Art Reference

The all-in-one reference tool built for painters: grid, value study, color harmonies, & color mixing. Everything you need, nothing you don't.

Artists Reference is made for painters, illustrators, and traditional artists who work with real materials, not pixels. It gives you the digital reference tools you need while you're creating physical art.

Key Features

• Gallery: Take a photo of your finished work, add a frame, and view them all together in your personal gallery.

• Value Study Mode: Instantly view your reference in 7-value scale to see shadows and highlights or greyscale to see tone and contrast clearly.

• Gridlines: Helps get your under-sketch down accurately.

• Side-by-Side View: Compare your reference and your canvas at the same time, optimized for tablets and stands.

• Crop and Frame Tools: Adjust composition and aspect ratio of your reference to match your canvas before you begin.

• Collections: Curated starter projects to help you practice and improve, including Animals, Architecture, Botanical, Figure, Landscape, Master Study, Portrait, and Still Life.

• Color harmonies: Experiment with color harmonies to define the feeling if your piece and save swatches

• Offline Friendly: Works anywhere, even in the studio or outdoors.

• Clean, Focused Design: No ads. No clutter. Just the reference tools you need.

• All of your artwork is private and only saved in your personal icloud. No artwork is visble to the internet or AI models

Made for Traditional Artists

Whether you're painting with oils, gouache, watercolor, or charcoal, Artists Reference helps you translate what you see into confident compositions and balanced values. Start with curated Collections to build your skills, or bring your own references for any project.

No AI art is used for any of the starter project references in this app. All photos are attributed to the original artists with links to their portfolio.