One way illustrators engage in disciplined drawing—the process of drawing to
improve technical skills—is through studying and replicating reference images.
However, for many novice and intermediate digital artists, knowing how to
approach studying a reference image can be challenging. It can also be
difficult to receive immediate feedback on their works-in-progress. To help
these users develop their professional vision, we propose ArtKrit, a tool that
scaffolds the process of replicating a reference image into three main steps:
composition, value, and color. At each step, our tool offers computational
guidance, such as adaptive composition line generation, and automatic feedback,
such as value and color accuracy. Evaluating this tool with intermediate digital
artists revealed that ArtKrit could flexibly accommodate their unique workflows
and encourage reflection-in-action on their drawing process. As a design probe,
ArtKrit suggests that computational scaffolds that enact new norms may drive new
artistic insights.