draw me like one of your French girls.”

General-purpose computers are terrible for creativity [Opinion]

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Computers are great for lots of things, but not everything.
Computers are great for lots of things, but not everything.
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Computers — the iPad, the Mac and anything else where a screen is the main form of interaction — are creativity killers. They distract, frustrate and get in the way of the flow that is essential to any creative work.

That’s not to say they don’t play an important part in art, music, photography or writing. It’s just that a lot of the time, there are much better tools for the job — and they’re getting more popular all the time.

How to learn to draw with the iPad Pro

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The new Apple Pencil is much nicer than the old one.
Drawing skills let you create in any medium.
Photo: Andrea Nepori

Today’s how-to is a little different. I won’t be recommending special apps for learning how to draw, or even AR apps that help you trace pictures onto real paper. Instead, I’m going to give you a few tips that will help you draw what you see in front of you, whether you’re using a pencil and paper, brush and canvas, or iPad Pro and Apple Pencil.

But first, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you already know how to draw — you just need to learn how to look. The bad news is that the only way to improve is to practice. A lot. There’s no shortcut. You just have to do a lot of drawing.

New line of free Apple seminars will make your brain bulge

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Today at Apple
Apples Stores will sell you the iPads and Apple Pencils. "Today at Apple" will show how to use them.
Photo: Apple

More than 60 new sessions to teach Apple users how to get the most creatively from their apps and devices will be added to the “Today at Apple” program, the company announced in New York today.

Held at Apple Stores around the world, the sessions offer primers on essential hardware and software in the Apple ecosystem. Each workshop is headed by local creative professionals teaching coding, digital drawing, photography, video and making music.

Adobe’s Project Gemini enhances iPad drawing and painting

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Project Gemini
Project Gemini aims to perfect the mobile drawing and painting experience.
Photo: Adobe

Adobe is developing new drawing and painting software for illustrators with a next-generation program called Project Gemini.

The announcement came with a pun – “we went back to the drawing board” – but artists likely received the words with relief as opposed to an eye roll.

Pro Tip: Instant Markup gets way better in iOS 12

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This is how it feels to use iOS 12's new Markup tools
This is how it feels to use iOS 12's new Markup tools
Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

Pro Tip Cult of Mac bug iOS 12 doesn’t really have any huge new standout features. It’s more a collection of really solid improvements to iOS 11. It sounds odd to say that my favorite new feature is Do Not Disturb during Bedtime, but it’s made a big difference in how I use my iPhone.

Likewise with today’s Pro Tip. iOS markup for screenshots, PDFs and Photos was already good, but new options for the pen tools make it great.