Studio Tools
Digital tools for the working studio
Most art software is built for digital illustration. These four apps are built for the other kind of studio — the one with wet paint, physical canvases, and pigment on the workbench — by a working painter who builds them for his own practice first.
Art Scanner & Studio Archive
Artwork Camera
A phone-camera art scanner built specifically for flat artwork — paintings, drawings, prints — instead of documents. Live edge detection finds the artwork in frame, a two-axis level keeps the phone parallel to the surface, and glare detection warns before a reflection ruins the shot. Auto-capture fires once the piece is framed, level, and stable, then a four-corner precision crop straightens and corrects perspective without the flattened, over-processed look of a document scan.
Every saved piece carries real studio metadata — title, artist, medium, year, inventory number, status, collection, and tags — searchable and filterable without uploading the archive to a cloud service. A work in progress can be tracked as an animated GIF showing how the piece developed. Everything stays on-device; Sign in with Apple is optional and Photos access is only requested on export.
Built for painters, illustrators, printmakers, art students, and galleries who need an honest photographic record without a studio lighting setup.
Oil Stick & Pigment Formulation
Wax & Pigment
A formulation calculator for anyone hand-making oil sticks, cold wax medium, or pigment-based paint recipes. It handles pigment selection, oil-to-wax ratio math, stick firmness adjustment, batch quantity scaling, material tracking, and saved, exportable recipe records — backed by real pigment data including oil absorption, color index, opacity, and toxicity and handling notes, so recipes stay consistent and repeatable batch to batch.
If you've ever tried to reverse-engineer a wax-to-pigment ratio from a stick you made months ago with no notes, this is the app that fixes that specific problem.
See the full process in our oil paint stick guide, or the material science in the oil & cold wax guide.
Composition & Proportion Check
Painting Mirror
Digitizes the oldest trick in the studio: hold a painting up to a mirror and every proportion mistake your eye had stopped seeing suddenly reappears. Painting Mirror replicates that reset — plus a value viewer to check tonal structure independent of color, a blur mode to test composition at a squint, composition guides, and a deliberate critique delay so you assess a saved study with fresh eyes instead of the ones that have been staring at it for three hours.
The underlying problem it solves is visual adaptation — the longer you look at your own work, the less reliable your instinct becomes. Flipping, blurring, or simplifying the view breaks that familiarity without needing a second person's opinion.
Studio Time Tracking
NotaTime
A minimalist time tracker for freelancers, commission painters, and independent studio practices who just want to log hours and get back to the work — open it, start a timer, close it. No categories to configure, no client-portal setup, no subscription. A free trial, then a one-time purchase to own it outright.
Useful for anyone billing hourly for commission work, or simply tracking how studio time actually splits between painting, prep, and admin.
Who makes these
All four are built by Nice Software AS — "software for the working studio" — a small, independent studio run by Georg Óskar, a painter based in Oslo. They're built to solve problems in his own practice first — archiving finished work, formulating pigment recipes, checking a composition with fresh eyes, tracking billable studio hours — which is a large part of why each one stays narrow and specific instead of trying to be a general-purpose creative suite.
Frequently asked questions
Why check a painting in a mirror?
Your eye adapts the longer you look at a piece, so proportion and balance errors stop registering. A mirror or flipped view resets that familiarity and makes the errors visible again.
What should I record when I photograph or scan finished artwork?
At minimum: title, medium, dimensions, year. For a real archive, also inventory number, status, and collection/series — details that are hard to reconstruct later.