I have discovered a void in the laptop/easel design world. There isn’t an easily available laptop easel. At least, there isn’t one that I can find.

I was watching The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar and noticed one of the characters preparing to write while seated in an armchair. He had a wooden board across the arms of the chair and what looked like a blueprint tube propping up the far edge. He placed his writing paper on top of the board and had a pencil sharpener at one side. This struck me as an almost-perfect arrangement.

Anyone who writes or sketches or paints from an armchair needs something like that. A few years ago, padded laptop desks were popular, but they were limited in scope and size and seem to have gone out of fashion. There are still a few of them available online, but they generally don’t tilt or have drawers for pencils or brushes or paints or sharpeners.

My most comfortable chair is a recliner and I would like to adapt it for sketching, doodling, and painting on artist’s pads and canvases. Sounds simple, right? Well, apparently not.

I have spent quite a long time doing some online searching for the ideal laptop easel and find that there really isn’t one. There are easels of various kinds and laptop desks of various kinds, but very few laptop easels. To make matters worse, there are absolutely no, none, nada padded laptop easels.  The padding matters not only for comfort but also to raise the height of the work surface to a good working level.

None of the easels that I could find would extend outside of the arms of my chair. At the same time, all the laptop desks seem to be designed for laptop computers, not sketchbooks or canvases. There are lap desks designed for use while in bed, but none of them had legs to fit either within or outside an armchair.

My community is replete with seniors and people with limited mobility, and many of us write and/or draw and/or paint. We would love to be able to engage in our creative activities from the comfort of our armchairs. If there are any product designers out there reading this, I would be very grateful if you would fill this product void, and I hope it makes you lots of money. You can thank me later.