Line Drawing Art Generator: Photo to Sketch

Make cool looking sketches and scribble drawings using distinct visible lines and white space. The line spacing and the opacity of the line represents the intensity of the color. Lines are placed using controlled randomness. You can convert digital photos, paintings and drawings into a scribble line drawing.

Create impressive line drawings without drawing. The line art generator quickly turns a picture into a random sketch. Open the menu, load an image or video, select the options you want and hit Lines. As the lines are added to the canvas it will gradually form recognizable patterns. Continue to add lines and it will start to look like a regular drawing or a black and white copy.

The pictures were made using random lines. It uses random values when choosing a starting location and a direction but the randomness is limited. There are checks to make sure the lines are not more intense than the original color. You can reduce the realism by reducing the number of lines, decreasing the contrast or increasing the randomness. Changing the Alpha option changes how the color intensity is calculated. Changing the style changes the line options.

After seeing some amazing line art I wanted to make my own. So I wrote this program. See what you can make with it. Try it out on different pictures and use different options. It works best with high contrast photos and images with transparent backgrounds. If you need photos to turn into art then try searching for public domain images.

The idea is to create a new image by making abstract realism art. It looks like something but it is not realistic. Add lines until you get the results you want. Stop before it starts to look like a copy of the original. I added the intensity limits so it spends more time filling in the intense areas. It alternates between the high and a low limits. If you change the limits to 127 & 200 then it would only fill in the brightest and the darkest areas.

I have used this program to make dozens of drawings. The best ones look amazing and they only took a few minutes to make. You don't need to be an artist. You just need to start with a good picture and choose options that work with it. Experiment to find the best options for the image. You can manually add more random lines to the drawing by pressing down and and slowly moving a mouse or your fingers across the canvas.

Attribution is appreciated. While you are sharing your art let people know what you used to make it.

Save PNG

Right click or hold finger on phone screen to save the image.
Select Lines to start or stop drawing lines.