Artist review - 40 days with the Wacom Cintiq Companion - Part 5: ArtRage

This review is of ArtRage on the Wacom Cintiq Companion - hopefully useful for artists considering just that combination.

Update: 03 Oct 2014: Please read together with the first comment below, from Ambient Design, the publishers of ArtRage - apparently most of the issues I picked up on are either fixed in the latest version of the software, or are features I didn't manage to find!

My test period with the Wacom Cintiq Companion tablet is close to ending and I haven't managed (of course) to do half the jobs I was hoping to do. I've had a quick play with all of the following software packages and will write some notes on them shortly:

Adobe Creative Cloud - Photoshop, Premiere & InDesign.
Microsoft Office 365.
XenoDream.
ZBrush 4R6
GroBoto.

My main object in trying out the tablet, though, and the one I did manage to fulfil pretty well, was to give a thorough workout to ArtRage. This is the package I've used most in the past, and the one I still intend to use most in the future. For those unfamiliar with it, it's a drawing and painting package for Windows, Mac and iPad which seeks to simulate traditional media, including oil paints, watercolours, pencil, pens, pastels, and more. The result is work which can be more or less indistinguishable from that done on paper or canvas, without the mess and the expense of chucking materials at projects which might not work out!  I love the feeling of being able to try out whatever I want without wasting paper - looking forward to trying it for lightning sketches when I drop in on the undergraduate life-drawing classes at college! I first used ArtRage on an an old PC with one of the first Wacom graphics tablets and then progressed a few years ago to an HP Tx2500 series tablet PC running Windows XP, which I later upgraded to the Windows 8 Beta release.  The combination worked very well, and I was able to do some interesting work, but there were some disadvantages. The old tablet PC touch interface was clunky and unresponsive, and the processing power wasn't up to using complicated brushes like watercolour washes without the marks lagging annoyingly behind the stylus.

The old tablet expired and the new generation of light and fast tablets came along, and I was eager to see how ArtRage would perform in a suitable purpose-built environment, hence when offered the chance to test-drive the Wacom Cintiq Companion for 40 days I grabbed it!

So here we go. It works. End of review. Well, no, not quite, but to me the point about graphics software (and specifically software/hardware combinations) is that it should just do what you want it to do straight out of the package/off the download. Admittedly, as you'll know if you read earlier reviews, I had to upgrade the Wacom to Windows 8.1 and reinstall the tablet driver to get things working well, but that was pre-ArtRage Installation. So I installed ArtRage on the tablet - no annoying licencing issues - once you've paid for it you can install it on all the PCs you own (and Macs?  - as far as I remember one licence covers all). One nice little feature is that you can copy the activation key into the clipboard and when you fire up the program for the first time it automatically pastes it into the right space for you.

Then the user interface appears - none of the problems I had with PhotoShop (the interface elements were way too small, and when I used the 'experimental features' menu to increase the size, they were way too large, as that feature is designed specifically for the Surface 3's higher resolution screen. Variable scaling, please, Adobe… but I digress). The ArtRage interface on the Cintiq Companion's 1920 x 1080 screen was just the right size to use with either finger or pen.

Move straight to drawing on the screen - well, I selected the pencil tool first - the default selection at first startup is blue oil paint … god knows why.  It works - press harder, line gets darker, ease off, line gets lighter. Just what you want. Turn the pen over and scribble with the other end, it's an eraser. Press harder, eraser gets bigger. All good. The tip is very responsive to pressure - I found I had to tweak the settings in the Wacom management utility to get the full range of light to dark. The individual range is going to vary from person to person - evidently I have quite a heavy hand, and I had to experiment a little with the settings to get it just right. One gripe with the pencil tool in ArtRage, though - the Wacom pen sends tilt information to the app, and I assumed this would be mapped to tilt in ArtRage, i.e. that the more I tilted the pen over, the wider the line would become. This doesn't happen - it doesn't use the tilt info. in the pencil tool. Why?? That would seem like a pretty obvious implementation to me. It's not that it doesn't work at all - using the airbrush tool the spray pattern becomes conical if you tilt the pen. All in all, though, the combination of the Wacom pen and ArtRage is excellent. I was able to pretty much forget that I wasn't working with a real pencil on paper and just get on with creating, which is, after all, the goal.

So here's a shot of me working on the first proper drawing I did with ArtRage on the Wacom Cintiq Companion. I already published the complete drawing *here*

Drawing in ArtRage on the Wacom Cintiq Companion

Moving on, what else makes for a good drawing experience? Well, the screen texture on the Wacom is slightly matt, rather than the high gloss found on most tablets, like the Microsoft Surface 3. Imagine drawing with a fibre-tip pen on a piece of the non-reflective glass used for picture framing to cut down glare and you'll get the idea. It means the pen is easier to control and not as liable to skid around. I found it a comfortable surface to draw on, but there are a couple of downsides. Firstly, the screen is not as bright, vibrant and sharp as on a typical tablet. This isn't an issue if you're creating using a pen and drawing using 'natural' media - who cares if a pencil stroke is bright and glossy? It is an issue, though, if you also want to watch movies on your tablet, or edit photos, or videos using Premiere as I do. It's an indication to me that the Cintiq Companion is great at exactly what it's designed for - drawing and painting in the digital domain, but not so good as a general laptop replacement. Secondly, the coating used on the screen is apparently not perfectly scratch resistant. Wacom recommend not using felt nibs in the Pro pen on the Companion, which might be a disadvantage for some graphics professionals. The reason, apparently, is that people who use those nibs tend to press harder, making screen damage more likely. I've never used them, so can't really comment.

The other really important factor for natural media drawing verisimilitude is lag. Is the CPU power of the tablet good enough to render complex brush patterns in real time so your line doesn't lag behind the stylus?  The Cintiq Companion uses a Core i7 processor clocked at 2.7GHz, so the answer should be yes - and it is. The most complex rendering that ArtRage has to do is making convincing watercolour strokes, blending with the colour already on the 'paper' in real time, and I had no problem with this. Here's a drawing I did where the shading on the eyes was first roughed out using a watercolour brush, and it was just like painting on watercolour paper:

"Up Like Wildflowers" : Digital drawing - ArtRage on Wacom Cintiq Companion
Copyright © 2014 by Martin Herbert

One important tip though (thanks to Wacom digital hero type dude David Oduro for this!):  The Windows power management scheme you use is important. When running on battery I would use the 'balanced' or 'power saver' profiles in Windows. In this case you would definitely get very noticeable lag between mark-making on the screen and mark actually appearing. This is because under these power schemes the CPU speed is down-clocked to around 0.9GHz.  For a lag-free drawing experience on the Wacom Cintiq Companion - set the power scheme to 'High Performance'!  CPU speed goes right up and everything is much smoother. Another tip was to go into the BIOS settings and increase the GPU memory window size to 512MB - this will also speed up graphics performance.

The way I work in ArtRage is to set myself up a pallette of colours corresponding to the media I use in real life - sepia, terracotta and graphite pencils and Chinese White chalk and gouache for highlights. Here's a last drawing, using my 'default' toolset:

"A Leg to Stand On (Universal Credit II) : Digital drawing - ArtRage on Wacom Cintiq Companion
Copyright © 2014 by Martin Herbert

... which leads me to another tip. ArtRage has layers just like Photoshop - use them! The chalk tool in ArtRage, even setting the pressure to zero and using as little pressure on the pen as possible, is too heavy for my liking. I got around it by shading and blurring my highlights on a separate layer with opacity set to 50% or so, then merging down layers when I was happy with the results. Reducing the layer opacity gives you the capability to make much more subtle adjustments. (Obviously this doesn't work if you want the colour to blend with media already on the 'canvas'). It's when using layers that another advantage of the Companion becomes apparent - 8GB of RAM means no appreciable slowing down when using layers. I worked on all the drawings seen here at full size (30 x 40 cm) with a resolution of 240dpi, scaling up to 300dpi later for eventual printing, so makes them 2880 x 3840 pixels when working. I was able to use at least half a dozen layers at this size without issue. One slight quirk with ArtRage when working on a canvas this size though - the maximum diameter of the brush tools is quite small - they're designed for a smaller working area really, so if you want to do something expressive with oil or watercolour brushes, I would work small to start with broad strokes, then rescale the canvas to add details later. It's annoying, but the technology still isn't up to A3 paintings in natural rendered media at Retina display resolution with no visible lag. It will be, I'm sure, but give it 2 or 3 years, I expect.

Small complaint - it's necessary to zoom in and out and rotate the canvas quite a lot when working with large files, and the intuitive pinch to zoom and two fingers to rotate methods didn't work well (I was able to get pinch to zoom working by tweaking some settings, but rotate could only be done via the ArtRage canvas tool). This something that Ambient Design, the publishers of ArtRage, could usefully work on. Oh, and … feature request, ArtRage guys - I'd really like it if I could draw with the pencil or chalk tool using the pen, and then blur/smudge using my finger without changing tools - shouldn't be a problem, right? Just detect the change from pen to touch and change the tool mapping accordingly. In the next version, please. (Oh and by the way, I should say all this was done with ArtRage 3.5, so maybe all these issues are addressed in version 4! I'm just a poor artist and can't afford to upgrade right now).

So there we are - if your question was 'how well does ArtRage work on the Wacom Cintiq Companion?' then hopefully that goes some way towards answering the question. I think the Cintiq Companion is probably the best possible platform for ArtRage's natural drawing media, and I guess the same probably goes for other painting packages. I haven't had time try them though, so can't vouch for the experience (Wacom pointed me towards a trial of Corel Painter but I just don't have the time). It seems to me like ArtRage is the best package for painting digitally, and it's amazingly cheap for everything it can do (and this review is just looking at a very few features).  The Cintiq is the perfect Companion for it (cheeeezy!!).

Artist review - 40 days with the Wacom Cintiq Companion - Part 1

Those who are attentive and have an interest in things technological for artists will remember that some time ago, I published this blog post, a comparative review of Windows 8 tablets that I thought might be  suitable for use by artists who want a pressure-sensitive pen solution for digital drawing and painting. Digital drawing is something which had become a bit of a mainstay of my practice, and which I've been a bit lost without since my old HP Tx2500 tablet PC died a couple of years ago.

Wacom Cintiq Companion

The object of the exercise was to decide which PC to specify in a large project grant application I was preparing for the Arts Council of Wales at the time. The clear winner in terms of functionality was the Wacom Cintiq Companion, which was about to come onto the market at the time. Sadly I didn't get the grant, and the project continues in a much reduced form. I resigned myself to carrying on using a standard non-pressure-sensitive Android tablet for the moment, and possibly getting a much cheaper Windows model like the Samsung Ativ Tab 3 later on…

Moving on a few months, and I happen to notice in passing a competition being run by Digital Arts Magazine.  The winners get a Cintiq Companion tablet (!), and the runners-up get a review unit free for 40 days in return for supplying feedback on its useability for art, with a big discount off the full price if they decide to keep it at the end of the review period. All that is required is my contact details and a link to my portfolio, so I spend 30 seconds filling them in, just entering a link to my website as the portfolio address, move on, and forget all about it. Obviously they are looking for illustrators and graphic designers to assess the product, and aren't going to be interested in a fine-artist specialising in oils and egg-tempera. Some weeks later I get an email from Digital Arts. Sorry, I wasn't one of the lucky few who won a Cintiq outright, but I AM one of the 50 who get a review unit for 40 days - yay!

So - I get my new tablet after all, for 6 weeks, with the option to purchase at a reduced price if I can raise the money in time (on top of getting together the cash for my MA course fees!).  I've just received notice that my new toy has left the manufacturers in Germany and should be here soon, and will be putting it through its paces for the next 40 days, writing about my experiences as I go. It's a timely happening, since apart from fine-art work, I have a book cover commission to do, and 2 website designs to thrash out over the next few weeks. I hope the blog posts will be useful to others who're considering what is, after all, a very expensive purchase for an independent artist (the full price is currently £1,599, so it's got to be worth about three iPads for that!).

So … here goes - a number of blog posts to come about how I get on. If you're an artist who's interested in how the Wacom Cintiq Companion performs in a day-to-day arts practice, please follow the blog (see top right for links). I promise one thing though - no crappy unboxing video!

… oh, and, expect me to try to sell you some art to pay for this thing if it turns out to be as useful as I hope!

Zen and the art of tempera medium

Magic potion ingredients

Why is adding a layer of egg-tempera medium over the under-painting not only a practical, but also a philosophical and spiritual experience?

... because, having taken to doing my underpaintings using Chroma Atelier interactive acrylic, to avoid the extended drying times of oil glazes in this benighted climate, (I have waxed unlyrical before about the fact that an oil glaze that took a couple of hours to dry when I was living under the Spanish sun now takes a couple of weeks in a more liberally humid mid-Wales), it is necessary to prepare the surface in a suitable way to get the final painting in oils to actually stick, without it embarrassingly parting company with the canvas at a sensitive stage of my career.

Egg-tempera medium is an emulsion, which is to say it contains both oil and water bound together precariously in a more or less stable mixture by the addition of a binder - in this case a beaten egg. I quickly brush on a quick even layer over the completed acrylic underpainting, to which it sticks nicely on account of being water based, and when it's dry it makes the perfect base on which to begin painting in oils, to which it sticks nicely on account of the varnish component, which contains resin and turpentine.

A practical measure then, for convenience's sake, but also a gateway from one realm to another. It marks a transition from the modern technological water-based world of working with acrylics to a realm of working deeply rooted in ancient traditions - the alchemical  discipline of oils and tempera.  I leave behind the modern and embrace the world of Leonardo and Michaelangelo.

Not only a gateway, but a transformational passage - the early stages of the painting are a technical and mechanical process, optically mixing glazes of primary colours masked by opaque white, carefully blalncing the textures of the different layers to create a 'monochrome' ground which is made, on closer inspection, of carefully controlled rainbow colours. At this stage I can still see distinctly and separately every constituent part of the process up to that point, like a complex technical drawing.  When the tempera medium is applied, however, it is a unifying force, binding all that has gone before into a single surface, a blank canvas that is no longer blank, ready for alchemical transformation.

From this point, anything can happen.

Recipe for egg-tempera medium (adapted from a recipe given by Ernst Fuchs):

1 egg

Dammar varnish (I use Kremer Pigmente no. 79300)

Refined linseed oil

De-ionised water

1. Break the egg into a ramekin and with the tines of a fork, remove the amniotic sac from around the yolk.
2. Put the egg into a small jar, screw on the lid and shake until the yolk and white are completely mixed.
3. Add an equal quantity of dammar varnish and a few drops of linseed oil.
4. Seal and mix again.
5. Double the volume with distilled/deionised water.
6. Mix for a last time.

The sealed jar will keep for up to 2 months in the regfrigerator. A slight smell of rotten eggs is nothing to worry about as the turpentine acts as a preservative. Discard if it gets too bad or if it curdles to the point where it can't be remixed to a smooth emulsion by vigorously shaking to jar.

Last day of trading ...

"What Snake Saw in the Smoke" : Digital Painting : Copyright © 2013 by Martin Herbert
On sale at etsy.com!

So... end of an era!  Today is my last day of trading under the name "Spirit Visions". For reasons previously noted (here), I'm abandoning all the branding and concentrating on making fine-art under my own name. From now on I'm leaving the selling and making money to the people who are best qualified to do it - i.e. the dealers and gallerists. There is something considerably liberating in freeing myself from the self-induced pressure to be marketing manager, advertiser and salesman as well artist. Hopefully that means a lot more time and energy to make a lot more art! To that end there will soon be a new website at martinherbert.com, and to keep in touch you can follow this blog (see "Follow by email..." at top right) and subscribe to the newsletter (click here).

(Of course there remains the small matter of finding one or more dealers who are actually prepared to represent me, but, hey ... details. Actually, of course, I wouldn't be making this move if I didn't have some encouragement in that direction!).

Anyway... today is the last day and I should, for the last time, point out that all fine-art prints, posters and greetings cards in my shop at etsy.com are on sale for the last time today at HALF PRICE.  Enter the discount coupon code CLOSING50 during checkout for 50% off your whole order. Click here to go to the shop.

There ... that's the last time I will need to make any crass commercial announcements through social media! Time to celebrate!

All the best,
Martin

Painting - first stage done. Work in progress.

"Everything in the Garden was Beautiful" (work in progress) : 24" x 24" : Acrylic on canvas : Copyright © 2013 by Martin Herbert

The first stage of painting complete. I sealed the surface of the drawing with a couple of coats of matt acrylic medium. (This was the point at which I didn't really know that the whole thing was going to work - it could have just dissolved the whole surface and I would have lost 2 weeks work!). Then I covered the whole thing with 2 successive transparent yellow glazes, one in lemon yellow and one in deep cadmium with a bit of mixing white. I blotted off some colour at each stage with a rag to get in a bit of texture and depth. Once that was all dry I washed a very thin veil of titanium white over everything. That makes the next stage highlights easier to feather and blend.

After preparing the surface as above I worked on reinforcing all the highlighted areas in titanium white, improving the '3D' modelling of the shapes and adding specular highlights. This process gets continued in the next stage, but hopefully I'm beginning to get a bit of depth appearing. At this stage the colour ranges from white through various shades of yellow and orange to the dark red / terracotta background which is still evident in some areas. That last is important - I don't want the red to get completely obscured since it's going to make an interesting violet (I hope!) when combined with the blue glaze that goes on next ...

Oh, and I added a few more flowers for luck.

All the way through here I'm using ordinary Windsor & Newton Finity & Galleria acrylics, mixed with Daler-Rowney System 3 glaze medium for the transparent colour glazes. I'll be getting on to the fancy new Atelier Interactive acrylics in the latter stages.

Today I'm concentrating on getting the next colour glazes onto the surface - that's where the magic happens, I hope! While coats are drying I'm off to the builder's merchant to pick up wood for the custom frame...

Last minute preparations ... phew !!

The last drawing for the exhibition in Llandrindod Wells rolled off the drawing board this morning and into a frame ready for hanging ...

"Crocodiles, Hens, Beetles, Armadillos & Fish (do not evince any remarkable partiality for man)" : 90cm x 70 cm :
Ink, pencil, gouache & transfer print on Khadi handmade paper : Copyright © 2012 by Martin Herbert

Last few prints just wrapped and ready for delivery.  The curator at the Radnorshire Museum, Will Adams, has been busy hanging things for the last 2 days, and (fingers crossed), everything is ready for tomorrow night's opening ... after which I will be taking a very well deserved week off before starting up the new business! (Of which more later, etc. etc. etc..... :-)

So remember - private view of the Project Synthesis exhibition at the Radnorshire Museum, Temple Street, Llandrindod Wells, Wales, LD1 5DL at 6:30PM tomorrow, Thursday 1st November!  Fourteen new large-scale works on paper, plus some of the older work which formed the original starting point for the project, and a video installation ....  All work is for sale.

If you can't make the opening, the exhibition continues until Sat. 12th Jan.  For a map and opening hours, especially over the holiday period, please check out the Radnorshire Museum website.

More information about the project, and link to a preview of the video, here:
http://artedstates.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/project-synthesis-exhibition-starts.html

"The Heart is the Fountain of Wisdom" : 90 cm x 70 cm : Ink, pencil, gouache & transfer print on handmade Khadi paper.
Copyright © 2012 by Martin Herbert

With the assistance of the Arts Council for Wales, and all these lovely people:

Great Britons: No news is ....

Well, another quick update - can't say much, but apparently The Committee [TM] will be continuing their deliberations for a few more days .....
How am I going to be painting their aeroplane with my fingernails bitten to the elbow, huh?  Meanwhile - trying to get some work done on the new project (which is really really top secret until I can get it together to write abut it).

Painting sold

Sold a little painting at the 'Retrospectives' show in Newtown (which is still running, by the way, as is the 'Dragons' show at the Great Oak Cafe in Llanidloes...
This little 'Buddha' went straight away...  (it's actually of a Cambodian king, from Angkor Wat).

"Serenity" : Oils & tempera on canvas : 5" x 5" : Copyright © 2009 by Martin Herbert

Not sure how to get decent pictures of oils like this without the reflections on the canvas ... I'm going to try photographing it again before the exhibition finishes, as people have expressed an interest in prints.  I'm likely to be painting some Buddha paintings of similar size in the near future, if anyone is interested....