How to film a drawing or painting tutorial with both iPhone cameras
An art tutorial is really two things happening at once: the marks landing on the page, and the person explaining or reacting to them. That is exactly the shape dual camera recording is built for — the paper and your face land in the same file from the first line, so a process video does not need a separate overhead demo clip stitched to a talking-head intro afterwards.
The general mechanics of simultaneous recording are covered elsewhere on this site; this page is about what is specific to drawing and painting — fitting an entire page into frame without a layout cropping its corners, keeping focus on the paper instead of wherever your hand happens to be, and working around exposure and glare from art materials that are more reflective than most subjects.
The page leads, your face reacts
Most of a tutorial is the page itself — the line, the wash, the shading — and your face exists to explain and react to it, not to share equal space with it. Picture-in-picture with the back camera filling the frame is the natural default: the page or canvas fills the recording, and your face sits in a small window in whichever corner is not over the part of the page you are actively working on.
That balance is worth flipping for the sentences where you are actually talking to the lens rather than to the page — an intro naming the piece, a sign-off holding up the result. DualCam lets you swap which camera fills the frame at any point mid-recording, so the switch can happen live: face-led for what opens and closes the video, page-led for the process in between.
Fitting the whole page in without losing a corner
A split layout crops both source frames to fit a vertical canvas, and it does not crop evenly on both axes. A left-and-right split keeps the full height of each feed but trims roughly a quarter off the left and right; a top-and-bottom split keeps the full width but trims roughly a quarter off the top and bottom. A page or canvas propped up and shot at an angle rarely sits centred enough in frame to survive either crop without losing a corner — and the corner is often exactly where the work is happening.
Picture-in-picture is the one layout that leaves the main frame uncropped — a phone camera’s native 16:9 image fits a 9:16 vertical canvas exactly when it fills the whole thing, nothing thrown away. If you would rather split the frame evenly with your face, top-and-bottom is the safer of the two for a page held or laid out wider than it is tall; left-and-right suits a canvas you are working on in portrait orientation better.
Focus keeps finding your hand instead of the page
The two cameras set focus and exposure independently, and each one reads only what it can see. A close, angled shot of a page is exactly the kind of frame autofocus struggles with on its own — a hand or a pen moving through the middle distance gives the camera something nearer to lock onto than the flat page behind it. Tap the page once it is in frame, before you start working on it, rather than trusting the camera to keep choosing correctly as your hand crosses back and forth.
Glossy paint, wet ink, and even graphite under a hard light throw back a highlight that a phone’s ordinary exposure was not built for — the same sheen that photos of finished paintings usually avoid by angling the light off to one side instead of straight on. Move the light, or move the page, until the glare sits outside the frame instead of trying to expose around it afterwards; nothing at the recording step fixes it once it is baked into the shot.
A closer shot without losing the whole page
When you want a tight, detailed shot of a small section — a blending technique, a fine line — switching the back camera to its ultra-wide lens, on the iPhones that have one, buys that closeness without moving the phone in close enough to end up in your own light or in the splash zone of wet paint. A dual-camera session cannot switch lenses automatically the way the stock Camera app’s macro mode does when something gets close, because that hand-off is built for a single-camera session; picking the lens yourself is the manual version of the same idea.
Whichever lens is on the back camera, exposure resets to whatever the new framing gives it. Tap to refocus and re-expose after a lens change for the same reason you tap after any other change to what the camera is looking at — the setting does not carry over from the previous frame.
A finished piece is longer than one take
A dual-camera recording runs straight through from record to stop with no way to freeze it mid-file, and a piece that takes an hour of real time is not going to be filmed as one unbroken take at full length anyway — most process videos already compress hours into minutes. Treat the natural stages of the work as your cut points instead: the sketch, the base layer, the details, the time paint or ink needs to dry before you can keep going. Stop the take at each one and start fresh rather than leaving the camera running through a stretch with nothing happening.
Shorter, separate takes also help with the same shared hardware budget every dual recording draws on. A long single sitting at 1080p, on a phone that is also warm from hours of handling and lighting, is a reasonable candidate for the thermal drop to 720p, or an early stop that finalizes and saves what you have. Breaking the session up the way the stages already suggest makes either outcome far less likely to interrupt the part you actually needed.
Common follow-up questions
Should the page or my face fill the main frame?
The page, most of the time — picture-in-picture with the back camera leading keeps the work uncropped while your face rides in a corner. Swap the two mid-recording for the moments you are talking straight to the lens, like an intro or the final reveal.
Why does a split layout cut off part of my drawing?
A split crops each source frame to fit half of a vertical canvas — about a quarter off the left and right for a left-right split, or a quarter off the top and bottom for a top-bottom split. A page shot at an angle rarely stays centred enough to survive that. Picture-in-picture is the only layout that leaves the main frame uncropped.
Can I zoom in for a close-up detail shot without losing the rest of the page?
Switch the back camera to its ultra-wide lens if your iPhone has one — that buys closeness without moving the phone in far enough to block your own light. Dual-camera recording cannot do this automatically the way single-camera macro mode does, so the lens choice has to be made by hand, and is worth a re-tap to focus once you do.
Want to just do this?
DualCam records the iPhone front and back cameras at the same time and writes one finished MP4 while you shoot. Free, no account, no ads, nothing leaves the phone.