Hello guys,

this is my first post, so first of all: Hi guys Been lurking around for quite some time now and finally decided to create an account.
And if this isn’t the right section for this, sorry in advance.

I’m into colored pencil, graphite and recently tried soft pastels and up until now i was always using the grid method to lay down the outlines, which works fine but sometimes it’s really annoying.

During my master thesis, which has nothing to do with art, i had to to a lot of image processing (or still have to do, because I’m far from done) with opencv (I don’t know if you have heard of it)

One night I had an idea, use my obtained knowledge and build some kind of “Camera Lucida App”. After two weeks of “after-work coding” I’m in the middle of drawing my first drawing with my app – ok maybe app is misleading, it’s running on my windows laptop – not my smartphone.

Anyways, so far it’s working so well, that I thought I could share my progress with you guys.

The way it works is you attach a webcam to your pc and place it above your piece of paper, facing down. Now the paper is detected automatically and “transformed and warped” to fit the actual size of the paper, so no matter where the webcam is located, you always get the same image.
I dont know if that’s understandable :clear: Anyways, in the next step the image you want to draw is placed on top of the webcam video feed and you can easily adjust the transparency and even zoom and pan around.

Now if you take a break or something, close everything and put your materials away and want to continue drawing the next day you can just calibrate it and because it detects the paper automatically and warps and fits it to the paper size and your reference photo, all your outlines will be in the right place.
It works really well.
Another scenario where you could use it is if you are almost finished with your drawing and want to check if all your proportions and colors are correct you do the exact same thing as above…

I’d love to show you some screenshots but I have to have 2 or more posts to add images/links, so maybe later :wink2:

My question to you is if you are interested in such an app/program? Right now it doesn’t really have a GUI because for me it’s enough the way it is. But if there’s interest I would add a GUI and more features.

What are your thoughts?

Regards
4ft4