This week, as Apple hosted their annual Worldwide Developers Conference, app developers and consumers alike got a look at what's to come from one of our favorite tech companies. And though we still have to wait til fall for the next iPhone, Apple did bless us with a shiny new version of our other fave device: the iPad Pro. For those of you who've already tried out the Pro, you know it takes the iPad technology and iOS to a whole new level (seriously, it's basically as good as a laptop) — and if you haven't tried it, it's definitely worth saving for and splurging on.
We were lucky enough to get early access to the new Pro before almost anyone else and while we could get into the tech specs, bells, and whistles, we decided instead to go for something that's so Teen Vogue.
Illustrator Janelle Sing — whose work you may have seen with brands like Soludos, Warby Parker, and Rachel Antonoff — let us watch as she worked her magic across the new Pro, recreating iconic Teen Vogue images using the Procreate app. Janelle's no stranger to using the iPad to create her works of art — she's done so going on five years. "I started using a really amazing sketching app called Paper by FiftyThree and I still love using that but I also love using Procreate which I'm using today," she says. "It's really fast, as in I can draw things while I'm on the go, while I'm traveling and it's so versatile because you have all of these tools right at your fingertips. The brushes are really close to the approximation of actual tools so the crayons look like crayons and the colored pencils act like colored pencils but you just have everything at your disposal."
"I like that you can layer things, especially in this app. You can change things around and you don't need to worry about messing up so much. The most amazing part about it is the colors and the vibrancy, especially if things are going to be viewed on screen, if they're for websites and online content like Instagram, then there's no loss like when you have to scan something. It's exactly what you're going to get on screen so it's accurate every time."
And since she's been using the iPad for a while now, we had to know: what does she think of the 10.5-inch iPad Pro?
"I love it." Janelle says. "It's kind of a game changer. The colors are so much more vivid, they're brighter. And the response time in drawing really is so fast, it's like as soon as the Pencil hits the surface it's fluid and there's zero lag time so it feels like it's flowing. It's just so much faster. Otherwise the capabilities of this — it's just going to make sharing my work that much easier because the new functionality with this iPad are really intuitive. Whether it's just holding down a picture and dragging it into my mail, you can do that now with this device instead of clicking around. Everything just feels faster."
Watch Janelle illustrate three Teen Vogue images above, and check out the side-by-sides below.
