Continuing the evolution of the digital journal, the team at Morpholio has granted another favor to the creators who utilize them–a new tool for use with their wildly popular Trace application. “Stencil” is a completely customizable stencil for digital drawing.
Stencils have always played an invaluable role in the design process, simplifying the addition of detailed and scaled figures, patterns, symbols, furniture, and more to drawings.
The Stencil tool for the Trace app (iOS only, sorry Android users) allows users to quickly create their own collection of graphics for drawings or designs for custom patterns. Stencil features an array of illustrations and symbols designed for Stencil that have been created for architecture, interiors, industrial, and graphic design. More importantly, Stencil can automatically turn any image into a custom template in seconds.
Creating stencils sits perfectly between the architect’s sketch and the quick photo. You’re trying to capture something–a texture, pattern, or detail that you want to use. Sketching is great, but slow. Taking a photo buries it in the photo album. Generating a stencil automatically creates an incredible tool that you can utilize in various ways. The stencil is the quickest path to distill an image into an actionable idea.
— Mark Collins, Stencil Co-Creator
The drawings created in Morpholio Trace are a combination of pre-made illustrations (figures, furniture, landscape, etc), original sketch, and background image. Adding the custom stencils can annotate the drawings or enhance them with creative graphics. The Stencil tool works with the color palettes and pen types in the Trace application to create multilayered drawings, not just in the manner that real-world stencils are used but also as a creative tool.
Stencils have always been used in art and other creative work–Morpholio has taken this antiquated tool to its next logical evolution, the digital realm.
Why is this any better or worse than just cloning a piece of clip art? The net effect is the same. Once digital, the stencil serves no actual purpose. With paper, the stencil is supposed to create exact duplicates of each shape. With a collection of clips or symbols, an artist can already get duplicates of any shape with a quick tap or keystroke. Unless you can show some great improvement to a digital artist’s workflow, I can’t see any benefit to this other than “cute”.