What do you use for drawing? (Graphics tablets?)

Recently I've been trying to find ways to draw which don't keep my bound to my desktop, or a flat surface with a laptop. I found a cheap and interesting solution that I didn't know existed! _{because I'm an idiot.}

I wanted to be able to draw... wherever, really. But most particularly places like the lounge, for a bit of afternoon doodles, or the bedroom for some late-night scribbling.

Taking the lounge as an example, I wanted to be able to laze about on the sofa but still draw. Up until recently I've done this using one of these newfangled Retina Macbook Pro's and a cheap Wacom tablet. Needless to say this isn't brilliant - you can't juggle a laptop and a graphics tablet on your lap - it gets uncomfortable quickly. You could put the laptop on some sort of coffee table, or even a laptop stand and keep the tablet in your lap, but then you're still leaning forwards to see (or trying to fit laptop & tablet into the same space again).

I felt like I needed something else. It was simple math really; surely better equipment = more productivity...

So what did that equation mean for me? Interestingly, it added up to a cheap, old Lenovo X60T tablet-laptop, uh, thing. Thanks, eBay!

It seemed unlikely. I'd been drooling over the latest crop of Windows tablets as I'd heard they integrated Wacom digitisers (making them perfect for accurate, pressure-sensitive scribbling). In doing so, I'd forgotten that Wacom have been supplying their technology to portable machines for years. And these machines are very affordable now.

You can blag these laptops for very little on eBay (expect to pay between £60-200) and as far as I can tell, they work great. I can flip the screen round (into 'tablet mode'), pop out the stylus, and scribble away like it's some kind of digital notepad. But when I need keyboard access, I can flip it back round and keep working with stylus and keys. And I don't need a desk, keyboard and Cintiq display to do it! Nor have I spent a fortune on a shiny new tablet (fun as that may be).

Is it a perfect solution? Well, probably not. It has less pressure levels (256, I think), probably not brilliant colour accuracy, and though the performance is actually not bad, the version I found sports a 32bit processor, which isn't ideal. But I can sit really comfortably nearly anywhere, and do most basic work now, and switch back to bigger machines for any really heavy stuff. These below three Deviations were all created on this little machine:









Does the trick! So what do you use? Pen & Paper? Mouse? A graphics tablet? Cintiq/similar draw-on-screen technology? A Microsoft Surface Pro? Or perhaps you use or are considering using a laptop convertible with an inbuilt digitiser too?