Can I trace a reference photo in a painting app?

Yes, you can. In Easel by Zaweba a reference photo can show over the canvas as a faint tracing guide, so you can follow its main lines while you paint. The photo is never merged into your painting, which means everything on the canvas is still your own brushwork. You can also keep the reference beside the canvas instead, if you'd rather work by eye.

Tracing has a long and respectable history. Painters have used grids, projections and tracing paper for centuries to get a drawing down quickly so they can spend their time on the painting. Using a guide is not cheating. It is a choice about where to spend effort.

How the tracing sheet works

Easel has a tracing-paper or acetate sheet that sits over the painting and holds guides. Ctrl+H shows or hides it. Your reference photo can sit as a faint guide on that sheet, so you can see the main shapes, but it stays separate from the painting at all times. Hide it and you see only what you have painted.

This matters for two reasons. First, the finished painting never contains bits of the photo, so it looks entirely painted. Second, you can check your progress honestly by hiding the guide and looking at your work on its own.

From photo to painted drawing

Choose the surface and canvas size first. The right size for the subject is worth settling before you begin.

Add your reference photo as a tracing guide. Keep it faint. The point is to see where the main shapes go, not to copy every detail.

Trace the big shapes lightly with a pencil, such as a hard graphite, or with a thin wash of a light colour. Outline the head, the horizon, the main buildings, the edges of shadows. Leave detail alone at this stage.

Hide the guide with Ctrl+H and look at what you have. Does it read as a drawing? If something looks wrong, fix it by eye now.

Then paint. Keep the guide hidden most of the time and bring it back now and then to check a shape. Paint with the photo in view beside the canvas if you prefer; it gives you colour and detail while the trace has given you placement.

Tracing without the stiffness

Don't trace too much. Tracing every line can make a painting look stiff. Trace placement and the main contours, then let the brush do the rest.

Simplify. Photos contain far more detail than a painting needs. Squinting helps, and Easel's squint view softens the picture the way half-closed eyes do, which is a quick way to see the big shapes in your own painting. The values view shows it in greyscale, to compare light and dark against the photo.

Check proportions with the mirror view. Even a traced drawing can drift as you paint over it, and flipping the picture shows lopsided shapes at once.

Other ways to place a drawing

If you'd rather learn to draw without tracing, Easel has other aids. A grid lets you use the old method of matching squares. Proportional dividers help you measure and compare distances. The ruler, French curve and ellipse guide take care of straight lines and accurate curves, and strokes that start on the ellipse guide follow it. They are drawing aids rather than paint, there to guide your hand.

A word about photos

Trace your own photos, or ones you have permission to use. A painting based closely on someone else's photograph can still raise questions of copyright, even when every stroke is yours.

With the tracing sheet, Easel by Zaweba gives you the speed of a trace and the look of a fully painted picture, and the choice of how much to use it is entirely yours.