FREE POST! The "Frog Bard" & Huion Kamvas 24" 4K Review (Patreon)

In this article I will be reviewing the Huion Kamvas 24" 4K Monitor Tablet, which Huion was kind enough to send to try out. I will also be sharing the process for the painting I made with it.  Special thanks to Huion for sponsoring this crazy little painting!

The painting is of the "Frog Bard" a character chosen by the Twitch chat in a recent livestream where we tried out the tablet. For the demo I was working in Photoshop and using my own pencils and brushes from my two most recent sets (which you can download here on this Patreon if you are in the 10$ tier).  For the review I went through my entire process, from concept sketches, to drawing, to painting to final detail. (A process guide showing the various stages has been attached below!)  

THE HUION KAMVAS 24 4K REVIEW: 

I'm not going to lie. For the past 20 years, I have disliked monitor tablets. Early on they were heavy, slow, and the colors were always off. For that reason I have stuck to only ever using the basic Intuos tablets. That is, up until Huion sent me their new Kamvas 24 4K monitor tablet to try, and I have to say that they have changed my mind on them.  

Previously, what I hated about tablets was the following: 

1. Lag. Older tablet monitors always had a noticeable cursor lag, which presented a low-grade irritation that made working with them frustrating over time. 

2. Color. Older tablet monitors never seemed to stay color corrected in my experience. They would drift over time, or simply be difficult to get the profiles correct, while my imac never seem to ever lose its color calibration. EVER. And this made relying on a tablet monitor for production work dicey.  

3. Feel. Older tablet monitors just didn't feel good. While I may have been using digital tools for 20 years, I have been drawing traditionally on physical materials since I can remember walking out from the ooze of the precambrian lakes all those millions of years ago. The more the digital tools tried to simulate the traditional drawing experience, the more I would notice any gaps, and the more unnatural it all felt.  

But I am happy to say that maybe I was wrong. Huion was nice enough to send me one of their new Kamvas 24 4K models to try out for this review and here is how it went: 

First, it is a perfect weight for desktop. It won't shift or slide around while working on it, and yet is also easy to re-position to fit your workspace. Second, the 24" real estate is incredible! Coming from a 12" tablet it was genuinely shocking for me. The horizons opened up and I felt like I get my whole arm into the drawing, rather than my usual cramped, claw-handed, crabby style of hunching over a tiny, postage stamp-sized area of tablet to draw like some old, arthritic vulture.

Perhaps most impressive of all for me was that the responsiveness fast which presented no noticeable cursor lag. The Frog Bard image was painted at 8000 pixels tall, 300dpi. (A big file!) It was a 3bg file with dozens of layers and I was even painting with larger mixer brushes in Photoshop to stress test it. All of it was no problem. The tablet handled it perfectly and presented a genuinely pleasant experience. Drawing was great and building up layers of color and texture of paint with the Kamvas felt marvelous. 

The color profile and calibration took a little bit of work and digging to sort out, but as I had another monitor to correct from, I was able to eventually get it to a workable place. The real question will be how that holds up months from now, but so far, it seems good. Lastly, the FEEL: And here I would say it really did great in a way that surprised me. I really enjoyed drawing and painting on it and never felt like I was straining my back or wrist from bad posture. The ergonomics felt great, and something I really loved was that it came with a little keypad for hotkeys that you could move around. I have always been a Wacom fan, but I will admit that I absolutely NEVER use their tablet buttons and would prefer their devices without any. After using the Huion I realized that a lot of that is because the Wacom buttons are locked into a place that is ergonomically uncomfortable for me to use.  The Huion 4K Kamvas buttons are detached, so you can move them around to a more natural position. It was as very cool, surprising little addition. 

Overall, I would recommend the Huion 24 4K, especially for the price. As of this writing it is $1300 on Amazon, which is a steal compared to the $2200 Wacom 24" 4K tablet.  Special thanks to Huion for sending me the tablet for this review! I look forward to painting with it more in the future.

THE PAINTING PROCESS: 

For those of you who stuck around to the end, a few notes on the painting process: I used the "Cycle" method I have described previously in my tutorials tier that helps me slowly build up color and light over time. I didn't start this image with my usual underpainting, and instead ended up just diving right in to color in my eagerness try out this new device. 

Panel #2 shows how I was slowly painting and smudging my way along and Panel #3 shows what the whole "dead color" phase turned out like. Panel #3 is a very important stage. I haven't added many sharp details yet, but I do have a solid sense of the forms and shadows and a basic idea of the color relationships.  I leave out the details and final colors at this point for 2 reasons: 

1. Details need to follow forms. I don't want to add a bunch of sharp details on a jacket, only to realize later on that the jacket should be a cloak, or that it doesn't fit right and I need to repaint it. If details are already on there, I am much less likely to be willing to murder my darlings and make the hard changes because I would dread having to repaint all those fine details. 

2. Narrative takes time! I don't know everything that will be in the painting precisely at the beginning. Often the fun narrative details don't occur to me until much of the painting is already made. Sometimes I have to step back and really ponder the image for a while to find out what little details might make an area more narratively interesting.  

Because of these reasons, I tend to focus more on shapes, forms and basic color relationships before moving on to detail and final color.  In Panels #4 and #5 you can see the results of two passes of the Cycle, where I first added light, then added color over that, then detailed and blended, before repeating it again to slowly build up detail and nuance.

I hope this was interesting! Thanks again to Huion for sponsoring this, and thank you everyone who showed up in the Twitch chat to give ideas for this character!  

-jg