How reMarkable! – Review of the reMarkable 2 Paper Tablet

Why This Matters

If you’re a designer, illustrator, or anyone whose work involves turning ideas into visuals, you probably know the pain of trying to bridge the gap between traditional sketching and digital production. Tools matter, but so does the feeling: that instant, tactile connection you get from a pencil on paper, the scratch of graphite, the grip of fibres. When you swap your battered sketchpad for a pristine tablet screen, part of the magic, and admittedly the mess, drains away.

Every time you move between sketchbook and computer, scanning or photographing, tracing again in Illustrator, workload doubles and precious hours slip away. Missed deadlines, rushed concepts, and inspiration that gets diluted as it’s translated from one medium to another can be the result. All this can stem from a device that never quite feels right.

For a branding designer at Pixelhaze Academy, these are daily realities: smudges on fingers, crumpled paper, lost thumbnails, and a small mountain of A3 pads threatening to block out the light. When working on fast-paced illustration projects (the recent Farmer in Training series springs to mind), there’s rarely the luxury of time to reinvent your entire process. Every shortcut counts. Every time-saving trick matters.

Common Pitfalls

Most creative professionals get stuck believing that a stylus and a big, glossy screen will solve every problem. Out comes the shiny iPad, complete with Apple Pencil and bottomless storage. The main advantage is the access to Adobe Illustrator, instant exports, an endless Undo history, and a sense you’ve moved into the future.

The reality is different. That glaring, glassy screen isn’t paper, and the stylus feels suspiciously like poking a slippery tile with a chopstick. You try to sketch and find your nib careering off at the faintest movement. Heavy-handed artists get punished. Detail work becomes an acrobatic feat. Add a faux-paper screen protector and still things feel off. Try a WACOM tablet and your eyes and hand aren't talking to each other.

Eventually, you settle for the workaround: draw on paper, photograph or scan, rework everything in software. It’s clunky and doubles the workload. Studio walls lined with doodles are charming but do little for your productivity or deadlines. Many believe you can’t have the best of both worlds. There's a widespread impression that it's either the soul and control of paper, or the digital convenience of tablets, never both at once.

Step-by-Step Fix

1. Map Out Your Sketch Workflow Plainly

Take an honest look at how you actually build illustrations from scratch. Start with a real-world project if you can. Do you jump into Illustrator cold? Or are you naturally reaching for the sketchbook and the clicky clutch pencil?

For me, every illustration, from brand marks to children’s books, begins on A3 paper. It's doodles on a wall if not the page. The Farmer in Training series showed how this habit defines my workflow. Pen in hand, I’ll rough out half a dozen sheep, a misbehaving tractor, maybe even Anwen Nichols’ rhyming fox, long before Adobe enters the equation.

Now, ask which parts are slowing you down. Usually, it’s that paper-to-digital leap. Photographs get grainy. Scans need cropping. Tracing in Illustrator is tedious and, weirdly, often kills what was lively in the pencil original.

2. Embrace the Mess, Then Find a Bridge

Acknowledge that no digital solution will erase your need for physical play. There’s a roughness to early sketches that unlocks ideas you’ll never get if you draw everything with a trembling hand on glass.

Look for a tool that connects the two worlds. In our studio, the short list was: iPad (with every imaginable screen covering), a battered WACOM, and analog paper. The iPad performed well for exporting finished work, and the new iPad Pro screens are genuinely impressive. However, despite their advanced features, the surfaces felt too slick and lacked resistance. Fiddly linework, especially for big branding jobs or detailed book pages, always felt slightly off.

That’s when the reMarkable 2 entered the conversation. It took time to test. Scepticism was real. However, the appeal was clear: e-ink screen, a stylus that sounded and felt like pencil on a sketch pad, and a minimalist interface with just enough features to keep it functional but not overblown.

The first impressions were clear. With the reMarkable, sketching felt like proper sketching again. The scratchy noise returned. The resistance caught the strokes just right. There was no frantic sliding off the edges of a slick display. Eye strain and blue-light headaches disappeared thanks to the matte surface and subdued look. At long last, paper and pixels nearly found a workable balance.

3. Set Up Your Digital ‘Studio’

Once you’re sold on the reMarkable’s ‘paperiness’, the next step is building a smart digital filing cabinet. Create folder structures that mimic a physical sketchbook: one for logos, one for in-progress illustrations, another for random late-night ideas.

Within a couple of weeks in the Pixelhaze studio, all those scattered notepads and sketch piles migrated onto the tablet. Every thumbnail, every rough storyboard, even mad-scientist scribbles for future projects all live in tidy, cloud-backed folders. The confusion of searching for that pig illustration in a stack of pads disappears.

There is an added benefit: backup is instant. Spill coffee, misplace the device, or lose it in a sea of A3 pads, and your work remains secure. You can switch seamlessly between past and current work, compare drafts, and never lose a half-formed idea because it got tossed with the recycling.

4. Integrate, Don’t Replace—Know When to Build Forward

No tool will provide every answer in isolation. Sometimes you need to blend old and new for the best result. The reMarkable tablet can serve as your launchpad for early sketching, warm-ups, and concept doodles. Once you arrive at a design you like, you can export it as an SVG or PDF straight to your main design suite. Illustrator is an obvious next step.

This approach shortens the time spent retracing, reduces friction, and cuts the journey from inspiration to finished art. Importantly, line quality remains strong during export, which helps preserve the character that makes the sketch special. For projects like Farmer in Training, exporting layered sketches (background, characters, props) allowed me to maintain the feel of the original pencil marks rather than flattening everything for efficiency.

If you need a grid or an isometric view, it’s possible to import background templates and sketch over them. This has proven useful for brand icons, technical drawings, and playful infographics such as the Pixelhaze ‘service islands’.

5. Consider The Drawbacks

No tool is perfect. Here’s what you might find with the reMarkable 2:

• No colour: You’re limited to shades of grey, plus three levels of stroke thickness. This setup works for base sketches, but digital painting or colour branding will need to happen elsewhere.
• Locked features: Want to share your screen to the studio projector during client meetings? That feature requires a monthly subscription. The up-front device cost is high, and there’s a small running fee for full cloud sync and ‘Connect’ features.
• That pencil nib: It feels uncannily like the real thing, but it’ll wear down with hard use (and needs changing occasionally). There’s a learning curve if, like me, you sometimes sketch with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

The balance for most professionals in the office is a positive one. You gain a reliable, time-saving hub for rough work and an easy pipeline into your main design software.

What Most People Miss

Success relies on more than just copying your old workflow onto a shiny device. You have to understand which creative habits make the real difference and trim the parts that slow you down.

Many designers become overly focused on digital features, seeking complex apps or endless brush packs. But simplicity often yields better results. The reMarkable’s limited options—no colour and a minimal toolset—encourage you to refine your craft and focus on fundamentals: composition, form, storytelling. Pure sketch. No distractions.

A lot of graphic artists and brand designers forget that breakthroughs happen in the early, rough stages—the places where mistakes and loose ideas can flourish. By choosing a digital sketch tool that faithfully mimics paper, you capture those happy accidents that make your work distinctive, without losing momentum or clarity when transferring your ideas.

The Bigger Picture

By streamlining this workflow, you reclaim a significant portion of your time and mental energy. There’s less scanning, retracing, and worrying about lost notes.

Your feedback loop accelerates. With all your sketches in one place, it’s easier to show clients rough drafts, make quick changes, or track the project’s evolution from first doodle to final icon.

Teams and solo designers alike benefit from the convenience of cloud storage—everything is accessible in the studio or on the move, removing barriers to productivity.

Above all, daily mental clutter shrinks. All the creative chaos finds a place, becomes easy to retrieve, and is safely backed up. In practice, this means less time lost in admin, more time dedicated to creativity, and a saner approach to hitting tight deadlines.

Wrap-Up

The search for the ideal ‘pen on paper’ feel continues, but for many illustrators and brand designers the reMarkable 2 comes closer than any digital tool so far. It connects the strengths of analogue with digital practicality, tucking your mountains of paper sketches into your pocket and letting your muscle memory guide you.

If you’re a creative struggling to move from messy, beautiful early ideas to organized digital workflows, now is a good time to reassess your process. Map your workflow, try the tools, and choose the approach that lets your creativity shine without being overwhelmed by chaos.

Want more helpful systems like this? Join Pixelhaze Academy for free at https://www.pixelhaze.academy/membership.