One TikTok account drew 86 celebrity faces: a Turkish developer turned the Loomis method from art class into an app, 12 weeks, 460k installs

Sketch Steps does something simple: you upload a portrait, and its AI breaks the face into 8 to 9 steps of Loomis structural drawing, starting from a sphere and a cross-line and working all the way to shading. It was built by an indie developer in Istanbul. It has never been covered by media, and nobody has shared its revenue. The Android version launched in Aug 14, and by Nov 6 it had about 465k installs, almost all driven by one TikTok account run by the developer, where every video is 'I drew [celebrity] with the Loomis method'. The playbook can be copied and the features aren't hard to build. The hard part is getting people to pay, and the app itself still hasn't solved that.

A video with 2.7M views, and the second-top comment is 'not free'

In 2026 Aug 31, TikTok account @andrew.drawing5 posted a video captioned 'I tried to draw Loki 😈😈 app name: Sketch Steps AI Loomis Draw'. The footage shows the app's step-by-step guide on a phone screen, with a hand on paper following along one step at a time. As of 11-06, the video has 2.7M views and 90k likes.

The top-liked comment is the account's own pinned line, 'hi guys! app name : Sketch Steps AI Loomis Draw', with 330 likes. The second most-liked is just two words: 'not free', with 63 likes. Scrolling down, people in every language ask the same thing: a Russian commenter asks what the app is called, a Spanish speaker says 'downloaded it, now it wants payment', an Indonesian writes 'only found out after downloading it it's paid 🤗', and Arabic, Persian, French and Portuguese comments are asking for the name too.

That comment section is basically the whole picture of this app: the content brings in people from around the world, and most of them download it and get stuck at the paywall.

What it is

It has two parts.

AI Loomis studio. Upload a photo, crop the face, wait a moment, and you get a set of step-by-step drawings: first the skull sphere and cross-lines, then the eye line, nose base and chin, then the features, and finally shading. You can go through it step by step or scroll the whole set. The Loomis method is the most common beginner approach to drawing heads in art circles, and communities like r/learntodraw recommend it almost every week. Three years ago a YouTube video titled 'Best APP to draw Loomis lines on photo' got 819k views, showing people were already searching for 'drawing Loomis guide lines on a photo', but nobody had turned it into a one-tap, step-by-step product.

Tracing studio. This part is identical to the dozens of 'AR tracing' apps on Play: hold the phone above the paper and trace through the camera, or turn the screen up bright and lay the paper on top to trace. It also comes with ready-made templates for animals, anime and cars, and can turn a photo into a pencil sketch. This isn't the selling point, but it covers the biggest drawing need on Play (the top app in this category, Artrace, has 64.8M installs), so free users still have something to use.

Monetization: AI generation requires a subscription or gold coins, with no ads. Pricing on the US App Store (11-06):

No free trial. The store page itself says: 'AI-generated tutorials are occasionally imperfect, and results vary by photo.'

How much it grew

The main stage is Android; iOS is a small slice. Users are concentrated in the Philippines, India and Turkey, countries dominated by Android. There is revenue, but judging from its #150 to #200 ranking on the category Top Grossing chart, it's not large (inferred).

The developer is Recep Can Akdemir, whose LinkedIn shows he does software development at Jotform in Istanbul. On Play he has only this one app; on iOS he has another app for laundry label recognition and one for vocabulary, neither of which took off.

Where users come from: one account, one format, four months

@andrew.drawing5 has the display name "Andrew - drawing", a bio reading "app: Sketch Steps: AI Loomis Draw / IOS / ANDROID link", and its homepage link points to the official site. 11-06 This account has 86 videos, 45k followers and 697k likes (TikTok).

Every video follows one format: 'I tried to draw <trending celebrity or character> ✨ with the loomis method', sometimes with '(App link in bio)' added, and the hashtags are always #drawingtutorial #loomismethod #howtodraw. The celebrity name brings in search and recommendations, the step-by-step process holds viewers, and the app name sits in the caption.

The account started posting in June, when only the iOS version existed: David Bowie (6-111M views), Dua Lipa (7-51.5M). After the Android version launched, each viral post pushed installs up a notch (daily increases are third-party estimates, averaged between observations, so only the trend is reliable):

Same format, but whether it blows up depends entirely on who gets drawn: Loki, Dua Lipa and Jennifer Lawrence reached the millions, Bruno Mars only 25k, and Billie Eilish under 10k.

Besides this account, there's a small account also run by 'Andrew', @emrecnhywva, whose bio says 'Drawing app I use: Sketch steps AI Loomis Draw'. It has 68 followers and didn't take off. A Facebook page is also reposting the same videos. On the store side, the title directly includes 'AI Loomis Draw', so users who see the name on TikTok can search 'loomis' and find it. 11-06 Of the apps that charted on Play, it's the only one whose bio mentions 'Loomis'.

We couldn't find whether there was paid acquisition. As an indie developer with modest revenue, large-scale ad spend is unlikely, but a few install jumps were bigger than the view counts would suggest (500k views matched 100k installs), so some small ad spend or Play recommendations can't be ruled out (inferred).

What users are complaining about

On Play, 1,339 of the 1-star ratings are at 25%, and the 2-star and 3-star counts are zero. Users either love it or feel scammed. App Store reviews are more specific, and nearly all of them say the same thing:

'I just need ONE COIN TO GENERATING THE IMAGE I HAVE 0 COINS 😡' (I just need one coin to generate the image, I have zero coins) US store, 10-31

"If there was a way you could earn a coin that would be great.. otherwise this app is trash." US store, 9-16. Developer reply: "We are looking at more ways for users to earn coins for free"

"You have to pay to do stuff and some kids can't pay" US store, 7-23

"I was very interested to try the AI function… However, it is completely impossible to test this without paying a significant subscription first." UK store, 6-08

Another complaint is about results: "It is generating inconsistent steps. I had to spend lots of coins for that." (Turkey store, 7-30, written in English), "All output steps useless" (Turkey store, 10-29).

Put these two together: many of the viewers TikTok brings in are students and kids in countries with weak purchasing power. They watch the video, come in, and the first thing they hit is a $7.99-a-week paywall with no free trial. So installs and ratings climb fast, but revenue doesn't.

Who it's competing with

Vangu shows the point: similar features, launched even earlier, but without that TikTok account it never took off. In this category, distribution matters more than features.

Why it's blowing up now

1. The demand was always there; nobody had built it as a one-tap product. The "Loomis method" was already a trending topic on TikTok: 9, and in October two ordinary tutorial videos on the Loomis method got 360k and 310k views (TikTok). The people posting them weren't app developers.
2. The product's output is itself short-video material. Step-by-step process, celebrity faces, real people drawing along: exactly the kind of video with high completion rates under #drawingtutorial. The app name sits in the caption, one step away from a download.
3. One account kept posting for four months. Out of 86 videos, at least 8 passed 500k views and 3 passed 1M, and each hit pushed installs up another notch.
4. Launching on Android three months later caught emerging markets. TikTok viewers were heavily in the Philippines, India and Turkey. The iOS version collected about 700 ratings in 5 months, while the Android version hit 460k installs in 12 weeks.

The moat is shallow. The core is just an image model plus a set of prompts, and the tracing part is completely commoditized.

If it were you

B. The playbook is clear and the niche isn't crowded yet: a method the art community already accepts, made into "any photo becomes a fixed-step tutorial" with AI, backed by a daily-posting real-person account. But it hasn't proven it can make money, and most users are students who can't pay. If you follow it, the goal isn't to build another copy. Focus on the two things it did badly: let people try for free first, and shift to users who can afford to pay.

Who it suits: 1 to 2 people, one who can shoot, edit, and post a drawing video every day for three months straight; another who can tune the image model's multi-step consistency so every step matches the same face. Ideally you have a content account in an English, German, Japanese or Korean market, where viewers can afford $5 to $10.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone who only wants to do AR tracing (dozens of players already, with leaders at tens of millions of installs); anyone counting on organic store traffic without making videos (Vangu is the cautionary tale); anyone who plans to copy its weekly subscriptions in the Philippines and India (the reviews already show that doesn't bring in money).

How to do it:

• Change the method, keep the playbook. Loomis is already taken by it. Still open: the Reilly method (also head construction), Asaro's head shading and planes, hand structure, full-body gesture lines, animals, anime faces. Put the method keyword right in the name.
• Fix its weak spots. Generate the first one free, or unlock more by watching videos for coins; sell one-time purchases of several tutorial packs instead of leading with a weekly subscription. Multi-step consistency is the second most common complaint, so nail that first.
• Change the audience. Build for art students or drawing class teachers and sell annual per-class licenses; or go straight to the higher-spending English market first, and launch on Android a few months later, as it did.

How to get users: copy its format: "I tried to draw <this week's trending person> with the <method name> method", and put the app name in three places: the caption, the pinned comment, and the bio. Choosing the person matters more than choosing the method: same format, drawing Loki got 2.7M, drawing Bruno Mars got 25k. Post the same footage to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts at the same time.

When to move: before March of 2027. Its video views dropped from hundreds of thousands in early November to twenty thousand, and daily installs fell from ten or twenty thousand back to a few thousand; Vangu has already started using the same tags. Wait longer, and the format will be overused and the algorithm will give it less reach.

Signs you've misread it: ① Sketch Steps stays outside the top 150 of the Play Top Grossing category, and its daily growth falls below a few thousand, showing this content brings installs but not revenue; ② none of your first 30 videos passes 100k views, meaning the format's window has closed; ③ ChatGPT, Gemini or Procreate launch "one-tap step-by-step drawing from a photo", and general-purpose tools eat the single feature.

Data and sources

Install counts and daily growth are third-party estimates (Google Play installs, as of 11-06); ratings and chart positions come from the Google Play and App Store pages (10-29 to 11-06); prices come from the App Store US page (11-06); video views, likes and comments come from TikTok (11-06); review quotes come from the App Store US, UK, Turkey and India stores. We could not find paid acquisition or actual revenue data; anything marked "inferred" is an inference.