Art Reference: Easel Assistant1.63 - App Store

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.

Version History - You can now customize the color of your gridlines
- Replaced the finished artwork frames with more 3D style frames
- Added the ability to color highlight different values in your value study 1.63 Sep 17 • Your project list sort order is now saved between sessions.
• Confirmation prompt before deleting a project.
• Projects are now automatically marked complete after adding your final artwork.
• Deleting a project while it's open now closes it cleanly.
• Thumbnails now keep their correct aspect ratio in the project list.
• New setting to hide the star from the project list.
• Tidied up spacing and layout throughout the project list and settings.
• Link to walkthrough video on YouTube.

Bug Fixes
• Fixed an issue where a project would close when rotating the device to landscape.
• Fixed issue where Collections and Gallery link on ipad has squared off corners, now rounded.
• Various visual polish and stability improvements. 1.62 Aug 13 New Collections & Reference Content
• Added curated Collections, including a Master Study collection and a Skulls collection, to give you more reference material to work from.

New Gallery
• Browse your finished artwork in a redesigned Gallery with a new grid view option and quick view for fast previewing.

Artwork Capture
• Photograph your artwork directly in the app, with a new exposure slider for better control over how it looks.

Customization & Tools
• Set any grid size for your reference grids.
• Color harmony swatch and dot refinements.
• Primary reference now scales to fit the screen width.

Quality-of-Life Improvements
• Your project list sort order is now saved between sessions.
• Confirmation prompt before deleting a project.
• Projects are now automatically marked complete after adding your final artwork.
• Deleting a project while it's open now closes it cleanly.
• Thumbnails now keep their correct aspect ratio in the project list.
• New setting to hide the star from the project list.
• Tidied up spacing and layout throughout the project list and settings.

Bug Fixes
• Fixed an issue where a project would close when rotating the device to landscape.
• Various visual polish and stability improvements. 1.61 Aug 11 Now add photos of your finished artwork and view them in your personal gallery. 1.60 May 28 Refined some small branding things like screenshots and name. 1.54 Apr 20 New collection for "skulls"

Fixed an issue where rotating the device within a project, closed the project 1.53 Apr 1 Added a new color harmonies tool in the secondary reference panel. 1.52 Feb 14 Added starter projects under a new “Collections” feature, including:
- Animals
- Architecture
- Botanical
- Figure
- Landscape
- Master Study
- Portrait
- Skill Life

Appending to the last update, added the ability to redeem offer codes from the paywall screen. 1.51 Feb 3 Added starter projects under a new “Collections” feature, including:
- Animals
- Architecture
- Botanical
- Figure
- Landscape
- Master Study
- Portrait
- Skill Life 1.50 Feb 2 Completely rewrote the cloud sync to fix issue where projects only synced per device but did not sync across devices using the same iCloud Account. Removed image cropping due to remaining sync issues while I troubleshoot and fix in the next few versions. 1.43 Jan 13 - Added onboarding flow
- Added activity stats to settings
- New app icon options (paid)
- Reached feature completion to add IAP to create more than 3 projects 1.42 Jan 4 - Added onboarding flow
- Added activity stats to settings
- New app icon options (paid)
- Reached feature completion to add IAP to create more than 3 projects 1.41 12/26/2025 - Added onboarding flow
- Added activity stats to settings
- New app icon options (paid)
- Reached feature completion to add IAP to create more than 3 projects 1.40 12/20/2025 - Added color mixing matrix and explaination to secondary reference
- Moved the close button to the top left to match iOS best practice
- Cleaned up filters to remove options that returned low quality results 1.31 12/07/2025 - Language localization to Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, and Italian.
- Fixed bug where grid colors were not readable.
- Fixed bug where app would crash when opening exampl app.
- Added feedback button to email 1.30 11/29/2025 - Fixed sync issues
- Clarify what reference is the button is adding (primary or secondary)
- Added numbers to the grid
- New UI when no project is open on iPad
- Consistent close button styles 1.21 11/24/2025 - Added the ability to search for reference photos
- Added more value scale options
- Changed value scale colors to greyscale
- More crisp value scale break points 1.2 11/19/2025 - Added settings > choose new app icon
- Added settings > choose light or dark appearance
- Fixed typos in app store screenshots
- Added ability to open value study in full screen
- Full screen modal is not zoomable 1.1 10/31/2025 1.0 10/12/2025