Illustration Drawing Interface with Image Retrieval and Adjustable Grid Guidance

Due to the proliferation of digital drawing devices and the growing popularity of digital illustrations, it has become an emerging issue to support amateur users in the digital illustration practice. While existing drawing support systems guide observation in illustration practice, there are few works that support the observation process itself. To address this issue, we propose a novel illustration drawing interface for practice support that incorporates adjustable grid guidance for tracing and image retrieval of reference illustrations based on the user’s rough sketches. The proposed system takes a rough user-drawn sketched input and presents similar illustrations according to the image features in the collected dataset. The user can select the preferred illustration and reproduce it using the drawing interface and can adjust the fineness of the grid guidance. We conducted a user study to verify the effectiveness of the proposed system in supporting illustration drawing practices.