About DrawMyPhoto

DrawMyPhoto is a small, independent project that turns photos into pencil sketches, line art and printable coloring pages, entirely inside your browser.

Why it exists

Turning a photo into a drawing is a common wish: a coloring page of the family dog, a sketch of a house for a card, line art to paint over. Most tools that do it ask you to upload the photo to a server first. For pictures of children, homes and family, that is a lot to ask for a coloring page. We wanted a tool that gives the same result without the photo ever leaving the device, and that prints properly on the paper people actually have.

How it works

The pencil sketch is a classic image filter: the photo is compared with a blurred copy of itself, so edges become graphite strokes and smooth areas become paper. It runs in a few milliseconds and always gives the same result for the same settings.

Line art and coloring pages come from Informative Drawings, an open-source line-drawing model by Caroline Chan, Frédo Durand and Phillip Isola (MIT CSAIL), presented at CVPR 2022 and released under the MIT licence. Your browser downloads the model and its runtime once, about 8 MB, and runs them with ONNX Runtime Web, Microsoft’s open-source engine for running AI models in the browser. A few clean-up steps that you control with the sliders turn its output into crisp line art or a coloring page with solid black lines.

Printable PDFs are written by the page itself, sized for US Letter or A4 with half-inch margins.

Credits

• Line-drawing model: Chan, Durand and Isola, “Learning to generate line drawings that convey geometry and semantics”, CVPR 2022 (MIT licence); ONNX conversion by Joe Rocca.
• ONNX Runtime Web, © Microsoft Corporation (MIT licence).
• Display typeface: Bricolage Grotesque by Mathieu Triay (SIL Open Font License 1.1).
• Sample photos, all public domain (CC0) from Wikimedia Commons:
  • Domestic shorthair cat portrait in grass
  • Bearded man with long hair-3052641
  • Staffordshire-bull-terrier-puppy-fawn-2166763
  • Flower full bloom
  • Family eating their lunch
  • Typical colonial house from downtown Maracaibo
  • Tabby cat with blue eyes-3336579
  • Horse in Tárcoles River

Who makes it

DrawMyPhoto is an independent project, not part of a larger company, and it is free to use. If paid features arrive later, such as a coloring book made from several photos, we will say clearly what costs money before you use it.

Get in touch

Bugs, ideas and questions go to contact@drawmyphoto.com, or see the contact page.