About this app

In 1525 Durer invented his drawing machine. It is a way of mechanically producing a picture. Drawing Machine Pro is an implementation of this technique on a mobile device that helps you draw a picture. This app will help you learn to draw. As your skill improves you can use the app less and less as you develop the proper mental repertoire for drawing pictures.

Durer's drawing machine works by dividing the picture into many smaller contiguously-connected pictures. Instead of drawing one large picture all at once you draw each of many small pictures, one after another. You can see how each smaller picture is connected to the other small pictures. The original picture is cut up into these smaller pieces by you specifying the number of squares you want. If you specify 10 squares then the original picture is sectioned into a 10 by 10 mesh of smaller pictures for a total of 100 small connected pictures. Overall, the technique is very simple and very effective.

If you wish you can use the app only to locate and place certain problematic points on your target image. Alternatively, you use the app only for some of the picture but not all of the picture.

Drawing Machine Pro has a built-in camera function that lets you use the camera on your mobile device to take a picture and apply the grid to your photo. Or, you can use an image from the Android Google Camera app or from the snapshots you have taken of the screen of your mobile device. The built-in camera is good if you don't want to be forced to use other apps during the process (you can stay within Drawing Machine Pro during the total drawing process). Getting an image from the Google Camera is good if you want the additional control of the camera itself provided by the Google Camera app. Getting an image from the snapshots lets you find an image on the internet and make a drawing of that particular image using Drawing Machine Pro. Nothing prevents you from using some other physical camera then transferring a digitized version of your camera image to one of the directories from which Drawing Machine Pro can access. This paid version does not show ads.

In addition to overlaying a grid on your image, this app helps you in other ways. It allows you to specify up to 4 different ranges of colors and then to de-emphasize or not display any pixels not in your color ranges. This helps you to concentrate on drawing specific colors. For example, suppose you are painting in oil and you have mixed 1 to 4 colors that match colors on your image. By selectively restricting displayed pixels to be the oil paint color(s) that you have just mixed you can concentrate on painting your freshly mixed color(s). De-emphasizing pixels not in specified color ranges allows you to ghost out parts of the image. For example, you can specify a "blend out" value of 50% to cause pixels not in any specified color range to fade halfway to black. Also this app allows you to zoom in on arbitrary sections of the image and to overlay a differently colored subgrid inside major squares.

New features

First version of Durer's Drawing Machine. This application performs a very simple function that will help you learn to draw.