Pocket Easel vs Art Reference

Pocket Easel is a color-study tool for painting on the go. Built around gamut masking — a color theory used by traditional painters — it helps you capture harmonious color quickly, right from your phone. Gamut Mask Color Picker Choose from preset mask shapes on the color wheel to constrain your palette. Every color you pick stays in harmony with the rest, without needing color theory expertise. Joystick Color Adjustment Drag or long-press the current color swatch to bring up a joystick for fine color control. Adjust hue and saturation with your thumb, designed for one-handed use while holding your phone. Canvas Zoom & Pan Pinch to zoom in on details, pan to reposition, and reset with one tap. Shape Tools Draw lines, circles, and rectangles with precise geometry alongside your freehand brush and fill tools. Color-Process Time-Lapse Export a time-lapse of your painting session that shows not just your strokes, but where each color came from on the gamut wheel. Landscape Mode for Two-Handed Painting Rotate your phone and the toolbar and color dock move to either side, so both thumbs stay free to paint and pick color. Pocket Easel is built for quick color studies, not detailed illustration — the constraint is the point. All painting tools are free, including watermarked export. A one-time purchase unlocks high-resolution export and time-lapse video.

Art Reference: Value Study helps painters, illustrators, and traditional artists see any reference more clearly. Study values, simplify light and shadow, overlay grids, and paint side-by-side with your canvas. A value (or tone) is how light or dark a color is. Learning to see values is one of the fastest ways to improve your drawing and painting. But it's hard to read shadows and highlights through all the color. This app makes it effortless. SEE YOUR REFERENCE IN VALUES Instantly convert any photo to grayscale, or a 7-value posterized scale. Flick between levels of detail, start in simple black and white, then build up value by value to train your eye. CROP & FRAME TO YOUR CANVAS Match your reference's composition and aspect ratio to your canvas before your first stroke. GRIDLINES Overlay grids to lay in your under-sketch with correct proportions. CURATED COLLECTIONS Don't have a reference ready? Start with dozens of hand-picked photos across Animals, Architecture, Botanical, Figure, Landscape, Portrait, Still Life, Skulls, and Master Studies from the great painters. NO AI ART Every starter reference is a real photograph or artwork, attributed to the original artist with a link to their portfolio. No AI-generated images. And your own artwork stays private in your personal iCloud, never shared online, never used to train AI models. WORKS OFFLINE No connection needed. Perfect for the studio, plein air, or anywhere you paint. CLEAN, FOCUSED, NO ADS Just the reference tools you need.