life drawing + brief surface pro thoughts

life drawing from last week. sorry for the lazy cut out job. 

these are from the surface pro's first life drawing outing this week. it was a lot of fun, though a little uncomfortable. going to have to really experiment with my setup! 

so, overall, the surface pro 2 has been great. its been a joy to work and play on. it's pretty much what i expected it to be: a mobile art station. it runs photoshop beautifully, among other art programs, while also functioning well as a tablet (games, internet browsing, etc). i've been quite impressed with the battery life so far, though i need to do a few tests from 100%-0%. from what i've seen so far, i should be able to get approx. 5 hours of heavy painting time in. 

not everything has been all sunshine and rainbows, though. the pen accuracy is all over the place. in the top corners, the accuracy is completely terrible, and over the rest of the screen, it's very inconsistent. not that its unusable, as i've done lots of drawing on it already, but, for a premium device, is unacceptable. i spent a week, or so, troubleshooting and researching, and it seems that the issue is fairly common. after chatting with microsoft tech support a few times, i've concluded that this is a hardware defect. a replacement is being shipped to me as i type this, so hopefully that'll remedy the issue. 

one other strange issue, which i've yet to figure out is this...

i think its an issue with wacom's drivers, as they're needed for photoshop to even recognize pressure sensitivity. basically, if i have opacity set to pen pressure, and the "tip feel" in the wacom settings in the control panel set to the normal, medium setting, i cannot get an opaque stroke when i press down fully. i mean, i'd have to press with all of my manly might in order to get an opaque stroke. that's just not cool. i remember reading somewhere that wacom is aware of issues with win8.1, so hopefully they're going to fix this. again, not a big deal, and it doesn't make photoshop unusable, but it sure is annoying.