Changelog · Sketch Hour

Version 0.6

8 November 2026 · A clearer home page

A shorter home page: three main features, three smaller tools, and a strip of example references.
Calmer type sizes across the website, and dusk blue for buttons and links.
A quick start at the top of the Handbook.
Darker grey text and larger tap targets, for easier reading and tapping.
A preview image when you share a link to Sketch Hour.

8 November 2026 · A new look

A calmer, gallery-like design: warm off-white pages, near-black type, large rounded cards and black buttons.
New fonts: Nunito for headings and Open Sans for text, served from Sketch Hour itself, not from Google.
Highlights in a gradient made from the Sketch Hour palette.
Pill-shaped tabs and switches, and a new dark mode to match.
New screenshots on the home page, using photo references.

5 November 2026 · Curriculum

New Learn tab: a curriculum of 30 units in eight tracks (figure, heads, perspective, light and value, color, composition, animals and environments), in a suggested order of ten terms.
Each exercise starts a timed session, a study, a Studio exercise or a timer, with the references it needs.
258 new references rendered for practice: posed mannequins, foreshortened views, head forms with construction lines, lit forms, still lifes, perspective boxes, cylinders, rooms, streets and colored forms.
147 public-domain master works from the Art Institute of Chicago for figure, portrait, value, color, landscape, composition and animal studies.
Progress tracking: exercises ticked off, units done, and minutes practiced per track.
A Curriculum page on the website with the whole plan.

5 November 2026 · Values in the Studio

Grayscale (G) and mirror (F) in the Studio, while you compose, draw and compare.
A Values panel that groups the reference into 5, 3 or 2 flat tones (V), with a slider for where shadow starts.
Brightness, contrast and a squint blur for seeing the big shapes of light and dark.
Downloads with guides and comparison downloads include the values you’ve set.

5 November 2026 · Studio

New Studio tab with a composition checker: a free frame in common shapes, black or dimmed outside, and guides for thirds, the golden grid and spiral, diagonals, golden triangles, dynamic symmetry, center lines and a drawing grid.
Fix a composition and draw it with a study timer, save it to the Library, or download it with or without guides.
Compare a photo of your drawing directly on top of the reference: pencil lines lifted off the paper in color, a pencil-on-print view, flicker, and hold-to-hide.
Line up the photo by straightening its four corners, by two matching points, or by hand.
Compose and Compare buttons in the reference viewer.

5 November 2026 · First release

Timed sessions with fixed times or 15-, 30- and 60-minute class plans, breaks and sound cues.
Library with boards, file uploads, pasting, GIFs and video clips.
Pinterest boards that refresh once a day, and single pins by pasting.
Reference viewer with zoom, mirror, grayscale, thirds grid, value studies, frame stepping and a study timer.
FilmGrab and MapCrunch sources, and a frame grabber for your own video files.
Timer with rounds and rests.
Practice log with weekly minutes, streak and recent sessions.
Light and dark themes.