AR Drawing Tracer (Trace a Picture onto Paper with the Camera)

About the AR Drawing Tracer (Trace a Picture onto Paper with the Camera)

Put your phone above a sheet of paper, start the camera, and your picture appears over the paper on the screen: draw along its lines and the drawing lands on the paper. Set the picture’s opacity, size and angle, mirror it, add a grid over it, and lock it so a hand on the screen cannot move it. One finger moves the picture, two fingers size and turn it.

Photos trace more easily as line art: the Outline style finds the edges of any picture, and Black and white makes a clean silhouette, both adjustable. No camera, or tracing on a tablet? The Light box shows the picture on a white screen to trace on thin paper laid over it. The screen is asked to stay on while you trace. Everything happens on your device: the picture and the camera view are never uploaded or recorded, and the page works offline once it has loaded.

Common uses

• Sketching from a photo when drawing freehand is hard.
• Transferring lettering, a logo or a pattern onto a card, a wall or a T-shirt.
• Practising proportions with a grid, the way art classes teach.
• Tracing on a tablet as a light box.

Getting a good trace

• Steady the phone. Any wobble moves the picture. A drinking glass under the phone, a stack of books or a phone stand all work; the camera should look straight down so the picture is not slanted.
• Lock before drawing. Your hand will touch the screen; the lock keeps the picture still. Unlock to adjust.
• Light the paper well, from the side so the phone does not cast a shadow. Where the browser lets the page switch the camera’s light, a Torch button appears.
• Look at the screen, not the paper. It takes a few minutes to get used to; start with large, simple shapes.
• Use the grid to check the proportions of what you have drawn against the picture square by square.

Keeping the screen on, and the torch

While the camera runs or the light box is on, the page asks the browser to keep the screen on with the Screen Wake Lock API. The browser drops the lock when the page is hidden or the battery is low; the page asks again when you come back. Where the browser does not support it, set a longer screen time-out in your phone’s settings. The torch uses the camera track’s torch setting from the W3C Image Capture specification, and its button shows only when the camera reports that the page can switch its light.

Limitations

• Nothing is recorded: the tool makes no time-lapse video or photo of your drawing.
• The camera image is the phone’s live view: if the phone is not straight above the paper the picture looks slanted on the paper, and the tool cannot correct that.
• The torch and keeping the screen on depend on the browser and the phone; some allow neither.
• Very large pictures are worked on at up to 2,048 pixels on their longest side.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.