This drawing mode uses your phone’s camera feed and lays a transparent picture you want to draw over that camera feed. If you look at your phone’s screen, you’ll be able to see both the picture you want to draw and the place where you want to draw it at the same time. This lets you easily trace an image onto any surface.
To get started, you need to place your phone on top of a tall glass.
If your phone doesn’t have case, it might slide around when you touch it. This will make adjusting settings while you’re drawing very difficult. To fix this, cut two rubber bands and place them on top of the glass about an inch apart. This will stop the phone from moving around.
You can position the phone any way that is easiest for you to draw. If your phone is positioned to the left or to the right, you can reorient the toolbars by tilting the phone upwards.
You should make sure you can see both the feed from your camera and the transparent image you want to draw. If your camera feed is black, you might need to go into your phone’s settings to make sure Da Vinci Eye is allowed access to your camera.
Now it’s time to position your picture on the paper. Press the move button, and using one finger you can pan the image…
Using two fingers, you can zoom, shrink and rotate the image.
When the move button is unpressed the image and the camera will be locked together. This lets you zoom out to see your drawing as a whole or zoom in, so you can draw fine details.
Finally, to make your image more or less transparent, you can use the Opacity slider.
Move the slider to the left to make your picture more transparent and to the right to make it less transparent.
Check out our Learn section to watch Da Vinci Eye instructional videos:
Or try completing the challenges at the top of the home screen to learn things like: How to record time lapse videos of your drawings, how to add filters to pictures to make them easier to draw, and how to use advanced features like the strobe to make super realistic drawings.
As always, if you have any questions or need any help, shoot us an email using the email button at the bottom of the home screen.
You can also check out our video on how to get started with Classic Mode right here:
Hey guys! My name is Sean, and I’m an artist/instructor with Da Vinci Eye. Because it’s the holiday season, we are going to learn how to draw an elf!
I’ll be drawing this on my tablet for you to easily see, but feel free to use a pencil and paper. You can also follow along with the tutorial step-by-step using Da Vinci Eye for iOS and Android. The app lets you trace along with my drawing to help become more comfortable and understand exactly what I do.
Let’s start this drawing out with three circles to help us shape up the body.
I’m using simple shapes of ovals and rectangles to block out the body, torso, the arms and the legs.
As you know elves have pointy ears and pointy shoes. So I’m going to start with the bottom and put in two curled shoes.
Next, we can draw out the clothes. I added some triangle ends and buttons to a shirt for detail.
With a round of face, we can put in those 2 pointed ears we talked about earlier.
The face doesn’t need to be super specific, a happy smile, and two elbows for eyes can totally work.
To finish out the body, we can put in the arms and some mitten hands for those cold winter nights.
Last is the big warm hat…
This is also a great time to add in some shading and clean up those initial sketch lines you put in.
And as always… Remember to sign your art because you did a great job!
If you want to find more of my art, follow me on Instagram at @Phoenix.Animations. Be sure to check out the Da Vinci Eye app, as well as subscribe here for more tutorials.
You can also check out our video on how to draw an elf right here:
Hey guys! It’s Sean, an artist instructor with Da Vinci Eye. Today, we’re going to be learning how to draw a toucan.
I’ll be drawing this on my tablet for you to easily see, but feel free to use a pencil and paper. You can also follow along with the tutorial step-by-step using Da Vinci Eye for iOS and Android. The app lets you trace along with my drawing to help become more comfortable and understand exactly what I do.
So let’s get started.
Remember with every drawing to start out light. So using little pressure with a pencil, draw three circles – the head, the body, and the eye.
Now we connect everything…
And add a Y looking line to indicate the wings, since we’re looking at the back of the toucan.
After that, I’m going to go in and add some more lines for the tail feathers.
As you can see, these don’t have to be perfect.
And now we add the main event – the long beak.
I decided to give my toucan a little berry to hold onto, but you could also just have the beak closed.
Last but not least, your toucan need some environment. So let’s put it in a tree branch with a little bit of texture.
After this, I just go in for some cleanup. So I make lines darker and add some feather and beak details.
And as always remember to sign your art because you did it and you should be proud of yourself!
Now, of course, toucans are very colorful, so don’t hesitate to do some quick color and shading.
If you want to find more of my art, follow me on Instagram at @Phoenix.Animations. Be sure to check out the Da Vinci Eye app, as well as subscribe here for more tutorials.
You can also check out our video on how to draw a toucan right here:
Hey guys! It’s Sean – I’m an artist-instructor with Da Vinci Eye. Today, we’re going to learn how to draw a panda.
I’ll be drawing this on my tablet for you to easily see, but feel free to use a pencil and paper. You can also follow along with this tutorial step-by-step using Da Vinci Eye App for iOS and Android. The app lets you trace along with my drawing to help become more comfortable and understand exactly what I do.
So let’s do this! Remember to start out light, so using little pressure with the pencil, draw three trapezoids in the shape of a tree.
Now, starting with the top, I want to give my Panda a pear shaped face.
For this guy, I’m also going to add some tufts of fur on the top of the head.
Next we put in the ears and color them in real quick, a triangle nose and two small oval eyes.
Now we take the nose and extend out the mouth and muzzle.
We’re aiming to have the muzzle extend up and form the characteristic black fur around the eyes. Don’t hesitate to raise your eyes and place them in a different spot; I do this all the time.
Before we move into the second section, we need to get the Panda some bamboo to eat.
Since the panda is actively eating, we can assume the bamboo will be broken partly in half. Hence we should make one side of the bamboo more slanted than the other. I also put in some leaves to make it read better to the eye.
Now that we have the bamboo, this indicates where the paw grabbing it needs to be.
We can also extend the shoulder down to the arm and add a second line coming down from the hand. Make sure to erase any overlap while we’re here!
For the other arm, I had mine more relaxed. The biggest thing to remember here is to stay mostly within your trapezoid section. It’s okay if the arm extends a bit past like mine does, but don’t go as far as to hit the ground.
For the third section we put in two paws that are facing towards you.
That way you can put in the toes and padding underneath. Then put a slightly curved line between the two feet to connect everything.
Now here’s the fun part – coloring in and cleaning up!
As you can see, the Panda has a very distinct coat patterning…
As a final note, I always like to add in some environment. So here I get the Panda some ground to sit on and do some abstract lines to show bamboo growing behind him.
I use an oval to show the segments of the bamboo, but I’m not trying to add too much detail or pushing the pencil into hard. The background is there to enhance the character, not distract from them.
And as always, don’t forget to sign your art! You did a great job. 🙂
If you want to find more of my artwork, follow me on Instagram at @Phoenix.Animations. Be sure to check out the Da Vinci Eye app, as well as subscribe here for more tutorials.
You can also watch the tutorial on how to draw a panda below. Have a great day, and we’ll see you next time!
Hey guys! My name is Sean and I’m an artist-instructor with Da Vinci Eye. Today, we’re going to learn how to draw a turkey!
I’ll be drawing this on my tablet for you to easily see, but feel free to use a pencil and paper. You can also follow along with this tutorial step-by-step using Da Vinci Eye App for iOS and Android. The app lets you trace along with my drawing to help become more comfortable and understand exactly what I do.
Let’s start this drawing out with three circles to help us shape out the body, the tail feathers and the smaller circle head.
Now we connect the head with the body and also sketch out the giant wing.
Our Turkey is looking fantastic! So let’s take these basic shapes and give them more form.
I’m going to work on the tail feathers here. Notice that I start from the bottom and move them out like sun rays. We want them to follow the curve of the turkey’s body…
Lets add a rounded face and let’s not forget the waddle… (That’s that red thing that hangs off its face)
We can start giving our turkey some personality and life. I’m also going to go ahead and put in some environment with a shadow underneath.
To ground it a bit more, you’ll see that I’m adding in some fall pumpkins to decorate the space. Feel free to put in some leaves or even another Turkey as a friend!
Lastly, is shading and detail. I’ve added some feather patterning, and cross hatched a lot of shading.
Because the Turkey is covered in feathers, the sketch-like effect really helps build texture rather than smoothing out everything.
And as always, don’t forget to sign your art! You did an awesome job. 🙂
If you want to find more of my artwork, follow me on Instagram at @Phoenix.Animations. Be sure to check out the Da Vinci Eye app, as well as subscribe here for more tutorials.
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You can also watch the tutorial on how to draw a turkey below. Have a great day, and we’ll see you next time!
Hey guys! It’s Sean – I’m an artist-instructor with Da Vinci Eye. Today we’re going to learn how to draw an owl perched on a tree branch.
I’ll be drawing this on my tablet for you to easily see, but feel free to use a pencil and paper. You can also follow along with this tutorial step-by-step using Da Vinci Eye App for iOS and Android. The app lets you trace along with my drawing to help become more comfortable and understand exactly what I do.
So let’s do this! Remember to start out light. So using little pressure with a pencil, draw two circles for the face:
And a curved rectangle for the body:
Now I’m going to jump right in and start shaping the face out.
I add a carrot looking shape right in the middle for the beak and two wide eyes.
Remember the owl’s eyes don’t actually move. So make sure the pupils are always in the middle.
Now I’m going in and adding details for feathers:
Then texturing around the eyes:
As well as two short tufts for the ears:
Moving to the body, we need to give our owl a big wing.
I always like to pattern my wings, so go ahead and add your own feather coloration.
I decided for the chest of my owl to be a much whiter color and indicated this by only lightly penciling in feathers in a downward direction.
The talons are added to curve around our tree branch, but you can also stick them under your owl.
Lastly, I’m going in to add detail to the branch and give the owl some tail feathers in the back.
Don’t forget to sign your art! You did a great job.
If you want to find more of my artwork, follow me on Instagram at @Phoenix.Animations. Be sure to check out the Da Vinci Eye app, as well as subscribe here for more tutorials.
You can also watch the tutorial on how to draw an owl right here:
For this lesson, we are going draw this photo to fit a 14 x 17 piece of paper:
1. Start by drawing a large circle. This is just for reference so draw this pretty light. This is going to represent how big the head is going the be. (Note that I made my circle roughly the same shape as her head)
2. Enlarge your image to match the size of the circle. You are basically making a hole, then sticking the face in it!
*You can now erase the circle you made as you won’t need them anymore*
3. Begin to trace the reference image as you normally would. The secret here is we want to make some areas as exact as possible because we are going to use these areas as reference points later.
You’ll notice that because your phone’s camera is so close to your paper, you can only see a small section of the paper. So how do we draw the other parts of drawing?
That’s easy… We just move the phone to where we want to draw next! Make sure to follow the next steps in order to correctly do this!
4. Press the move button, and with just *1 finger*, move the image to align with your reference points. In this case, I’ve drawn the lips in pretty fine detail… so I am going to use those as my reference point.
Just get it pretty close because you can just nudge your cup to get it precisely aligned.
*Do not forget to press the move button again when you are done aligning your image.*
5. Now just keep repeating this step of drawing a section, moving, and aligning.
This whole outline took less than 5 minutes!
*This same process works for an iPad!*
This wraps up our tutorial on how to draw large pictures in Classic Mode! Don’t forget to upload your pictures in the app on iOS or tag us on Instagram!
Hey Everyone! Today we are going to be talking about the breakdown feature in Da Vinci Eye. Breakdown Mode is also called Step By Step in the Android version of the app. If you don’t want to read all of this I’ve posted a video at the bottom of the page, however below goes into a bit more depth.
If you haven’t already download the Da Vinci Eye app!
Using this mode, you can turn any picture into a step-by-step drawing tutorial. It does not give you lines to draw. Instead, it is more like a custom paint-by-numbers picture, which is more in line with how professional artists draw and paint.
Learning to see color values
The goal of this mode is to train your eye on how to see different color values or shades of gray. Eventually, you will learn how to identify light, mid-tone, and dark areas without the aid of the app. Simply put, this mode teaches you how to draw realistic portraits.
Drawing and painting, when going for a more realistic look, isn’t about drawing lines. If you look at any old master’s painting or actual photos of people, you never see and hard lines, just gradual transitions of one color to the next. Even when an artist, who is going for a realistic look uses lines, they usually use them to help depict areas of intense shadows.
Many artists start drawing by breaking a picture down into steps or layers. They will often cross their eyes, or squint, to make what they are looking at blurry. Blurring the image lets them simplify the colors into lighter or darker areas. Then they draw the lightest areas first layering on top of them the darker layers and adding in details towards the end. This drawing mode emulates this process.
Getting Started
To get into breakdown mode on Android just press “Step by Step” on the home screen. Step by Step is the same thing as Breakdown mode.
To get into breakdown mode in iOS, start or continue any drawing. Go to Tools, then scroll to Breakdown, then press the Breakdown Mode switch.
That is going to take you to this screen.
You’ll notice the image broken down into just a few shades of gray. Hence the name of the drawing mode.
Each of these shades is going to be turned into a layer or Step for you to draw.
Underneath the image preview is the Cut Out toggle. We’ll cover what this done a little later in this article.
Under the Cut Out toggle, you can configure how many steps, also aka layers, that you want your drawing to have. The more steps you have, the more detailed the preview image will be. However, you don’t want to go over 5 or 6 steps. After 6 steps, it becomes too challenging to draw.
Finally, there is the exposure slider. This changes the exposure of the drawing before the breakdown process applied.
Play with the exposure slider along with the steps until the preview image looks close to how you want your drawing to look.
When you are done press the Done button in the toplight corner of the screen
At the bottom of the screen, you will see the color pallet. The color pallet tells you what order and shade to color in each layer.
The layer you are currently viewing, and supposed to color-in, is highlighted in red on your screen.
The layers are red because if they were the same color that you are trying to draw, it would be difficult to tell the difference between where you need to draw and where you have already drawn.
That being said, if you are drawing or painting a picture with a lot of red in it, you can change the color of the layers by going by pressing the Color buttons in the breakdown tab.
After the final Step, there are three additional buttons on your color pallet.
The first one is the image preview from the breakdown settings screen, the second one is your picture in black and white, and the third is your original picture. These help you add finishing touches at the end of your drawing
Cut Out Mode: OFF
We are going to start by making a drawing with cut out mode off. The way this works is, we are going to use the same very light color for all of these steps. But we are going to be layering that color on top of itself, to bring out the darker parts of our drawing.
To demonstrate this, I am using a watercolor pen filled with a little bit of black ink and water.
For the first layer, I am going to color in all of the red that is on my screen. Try and do this as evenly as possible. You don’t want darker and light spots, try to keep it consistent.
Now we are going to move onto the second layer by pressing the button labeled two.
We want to put down this layer precisely as before. By creating a new layer on top of parts of the first layer, the drawing will become darker where it needs to be.
Next, press the third Step’s button, and do the same thing. Put another light and even layer down on top of the 1st and second layers. You will start to notice your picture beginning to form.
For the last Step in the color pallet, this is your darkest layer, again do the same thing one more time.
Finally, we will use the last three buttons on the color pallet to add our finishing touches. You can now add details that you may have missed, or the breakdown layers may have oversimplified.
I like to use the strobe feature to compare the reference image to what is on the paper. I’ll talk about that in another post.
In the end, your picture should look something like this:
There are so many fun ways to experiment with the breakdown feature.
Here is another example where instead of using shades of gray, I am using lines to differentiate the layers creating a cross-hatching effect.
Each Step is a different line direction. Step one just lines from top right to bottom left, Step two just lines that go from the top left to bottom right, step three lines that go from left to right, etc…
When all of these lines get layered on top of each other, you end up with a very fun drawing!
Cut Out Mode: ON
That was Cut Out mode turned off, now lets check out when cut out is turned on.
Instead of layering the colors on top of each other, it separates or cuts out each layer. This might be good if you are using a medium that doesn’t work well with layering. For example, we are going to make this portrait using highlighter markers.
You will notice that the steps now go from darkest to lightest
For this first Step, we are going to use purple to represent our darkest color. However, you can choose any dark color you like.
Now we are going to move onto our second Step, and use a blue marker that is a little lighter in tone than the purple marker. Notice that the blue layer (Step 2) never overlaps with the purple layer (Step 1).
For the third Step, we are going to use the yellow marker to represent the lightest colors. Again notice that our yellow layer never overlaps with the purple or blue layers either.
We will skip the final Step in this mode because it shows us the negative space in our picture. That means those areas are supposed to be white, and there is no need to color them.
Next, we will go back to see if we missed any spots in our blue and purple layers. It is easy to miss coloring in spots with this mode, and you don’t want unintentional random gaps in your drawing.
The final thing I am going to do is use the last three buttons to add finishing touches to my drawing. This time I am using a black fine tip marker to add in some details that were missed by the breakdown layers, but are in the original picture.
In the end, your picture should look something like this.
That was our deep dive into breakdown mode!
If you make some cool drawings, we would love to see!
Upload your pictures in the app on iOS, email us, or tag us on Instagram!
