Photograph something Pen has painted, lift the shape off the paper, then repeat it across a sheet as big as A0. Everything happens on your device — no photo ever leaves your phone.
1 Start a shape
Choose photo or Take photo to bring in a painting. A shape with white paper around it works best — fill the frame, avoid hard shadows, and shoot straight on rather than at an angle.
Or tap 🖌 Create your own shape to paint one from scratch. See The paint tool below.
2 Prepare the image
This step is about getting a clean picture before you cut the shape out. Time spent here saves a lot of tidying later.
- Zoom and Move — zoom in, then drag to travel around the picture.
- Crop — a frame appears. Drag inside it to move it; drag a corner to resize. Then Apply crop.
- Brightness / Contrast — the basics.
- Whiteness — pulls off-white paper up to pure white. The paint survives; the paper disappears.
- Blackness — deepens dark ink so it reads solid rather than muddy.
- Vibrance — lifts the muted colours without over-cooking the already-bright ones.
- Sharpen — crisps up a slightly soft photo, which helps the next step find a clean edge. Go gently; past halfway it starts to look crunchy.
The single best trick: push Whiteness up to about 40–60 and add a little Contrast. Grey, shadowy paper turns pure white and the next step lifts the shape almost perfectly on its own.
3 Clean up the shape
The paper is removed automatically — the checkerboard shows what has become see-through. Now refine it.
- Edge sensitivity — the main dial. Too little and paper is left behind; too much and the paint starts eating away.
- Pick shape — tap one shape to use just that one.
- Erase colour — tap a colour to remove it everywhere (a pencil guideline, say). Add several; tune with Colour tolerance.
- Eraser / Restore — rub away stray bits by hand, or paint them back. Zoom in first for fiddly edges.
- ↶ Undo — steps back through everything you've done here, 20 deep.
- Keep — biggest shape, everything, or the whole photo untouched.
- Edge softness feathers the cut-out; Remove specks drops little flecks of noise.
🎨 Change colour
Tap 🎨 Change colour in Step 3 to open the colour panel. The shape recolours live as you drag, so you can see exactly what you're getting.
- Shift hue — rotate the whole palette around the colour wheel. All the internal colour relationships are kept. Colour strength pushes or mutes the saturation.
- Tint — recolour everything to one chosen colour, while keeping the light and dark of the original brushwork — so the watercolour depth, the pooled edges and the bristle marks all survive. It won't flatten into a silhouette.
Try this: save a shape, shift the hue, save it again, shift again and save a third. Now you have the same shape in three colourways — turn them all on in Step 4 and scatter them together.
💾 Saving shapes
When a shape looks right, tap ＋ Save this shape. You can keep up to 5. Each saved shape has an on/off switch — tap it to toggle. The × deletes it.
The pattern uses every shape that is turned on. Turn one on and the sheet repeats just that; turn three on and it mixes all three. If nothing is saved yet, the pattern simply uses the shape you're working on.
4 Repeat across the sheet
Choose paper size (A5 up to A0), resolution and orientation. The preview stays pinned at the top while you scroll the controls, so you see every change land.
Your saved shapes appear here too, so you can switch them on and off without scrolling back.
The option chips combine freely — tap any mix:
- Random placement — scatters the shapes, and they will never overlap. Density controls how packed it is.
- Random size — varies the scale. Works with a tidy grid or with scatter.
- Random rotation — tumbles each shape. Max tilt sets how far.
- Seamless — the sheet wraps at all four edges, so it repeats forever. Tick Show as 2×2 wall to check the join. This is the one for wallpaper.
Without random placement you get a grid: set the gap, and use row offset for a brick-style stagger. Shuffle ⟳ rerolls the randomness.
5 Save the sheet
Save to Photos / Files / Drive opens the share sheet — from there choose Save Image for the photo roll, Save to Files, or your Drive app. Download JPG instead is the fallback.
About big sheets. A0 at 300 dpi is about 139 megapixels — larger than most browsers, and phones especially, can build. The studio tells you the size and warns you before you try. For large prints, 150 dpi is the sensible choice: it's the normal standard for large format, since big pieces are viewed from further away.
🖌 The paint tool
Opens from Step 1. Paint a shape and it goes straight into the studio, ready to tile.
- Brush — wet watercolour: spreading water, pooling edges, bristle marks. Wetness controls how far it bleeds and blooms.
- Pen — solid ink.
- Pencil — dry, grainy, broken graphite. Go over an area again to build it up.
- Splatter — flings random dots at random sizes. Wetness throws them further.
- Ink splotch — a dropped blot of ink: an irregular blob with tendrils flicking off it and droplets scattered around. Tap for one, or drag to trail them.
- Eraser, a colour picker with swatches, size, and ↶ Undo.
Tap Save to studio and it's trimmed and added to your shapes.
📁 Saving your work
The studio remembers automatically — close it, come back, and your project is still there. Save project writes a file you can keep in Files or Drive (a durable backup, or a way to move to another device); Open project loads it back. New clears everything and starts again.
If a button seems to do nothing — the camera, photo library and saving all need real Safari. If you've opened this inside another app's preview window, tap the ••• and choose Open in browser.