Da Vinci Eye

ANYONE CAN DRAW, BUT NOT ANYONE CAN DRAW WELL. Free | www.davincieyeapp.com

Da Vinci Eye takes the tracing technique and flips it on its head, using your phone’s camera to display your piece of real-life paper, plus an overlay of the image you wish to draw. While the app’s instructions demonstrate holding your phone above the paper by precariously balancing it on a tall glass (no, seriously, it does), we’d recommend a small phone tripod if you have one. The app provides three different modes. Step by Step breaks your image into sections to concentrate on, either by colour or shade (a bit weird). Lessons is a good mode in theory, as it offers a number of different styles of drawing to learn — anime, life, caricature and so on — but the drawings on offer aren’t overly inspiring. Too many pictures of Justin Bieber. Classic involves choosing your own picture and optionally adding a filter to that image to make the important features stick out more. We spent most of our time here. You can change the opacity of the image and can even initiate a timelapse of your work. We did encounter a few bugs, but the biggest flaw is that, since your hand and pencil will be crossing into view of your phone’s camera, it will be constantly trying to refocus — more than a little irritating. Try a ‘learn how to draw’ book instead, we say.