I’m an amateur painter. At least I occasionally spend nights slopping paint around a canvas in a fashion that offers a lot of style in lieu of faithful reproduction. The truth is I’ve never been very good at drawing. I can sketch a cartoon but true to life draughtsmanship has never been my wheelhouse.

Over the years I’ve learned to use technology to ameliorate my scribbling ways. I would take a picture of the canvas I was working on and using Photoshop or GiMP, I’d superimpose the canvas on a reference photo and use the opacity controls to compare my marks with the real thing.

This process is effective but time consuming. There a lot of steps involved which is a pain when all I really want to know is if I’ve placed someone’s eyes too close together.

In the spirit of scratching my own itch, I recently wrote Obscur – an app for artists that simplifies this process into just a tap or two on your phone.

The app has a pretty minimal interface. You select a source image and then hover over your work in progress to compare the shapes and dimensions.

You can grab a snapshot of “live image” by clicking the pause button and change the opacity of the source by dragging your finger up and down the screen.