Da Vinci at work

gotta' love a useful app

Though it is a little creepy when platforms like Instagram seem to know what I’m thinking, at times the cross-app tracking/my-phone-is-listening-to-me does serve up some useful content. In this case, a story posted by an artist who was extolling the virtues of the Da Vinci Eye app.

Basically, this app sort of projects (without projecting anything) a virtual reality copy of a photo onto any surface (like the example above). By positioning your phone/camera above the blank page upon which you would like to draw (you need a tripod or some other way to prop the phone up above your work surface) you then look at the image on the screen of your phone but draw on the page as seen through your phone camera. As you draw, the app creates lines over the top of the image you are projecting… Which, I realize, all sounds weird and complicated but is actually a super effective way to capture the broad strokes of an image in more or less correct proportions.

Once that’s been accomplished, out come the paints (or watercolour pencils or whatever else you might like to splash around on the page) and it’s time to get messy and playful.

It didn’t take long at all to get the basic hang of things and I’m thinking this could help speed things up when it comes to doing the copious numbers of drawings needed for this project.

Cool!

For the curious, here’s the original photo:

While the app definitely helped keep things more accurate and sped up the process of getting some sort of drawing down on the page, clearly there’s still room for error (and improvement). Expect to see some more experiments with this technique!

And, yes, if you are wondering, the inspiration for this evening’s newsletter comes to you courtesy of my NEW HUSBAND (refer to previous posts about the surprise wedding, if you missed them) and our recent quick trip to the Bahamas.

The photo is certainly different from the break I took a few minutes ago to shovel the snow from the sidewalk outside the house back home in reality-land.

Until tomorrow, stay warm! (or, cool, as the case may be…)