Draw Anime - AR Tracing App

Review by eFreeware

Draw Anime - AR Tracing App is a free Art & Design release from Braly JSC, built around a simple idea: use your device's camera to lay an anime sketch over whatever is in front of you, then follow it with pencil and paper. The app is rated Everyone, has passed 50 million installs, and holds a 4.4 average from 141,832 ratings. It arrived in January 2025 and was last updated in September 2026.

What makes it worth a second look is the combination of camera-based tracing and guided tutorials. Instead of handing you an empty canvas and wishing you luck, the app walks through drawings in stages, so a beginner can work through a character piece by piece. The tracing layer sits on top of your surroundings, which turns a phone or tablet into a kind of lightbox you can carry anywhere.

It is not a fully equipped studio. The app is free with ads and in-app purchases, and its focus stays on anime-style drawing practice rather than general illustration. If that narrow brief matches what you are after, the rest of this review explains how the pieces fit together.

Tracing anime onto the world around you

The core feature is augmented reality drawing. Your camera feed becomes the backdrop, and the app layers an anime sketch on top of it, so the drawing sits against your desk, your wall or whatever else the lens picks up. The developer describes this as blending your surroundings with your own creations, and that is the effect the feature is going for.

The tracing tools are where most of the practical control lives. You can extend a guide, adjust its opacity, switch the flashlight on or off, lock a reference in place, or reset it. Opacity matters more than it sounds: a faint overlay lets you see both the guide and your pencil line, while a stronger one works better when you are sketching in a dim room. Locking keeps the reference from drifting while you work, and reset clears the slate when a drawing goes wrong.

The result is a workflow that suits people who sketch with pencil and paper and want digital help rather than a purely digital canvas. You are still making the marks yourself, which is the point. The app supplies the structure and the reference; your hand does the rest.

Learning through staged tutorials

The tutorial system breaks anime drawings into manageable steps. Rather than presenting a finished character and leaving you to reverse-engineer it, the app sequences the process so each stage builds on the last. That structure is what makes the app approachable for someone who has never drawn a face or a pose before.

The developer positions this for a younger crowd of anime fans who want to pick up drawing in an engaging way, and the step-by-step framing fits that audience well. Working through a drawing in stages gives you a sense of progress that a single intimidating reference image does not. It also means a session can be short: one or two steps, then stop, then pick it up again later.

Because the tutorials are anime-specific, the practice you get is concentrated on that style. Eyes, hair, expressions and character proportions come up repeatedly, which is useful if anime is the look you want to draw. It is a focused tool rather than a broad drawing course.

Keeping track of what you draw

The Artwork section is the app's record-keeping side. It tracks your artistic journey and surfaces insights about your progress and achievements, so the app is doing more than serving up one drawing at a time. For anyone who responds well to seeing a history build up, that adds a reason to come back.

There is also a favorites list. You can mark the characters you want to master and reach them again quickly, which saves hunting through the catalog every time you sit down to practice. If you are working on one character across several sessions, that shortcut is the difference between steady progress and starting over each time.

Finished pieces can be saved or shared with friends. Sharing is a natural fit for an app aimed partly at teenagers, since a completed drawing is easy to show off. Saving gives you something to compare against later as your skills change.

What you need before you start

The app depends on your device's camera. That is not a side feature; the camera is what makes the tracing possible, since the overlay has to sit on top of a live view of your surroundings. A device with a working camera is therefore the basic requirement, and the experience is built around pointing it at the surface you want to draw on.

The controls you will be using while tracing are extend, opacity, flashlight, lock and reset. Those are the levers you adjust as you work rather than something you configure once and forget.

The app is free to download, carries ads, and offers in-app purchases. It is rated for Everyone, and the developer invites feedback by email for questions and contributions. Recent updates have focused on performance improvements and bug fixes, with the latest version noted as 1.1.41.

Where this app fits

The strongest match is a teenager or anime fan who wants to learn to draw characters and responds to guidance. The step-by-step tutorials, the camera tracing and the progress tracking all point at that user. Someone practicing anime faces and poses with pencil and paper, with a phone propped up nearby, will get the most out of what is here.

It also suits anyone who finds a blank page intimidating. Having a guide underneath your pencil removes the hardest part of starting, and the staged tutorials mean you are never asked to draw something far beyond your current level. That combination is genuinely useful for building confidence early on.

The app is narrower than a general drawing tool. Readers who want an open-ended illustration suite or a tool for other subjects will find the scope here limited by design, and that is worth weighing before installing.

A focused tracing companion for anime practice

Draw Anime - AR Tracing App does one job and does it in a way that is easy to understand: it puts an anime guide in front of your camera, breaks the drawing into steps, and keeps a record of what you have made. The tracing controls give you enough adjustment to make the overlay usable in different lighting and on different surfaces, and the favorites list keeps your current project within reach.

The trade-offs are straightforward, and none of that is hidden; it is simply the shape of the app. The 4.4 average from a large rating base suggests the approach lands with a lot of people.

If you are learning to draw anime characters and want structure rather than a blank canvas, this is a sensible install. If you are looking for a broad illustration tool, the focus here will feel tight. For its intended audience, it offers a clear path from tracing a guide to drawing on your own.

What's new in version 1.1.41

Draw Anime version 1.1.41 16/09/2026 - Improve performance - Fix bugs