Exploring the Surface Pro 3 and Manga Studio 5 EX Part 1

I've been planning a month-long road trip across the southern US, and I wanted to try and convert something that looks like this:

Into something a little more portable.

Though tablets have been around for a while, we've been waiting on one that would finally be as portable and effective as a sketchbook, and a bunch of artists online have been raving about Microsoft's Surface Pro 3.  The road trip seemed like a great opportunity to explore what might be possible with this new hardware.

With the addition of my new Surface Pro 3, I wanted to change drawing programs.  I've gotten comfortable with Photoshop, but because it isn't designed to be specifically a drawing program, it can be very finicky.  Everyone online has been talking about the utility of Manga Studio, finding that it vastly outperforms Photoshop, especially when it comes to tablets.  You can read other accounts of its utility on Ray Frenden's blog (which by the way is a phenomenal resource on all kinds of drawing tablets, as well as the source of the best brushes available for both Manga Studio and Photoshop) and on Jonathan Case's blog.

I'm going to start at the beginning, and explore some of the ways you can get your own art studio going from scratch.

Here's Manga Studio 5EX

You'll notice that when I use the pen, the pressure sensitivity isn't responding:

It turns out you need to install the newest drivers from n-trig, the company that produces the digitizer for Microsoft in the Surface 3.  Their newest drivers can be found at http://www.ntrig.com/

Now that I have the drivers installed, the pen works much better!

And when I took it to the local coffee shop, I was excited to find that it was both portable and responsive.

In the next part, I'll discuss how to get the optimal set-up for the Surface.