A koi drawing needs more than koi photographs. Anatomy in one place, the artists whose brushwork you are borrowing in another, the color you keep coming back to somewhere you can see it. One board can hold all of it, laid out however the project makes sense to you.
Save the source while it is on screen
Send an image to ArtDeck from another app’s Share menu, drag it from Safari or Photos, or paste it onto the board. If the source is somewhere else, open Photos, Files, the camera, or the document scanner from ArtDeck.
Keep a URL as a link card when the page matters as much as the picture. Import a direct image, video, or PDF link when you need the material itself on the canvas.
If the board syncs, what you saved on your iPhone or Mac during the week is already on the canvas when you pick up the iPad.
Give each part of the piece its own region
A board holds more than photographs. Give the anatomy its own corner and the artist references another: paintings you are learning from, with links back to the gallery or Instagram account they came from. Concepts, written notes, the colors you settled on, and studies saved from ArtDeck’s lenses can each hold a region of their own.
Nothing enforces the regions. The canvas is freeform, and items can be grouped or nested when a cluster gets busy enough to need it.
Inspect the reference without changing it
ArtDeck includes five study lenses that open over an item. Before drawing the koi, the question was which masses survive once the detail goes. The Read lens blurs and groups the photograph until only the big shapes remain, and a pattern that looked complicated turns out to be four or five patches.
The other lenses handle other questions: Values for light and dark, Color for palettes and zones, Composition for structure, Measure for proportion. None of them alters the source file. Keep the result on the board next to the original, or export it.
Keeping the answer matters more than it sounds. An hour later you will have forgotten which of the two photographs had the cleaner value break, and the saved study on the board answers that without redoing the work. Over a few projects the board stops being storage and turns into a record of what you noticed.
You do not need a study plan to use this
Most writing about this kind of tool assumes you are practicing deliberately, working through fundamentals in some sensible order. That is one way to use it and not the most common one.
The other way is smaller. You saved a photograph because something about it worked and you could not say what. Open the Values lens and drop it to two tones: either the composition survives as a shape or it does not, and you have your answer in a second. Pull the palette on an image whose color you envy and the surprise is usually the proportions, that the color carrying the picture occupies four percent of it.
Nothing about that is a curriculum. It is looking properly at something you already liked, which is the part that quietly accumulates into judgment. If you draw for a living, this is practice. If you draw on weekends, it is just curiosity with better tools, and it works the same way.
Keep the board beside the drawing app
On iPad, ArtDeck runs in Slide Over, Split View, and Stage Manager. Slide Over floats the board as a rectangle over the drawing app; leave it there for the whole session or swipe it aside between checks. Split View gives the board a full-height column instead, and Stage Manager puts it in its own window on a desk setup.
A color can cross between the two. Pick one off a reference with the eyedropper and it lands on the clipboard, ready to paste into the color picker on the other side.
How much room to give the board depends on the drawing app and the display. A dense board is easier to read in a wide split, while two or three references hold up fine in the floating rectangle.
If Procreate is the drawing app, compare this setup with its one-image Reference Companion.
Common questions
Does the board need an internet connection?
No. Boards are stored on the device and work offline. iCloud sync carries every board across your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, or leaves the ones you choose where they are, so a board that never leaves the iPad is a fully supported way to use the app.
Can I use this beside apps other than Procreate?
Yes. Slide Over, Split View, and Stage Manager are iPadOS window modes, not app integrations, so the board sits beside Clip Studio Paint, Fresco, Affinity, or anything else that supports them. What varies is whether the other app accepts a dragged image or a pasted color, which is worth testing with your normal canvas.
Do the lenses change my original image?
No. In ArtDeck, each lens draws over the item without changing the saved source. A result you want to keep is saved to the board as a separate item beside it.
Is an iPad the best device for this?
It is the one where collecting and drawing happen in the same place, which is why the workflow above is written for it. Collecting is often easier on an iPhone, and a dense board is easier to arrange on a Mac. The same board opens on all three if you turn sync on.