Share Ideas & Opinions: Tracing Paper

Link: Tracing Paper App

My Rating: 4/5

      This app is unique, it allows people to trace over photographs in order to learn the details of certain objects and potentially learn how to draw them. You can sketch over the photo, as well as shade, use color and different mediums. After drawing something once, the memory of that drawing stays in your mind and hopefully becomes a reference for how to draw it in the future. This app helps increase the amount of things we can learn to draw and have in our minds as references. If you want to draw a self portrait you simply need to take a picture of yourself and then trace over it. This allows you to learn the curves of your face and the shapes of your features. When your drawing is done, you can subtract the original photograph and you are left with your finished drawing.

   This app is one payment of $3.99.

Here is an example of a person taking a picture and tracing over it.

Here is an example of a drawing that
someone traced over an existing picture.

Share Ideas & Opinions

      This app is great for sharing ideas and opinions. On the popular app Instagram we can share pictures all day long. Now, with this app, artists can share their artwork inspired by pictures. There are no limits to what you can trace, if you can take a picture of it, you can learn to draw it. Instead of watching a teacher draw something step by step, you are able to learn from a picture and see the shapes, lines, textures, and curves of what it is you want to draw right before your eyes. This app also allows you to share and download your work when it is completed. As a teacher I could use this app for assignments, maybe have the students draw something new every night. 

      The limitations that this app might create is a dependency on having a photograph to reference and trace. A skill of being able to draw is being able to look at something and understand it's shape just by looking at it, not by tracing it underneath your pencil. Yes this is a great way to learn the elements of objects but I give it 4 out of 5 stars because artists must also be able to draw just by looking at something, or possibly even from memory and visualizing something in your mind.