Drawings to Trace — A Curated Library You Can Project onto Paper 15 step-by-step tutorials, one tracing method that works for all of them.

Tutorials

15

And growing

Difficulty

Beginner

All entries

Method

AR overlay

Phone camera

Best for

Ages 6+

Kids & adults

What is a tracing library?

"Drawings to trace" used to mean a stack of printed coloring-book pages and a sheet of carbon paper. Today it means any reference image you can project onto your paper through a phone camera — so the library is whatever you can pull up on a screen.

The catch: not every image traces well. A photo with a busy background or a complex character with hundreds of detail lines will frustrate you in the first ten minutes. The best drawings to trace share three traits:

• Clean outlines. Edges are obvious; you can see where each line starts and ends without squinting.
• Beginner-friendly construction. Underlying shapes are simple enough that, after tracing once, you can sketch it again from scratch.
• A recognizable result. Something you'd be glad to show off when the page is done.

Every tutorial linked below was built with those three traits in mind.

How to trace any of these — in five minutes

Pick a tutorial, open the cover image on your phone, prop the phone above your paper, and trace through the camera. The full step-by-step walkthrough lives here:

Or skip the freehand entirely: open any cover from the list below in ARTrace and the app will project it through the camera with opacity, pinch-to-zoom, and lock controls already wired up.

Cute animals — start here if you're new

The animal tutorials all share the same circle-plus-oval skeleton, so once you've drawn one, the next one is much faster. Beginner-friendly, 30–45 minutes each, big visual payoff.

Characters and fantasy — pop-culture favorites

Licensed character art is exactly what beginners want to copy but can't free-hand. These tutorials build the silhouette piece by piece, so the proportions stay right even on the first attempt.

Flowers and nature — slower, more meditative

Less skeleton, more layering. Flower tutorials reward patience and make great practice for shading and color work.

What's coming next

The library expands every couple of weeks. On the near horizon: more pop-culture characters (Bluey, Sonic), animals that round out the beginner set (butterfly, horse, dinosaur), and a flowers roundup that consolidates rose and sunflower with lily, daisy, and tulip.

Bookmark this page or follow ARTrace on the App Store — every new tutorial gets added to the right section below.