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Midlife crisis. Am I having one? Maybe! No, I’m not planning to buy a few pairs of jorts and a shiny new corvette. But I am turning 50 in a few years and for whatever reason have really been inspired to get better at things I have always loved, but put aside. One of those things is drawing.

A few months ago, my middle son said he was interested in animation. He’s made some pretty cool animations on his iPad using an app called Looom. I bought him a sketchbook and told him to try drawing something every day for 30 days. At the same time I thought I should probably do the same thing, but work on a specific weakness. I’ve always had trouble drawing the human body. And not surprising as I never put in the time to study and practice figure drawing. I have many books on figure drawing, but studying and drawing from them is like working out. Who wants to do that? Well I decided to use this moment to work on my weakness. I started taking a sketchbook and one of my figure/pose books every day with me to sketch while I waited in line to pick up one of my kids from school.

Copying other drawings is never fun for me, but I really wanted to see what the results would be if I copied every drawing in the book from start to finish. So I started doing just that. It was often painfully boring. And when something did look good, I felt no joy in it as I was just copying what I saw. While I didn’t enjoy these exercises specifically, I did start feeling like I really wanted to become a better artist.

Side Quest

While this was going on, I started to see e-ink tablets show up on social media, YouTube, and elsewhere on the web (note to self: suppress the conspiracy theory thoughts!). I was going on a short weekend trip in a few days and thought it would be interesting to buy an e-ink tablet to use for a few days and just return it if I didn’t love it. So I did my research and ended up trying to decide between the reMarkable Paper Pro (large size) and their Move (small size). It was a very tough choice, but I wanted something I could take almost everywhere and smaller made more sense. So the Move it was. I already have an iPad and Apple Pencil setup and don’t want to take that everywhere with me so I probably wouldn’t take the larger Paper Pro. Besides, if I wanted to draw on a bigger canvas, I could just use my iPad.

I did have my reservations with e-ink. Being such a stickler for 120+ hz refresh rates on screens, all the flashing (refreshes) on e-ink screens just turned me off. It was all the qualities of feeling like paper, battery life, and narrow focus (no apps to distract) that interested me.

My initial experience with the tablet was interesting. All of the screen refreshing was jarring at first, but I got used to it quicker than I had imagined. Seeing my drawing on a matte screen with no backlight just looked natural. Response time while drawing was totally fine. As I got used to the drawing tools, my drawings started to look better and I was really falling love with using the Move. I love the way my sketches look on screen. I love the limited color palette as I don’t have to think so much about what colors I want to use. It’s just been an amazing experience overall.

There are things I don’t like about it though. The battery life is a lot shorter than expected. Each drawing I complete uses about 40-45% battery life so I basically get 2 drawings per charge. Not a dealbreaker as I can charge any time I’m not using it and I tend to do one sketch a day anyways. Waiting for screen refreshes after painting colors can be annoying. The tablet is often unresponsive to my touches with my fingers. I like to pan and zoom a lot while drawing details and there are many, many times there’s no response to my gestures. Not sure if the CPU is just busy or if the screen just doesn’t detect my touch. That’s probably my biggest annoyance. But I still love using it much more than it bothers me!

Main Quest

But this post isn’t supposed to be a hardware review! My journey to drawing again just happened to coincide with my experience and newfound love for drawing on an e-ink tablet. So after 3 weeks of copying sketches/poses from my book, I can say my figure drawing from memory has been a huge improvement! I feel like my drawing skills have already surpassed the level I was at when I used to draw all the time in college. I will continue to go through copying/studying all the sketches in my pose book as I feel like it’s really helping. I’m also trying to do a drawing every day (though some days I’m just too busy to get one in). I hope 🤞 I can keep this up long term and continue to show improvement after each month. I have so many art books I’ve bought over the years, but have never used to study/practice with. Once I finish this pose book, I plan to move onto another one. I’m so excited about continuing this journey again.

Final Thoughts on the reMarkable Paper Pro Move

So do I recommend this device to other artists? I guess it kind of depends. Keep in mind, I have not tested any other e-ink device on the market. I did do research on some of the most popular ones and I felt like reMarkable was the one I should try first. I love it as it encourages me to draw more and I’m having fun with it. If you are looking for extremely polished art results, then an iPad is definitely the way to go. Procreate is so much faster and has amazing tools. But it’s very easy to get distracted by other things on an iPad. When I take my reMarkable Move with me, there’s only one thing I’m able to do on it: Draw. The size of the Move is also perfect as it will fit in huge pockets (think hoodie or some jacket pockets), or a small shoulder bag/pouch. You aren’t overwhelmed by a huge empty canvas or have an endless amount of tools to configure so it’s pretty effortless to just start sketching. And when you do happen to draw what you feel is a masterpiece, your work is synced to all of your other devices automatically (there is a small subscription fee for some features) and you can export your artwork as a pdf or svg (vector-based) so you can resize to any resolution you please. I’m only about 3 weeks into it, but I absolutely love it. When I do happen to draw something I really like on it, I’ll add it to my illustration works page.

• What’s with the Japanese?