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Life & fun · August 5, 2025

Rest of the Owl

Hey all! My girlfriend is really good at drawing and wants to become an illustrator for children's books, so she's practicing drawing various animals. We were at a cafe and she got stuck staring at a blank page trying to draw a fox using a reference photo. So I generated some pencil sketches from the reference image with ChatGPT. Seeing the drawing broken down step by step made it easier to start for her. The next day she asked me to generate sketches for 10 more photos, so I decided to polish my prompts and wrap the workflow in a self-service app for her. The app allows you to upload any…

Rest of the Owl launched on August 5, 2025 with 15 votes, #814 of 8,530 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.

Visit restoftheowl.app ↗Rest of the Owl alternativestop 10% of August 2025

What it does

Upload any image and get a 5-step pencil drawing breakdown, from basic shapes to final shading. Bust through the "blank page moment", warm up creatively, or just have fun sketching.

Turn any photo into 5 step-by-step pencil drawing exercises. Upload an image and get shapes → outline → shading → finished sketch in minutes.

Upload an image. Get five pencil drawing steps, from basic shapes to a fully detailed pencil drawing. Upload any photo (for example, an owl!). We’ll turn it into 5 pencil sketches. Use the generated pencil sketches to warmup, learn, and breaking through the "staring at the blank page" moments. Rest of the Owl works with all kinds of images - click on one of them below and practice drawing for free. The sketches for every photo was one-shotted with the app - no retakes. No subscriptions. Start with just one photo, or save withfrom restoftheowl.app

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hey all! My girlfriend is really good at drawing and wants to become an illustrator for children's books, so she's practicing drawing various animals. We were at a cafe and she got stuck staring at a blank page trying to draw a fox using a reference photo. So I generated some pencil sketches from the reference image…

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