Apple unveiled a new iPad Pro and stylus on Wednesday, and professional artists are ecstatic.
The Apple Pencil is pressure sensitive. Press lightly, and the stroke gets thinner. Tilt the pencil, and the stroke gets thicker. Pair it with an iPad Pro, and there's finally an Apple (AAPL) device to replace paper sketchbooks.
College students can balance this on a knee when doing sketches at an art museum. Comic book artists can finally work from the couch.
Sure, electronic drawing pads already exist. But the best ones are bulky and stay at the desk. And until now, artists using iPads to draw were forced to buy a third-party stylus that was unreliable, with delayed reaction times between the stylus and screen and inaccurate drawing strokes.
David Macy is an artist at Adobe who tested the iPad-Pencil pairing sometime before this week's announcement. He told CNNMoney that he was impressed by the iPad's ability to quickly switch between programs, carrying files from one to another.
And the stylus-tablet communication is seamless, he said.
"There's no glitches or latency when drawing. It keeps up with your movement," he said. "It really really feels great, and I think artists are going to love it."
David Marquez is an artist at Marvel, where his work includes the "All-New X-Men" and "Ultimate Comics Spider-Man" series. All his work is digital, so he can't wait to try out the iPad-Pencil combination. He can finally walk away from the desk.
"There are lots of artists already using iPads and other mobile devices as a creation tool," he said. "This is Apple creating an iPad with us specifically in mind."
As professional cartoonist Michael Avon Oeming explains: "Comic book artists are the leaders in testing out digital art because if the volume of work we do. We are always looking for more efficient ways to create art -- especially while traveling."
Mike Norton is another comic book artist who's worked with the major publishers -- DC and Marvel -- and now has his own series, Battlepug. Like others, he ditched ink and paper for stylus and screen.
"I read comics on the iPad, but I can't draw on them," he said. "Owning several iPads over the years just made me and every other artist think, 'Wouldn't it be nice to just use this on the couch and work?'"
He has a portable tablet from Wacom, but he feels it's just too big and heavy to carry around everywhere. Norton thinks this new 12.9-inch iPad will be a more natural fit for his work, because it's much closer to a classic paper sketchpad.
"I still don't know if I'll be fully creating comics on the iPad Pro, but I could see myself doing layouts and preliminary stuff," he said.
And that's another thing. Until now, artists had a hard time switching between apps. By comparison, iOS 9 software on the new iPad lets artists build an elaborate background in Adobe Comp software, then draw something in Photoshop Sketch, then pair them together.
And surprisingly for Apple, this price point doesn't hurt. The iPad Pro starts at $799, and the Pencil is another $99. The total $900 package is slightly cheaper than the comparable 13-inch Wacom Cintiq.
"We digital artists love Wacom's stuff. But they're seen as the Mercedes-Benz of the tablet industry," said Aysha Marie Zouain, an independent illustrator in Miami. "Apple just created more competition."
