  Covariantly smeared sources are commonly used in lattice QCD to enhance the
projection onto the ground state. Here we investigate the dependence of their
shape on the gauge field background and find that the presence of localized
concentrations of magnetic field can lead to strong distortions which reduce
the smearing radii achievable by iterative smearing prescriptions. In
particular, as $a\to 0$, iterative procedures like Jacobi smearing require
increasingly large iteration counts in order to reach physically-sized smearing
radii $r_{sm}\sim$ 0.5 fm, and the resulting sources are strongly distorted. To
bypass this issue, we propose a covariant smearing procedure (``free-form
smearing'') that allows us to create arbitrarily shaped sources, including in
particular Gaussians of arbitrary radius.
