Two weeks back I went full treat-yo’-self-mode and got a 12.9 inch iPad Pro, the keyboard cover to go with it, and an Apple Pencil. I’m not particularly creative – at least in the drawy-painty sense. I work in tech, but I don’t formally do design work. I don’t sketch wireframes or draw user journeys or personas. To me the Pencil (both with lower- and upper case “P”) is more for fun than for work.
Still, now that I have the thing I can put it to some good use in my CSS labs. In the labs I do things. Things that sometimes include image assets. Before, I would look around the web for a suitable image which hopefully was OK to use in an educational setting. But now, with some patience and trial-and-error, I can make my own!
Say hello to Stjernen, my pointy CSS shapes teaching assistant!
I drew Stjernen in Pixelmator. I won’t go into detail on how to start drawing in Pixelmator, but for reference I used the Manga brush to make Stjernen. The brush is listed in the Markers category.
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OK, fine. Stjernen wasn’t my first take at drawing…
There. Happy?
If you’re in the market for an iPad that supports the Apple Pencil I recommend picking one up. In the weeks I’ve had one I’ve used it for some kindergarden-level drawing, some precision edits of photos, and annotation of a PDF during review. If for nothing else, get one just for fun 👨🎨