Tracing is a studio technique with a four-hundred-year paper trail, and it has never stopped being one. You use it to get a shape down accurately and fast, and then you get on with the drawing.
It is worth knowing that this objection is quite new, and that essentially every institution that has ever successfully taught drawing has ignored it.
Tracing has always been the method
Renaissance workshops had apprentices copy the master's drawings before they were allowed to draw from life, and copy them by any means available, including pouncing: pricking holes along the lines of a drawing and dusting charcoal through them onto the sheet below. It is tracing with extra steps and it was standard practice.
Vermeer almost certainly used a camera obscura or something like it. Ingres, one of the most feared draughtsmen of the nineteenth century, traced. Disney's animators worked on light boxes, stacking drawings and tracing through the sheet beneath. The whole medium is built on it. Rotoscoping, which is tracing over filmed footage frame by frame, produced a substantial part of twentieth-century animation.
None of these people were trying to get away with something. Tracing was the method because tracing teaches a specific thing very efficiently.
What it actually does
A drawing that comes out wrong is usually not a hand problem. It is a seeing problem. You put an eye too high on the head because you know where eyes go, and what you know overrides what is in front of you. The hand draws symbols, the idea of a nose and the idea of a hand, unless the eye is held to shapes.
Tracing interrupts that. When you follow a line that is already there, you cannot substitute what you assume for what is present. Your hand goes where the shape goes, and your eye registers the shape instead of the symbol for it. Proportions come out at the length they actually are. The shadow under a jaw stays a hard edge instead of becoming a smudge.
What tracing does not do is compose the picture or invent the subject. Nobody claims it does. It is one move in the work, and it is the one that puts an accurate shape on the page in minutes instead of an hour, which is where the rest of the drawing starts.
Why a phone is a reasonable place to do this
The case against the phone is obvious. The screen is small, most people do not have a stylus for it, and a finger is a blunt instrument.
The case for it is that the phone is the only drawing surface you actually have with you.
Frequency beats session length, and it is not close. Twenty minutes four times a week puts more finished line on paper than three hours on a Sunday. The iPad is in a bag at home. The phone is in your hand in a queue, on a train, in the twenty minutes before someone shows up.
The small screen also turns out to be less of a problem than it sounds for this particular exercise, because tracing at phone size holds you at the level of large shapes and proportion, which is what makes a drawing read. It is quite hard to get lost rendering individual eyelashes on a screen that size. That constraint is doing you a favour.
A finger is fine for this. You are following a line that already exists, not trying to land a precise taper. If you want a stylus, any cheap capacitive one works; you do not need a Pencil on the phone to get the benefit.
How tracing works in drawsta
The whole loop is built to be short, because a loop that takes five minutes to set up is a loop you do not run.
Find something. The app opens to a wall of pictures, ready to trace: tool lineups drawn as characters, animals in two-tone profile, cut-paper studies, objects photographed where they were left, trays of tools laid out in rows, and flat drawings of benchtop machines. Different every visit. Original pictures from weirdLA, new ones every week.
Tap it. It lands on your canvas as a ghosted trace layer: the picture, washed back, sitting under where you are about to draw. There is a slider that takes it from a faint wash to the full photograph, so you can bring it up when you are looking for an edge and push it back down when you want to see your own line.
Follow the lines. Draw over it. Layers are there if you want to keep your line work separate from a second pass.
Turn the ghost off. What is left is yours: your line, on clean paper, with nothing underneath it.
That last step is the one that matters and it is the reason the ghost is a layer rather than a background. You get to see what you actually drew, without the crutch, the moment you are done.
drawsta is not the only app with a trace mode. Infinite Painter has one too, and it holds more than one reference image at a time, which drawsta cannot. The difference is where the picture comes from.
Honest about the iPhone version
The iPad is a better drawing surface than the iPhone. That is true of every app and it is true of this one: bigger canvas, Apple Pencil with pressure and tilt, more room for the controls that let you work finely.
The iPhone version is for frequency rather than finish. It is where twenty minutes of drawing happens because you had twenty minutes. Your drawings sync through your own private iCloud, so something started on the phone is on the iPad when you sit down with it.
There is no account to make, no ads, and no tracking. It is free, and it needs iOS 17 or later.
Trace one, then draw it again
Try it once with a timer. Ten minutes, one picture, trace it, then turn the ghost off and look at what is on the page.
The useful part is not the traced drawing. It is that you now know precisely which bits you got right and which bits you fudged, which is information you did not have ten minutes earlier. Then draw the same subject again without the ghost and see how much further you get.
That gap, between the traced one and the second one, is the whole thing. It is what the apprentices were doing with the charcoal and the pinholes.
