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Trace & Compare

Trace a drawing to get the shape into your hand, then draw it again with nothing underneath — and lay the two on top of each other to see where your lines actually went.

Pick something to draw

Fifteen line drawings, drawn for this page. Start easy — the point is the line, not the subject.

15 drawings, made for this page — nothing borrowed from anywhere else.

Or use your own picture

Any image on this device works as a guide — a photo, a sketch you scanned, a drawing you are working from.

Your picture never leaves your device. The browser opens it straight from your files and draws it on this page; there is no upload in this tool and nothing is sent anywhere, including the image you save at the end.

How to use it

  1. Trace it once

    Pick a drawing and it appears under your hand, faint. Follow the lines. The slider fades it out, so the same drawing gets harder every time you come back to it — start with the guide strong and take it down as the shape starts to feel familiar.

  2. Then draw it with nothing underneath

    Switch to drawing from scratch and the original moves to the side. This is the part that actually teaches you anything: tracing trains your hand, drawing from a reference trains your eye, and only the second one transfers to a blank page.

  3. Lay them on top of each other

    Press overlay and your lines land on the original, coloured by how far off they were. Green sat on the line, yellow was a line away, red went somewhere else — and the parts you never drew show up too. That picture is more useful than the number beside it.

Tracing is a warm-up, not the lesson

Tracing gets a bad name, and half of that is deserved. Following a line teaches your hand what the movement feels like, but it never asks your eye to work out where the line should go — and on a blank page, that judgement is the entire job. People who only trace get very good at tracing.

It earns its place as the first half of a pair. Trace the shape once so the movement is in your hand, then immediately draw the same thing with nothing underneath it. The second attempt is where the learning is, and the gap between the two is the most useful thing you will look at all session. That gap is what the overlay is for.

Why the overlay beats the number

A percentage tells you how it went. The overlay tells you where it went — and those are different pieces of information. Almost everyone drifts in a consistent direction: circles come out as eggs leaning the same way, long lines bow outwards, the right-hand side of a symmetrical thing is always smaller than the left. You cannot see that in a score. You can see it immediately when your line is sitting a centimetre outside the original, in red, in the same place it was last time.

The parts you never drew are marked too, and they are worth as much attention. Missing lines are usually not a hand problem — they are a looking problem, the bits you stopped noticing because your brain had already decided what the object was.

Your picture stays on your device

The fifteen drawings here were made for this page. If you would rather work from something of your own, you can load any image on your device and use it as the guide instead — a photo, a scan of a sketch, a page from your own sketchbook.

That picture never leaves the browser. It is opened straight from your files and drawn on this page; there is no upload in this tool, no account, and nothing is sent anywhere — including the image you save at the end, which is put together in this tab on your own device. Close the tab and there is nothing left to delete.

Where to go next

Once the shapes here feel easy, the trouble is usually deciding what to draw next. Things to draw has a few hundred subjects sorted by how hard they are, the random drawing generator hands you one at a time, and Doodle Dash puts a sixty second clock on it — which is a surprisingly good cure for drawing the same safe thing over and over.

Questions people ask

What is trace and compare?
It is a drawing practice tool with two halves. First you trace over a line drawing so your hand learns the shape, then you draw the same thing on blank paper while the original sits beside you. Finally the two are laid on top of each other, with your lines coloured by how far they landed from the original, so you can see exactly where you drifted rather than just feeling that something is off.
Is my picture uploaded anywhere?
No. If you load a picture from your own device, the browser opens it straight from your files and draws it on this page — there is no upload in this tool, no server involved, and nothing is sent anywhere. The same is true of the image you save at the end: it is put together in this tab, on your device. Closing the tab is enough to remove every trace of it.
Why is there no score for my own picture?
Because it would be a guess. The fifteen built-in drawings are stored as lines, so the tool knows precisely where every line is and can measure your stroke against the real thing. Your own picture is just pixels to a browser — we would have to guess where the lines are, and that guess falls apart on photos, shading and texture. A percentage built on a bad guess looks exactly like a percentage built on a good one, so we do not print it. The overlay still works and still shows you the difference.
How is the match worked out?
Both drawings are turned into evenly spaced points and compared in both directions: how much of the original your lines covered, and how much of what you drew landed on the original. The two are combined, so neither shortcut works — scribbling over the whole page covers everything but almost none of it is on target, and drawing one careful line is perfectly on target but covers almost nothing. Anything within about 30 units on a 1000-wide canvas counts as on the line, which is roughly a fingertip.
Does tracing actually help you learn to draw?
On its own, not much — it trains the hand movement but lets the eye off the hook, and the eye is what does the work on a blank page. It helps a lot as the first half of a pair: trace it, then immediately draw it again from scratch and compare. That second attempt is where the learning happens, and having the overlay tell you which lines drifted is the part you cannot do for yourself.
Do I need a pen tablet, or an account?
Neither. It runs in the browser tab with a mouse, a finger or a pen, and there is nothing to sign up for or install. A phone works fine — the drawing area keeps the same proportions on every screen, so a drawing traced on a phone and one traced on a laptop are scored the same way.

Next up

More to draw once the lines line up.