An honest head-to-head of Line of Action and Quickposes: session setup, reference variety, custom uploads, practice modes, and which one suits you.
You have decided to do timed figure drawing every day. You open a browser, search for a pose timer, and land on two names that everybody recommends: Line of Action and Quickposes. Both are free. Both run in the browser. Both put a photo on screen and count down. So you pick one at random, use it for a fortnight, and then quietly wonder whether the other one would have suited you better.
That question is not answered by a feature checklist. The two tools have genuinely different personalities, and the right one depends on what your practice looks like six months from now. Here is a fair comparison from someone who has used both for years and who also sells reference packs — which I will be upfront about rather than pretending otherwise.
Line of Action is the broader studio. Beyond figures it has dedicated practice modes for hands and feet, faces and expressions, animals, and landscapes or scenes. Its class mode sequences intervals for you — a warm-up of thirty-second poses stepping up to longer studies — so a whole session runs without you touching the timer. It has been running for a long time and is stable, and it offers filters for clothed or nude references and for body type.
Quickposes is the faster blade. The interface is minimal, the timer UX is clean, and you are drawing within a few clicks. It has category filters, and — the feature that genuinely sets it apart — it can run the timer against your own uploaded image set . That single capability changes what the tool is for.
If your friction point is starting, Quickposes wins on raw seconds. Choose a category, choose an interval, go. There is very little between you and the first pose, which matters more than people admit; a tool you can start in ten seconds gets used on the evenings when you are tired.
Line of Action asks slightly more of you up front, but pays it back over a longer session. Its class mode is the honest answer to “what should I actually practise tonight?” — you pick a session length and it builds the interval ladder. If you have ever spent fifteen minutes deciding on a timer setting and then not drawn, that structure is worth more than the extra clicks. Our own notes on building a repeatable habit are in the daily drawing practice routine guide .
Published 2026-07-23 on the Refimages blog.