Skisa - Photo to Sketch

Paintingstack Technologies

In-app purchases

About this app

Not a filter. A real drawing. Skisa takes a photo and draws it as clean line art with a real instrument on real paper, right on your device.

Most photo to sketch apps run your picture through a filter and hand back a flat outline. Skisa draws it. You pick an instrument and a sheet of paper, and the drawing comes out the way that pairing would come out in your hand. Unlike a one-tap sketch converter that flattens every photo the same way, here the instrument and the paper do the work.

Every instrument has its own hand. A fineliner lays an even, confident line. A ballpoint skips and pools. A pencil gives you a real pencil sketch, varying with pressure. Ink bites. A marker floods. Charcoal is soft, broad, and hungry. Silverpoint is the faint grey metal line Leonardo drew with. A quill runs dry mid-stroke and widens as it turns. A litho crayon carries a grain of its own.

The papers fight back. Hot press has a fine, even tooth. Kraft is fibrous brown packing stock. Toned grey is the sheet made for charcoal drawing, where the paper is the midtone and both the lights and the darks read. On the black ground and the blueprint, the app hands you white chalk instead of graphite, so you draw the light out of the dark the way you would on real toned paper. Plain is the printer's sheet, for when the line drawing is going to be traced, and you can tint it ivory, pale blue, indigo, or burgundy.

Shade it with techniques taken from the history of printmaking. Stipple builds tone out of dots. Etching is the needle's crosshatch. Chalk is dragged and broken. Burin is the engraver's swelling cut. Aquatint bites its tone in flat fields. Mezzotint starts from a rocked black plate and burnishes the lights back out of it, which is how the darkest prints in history were made.

Then the sliders finish the drawing. Detail sets how much survives, from only the strongest edges to every contour. Thickness sets how bold the strokes are. Looseness decides whether the hand is precise or searching. Continuity joins broken edges into long, confident lines. And the shading carries an amount of its own.

Curated ink colors, or any color you want. Graphite, blue, red, green, sepia, white chalk, or mix your own and keep it one tap away.

Skisa comes with ready-made templates, and with Premium you can save your own: get a drawing looking the way you want, keep it as a template, and one tap puts the whole setup on the next photo.

Export with a transparent background when you need the lines alone. Skisa saves a transparent PNG with nothing behind the lines, ready to drop over a photo, a color, or another drawing in any other app. The paper still shapes the strokes; only the sheet is left out.

Made for people whose drawings have a job to do. Print a coloring page for your kids, the way a coloring page maker should. Build a tattoo stencil. Put an underdrawing beneath your painting, or use it as a tracing app to trace a portrait onto canvas or a lightbox. Cut a craft template with a clean outline. The output is clean enough to work with, not just to look at.

Crop, rotate and flip whenever you like, freehand or locked to portrait or landscape. The drawing appears the moment the photo loads, so shaping it is something you do to a drawing, not before you get one.

What you see is what you export. The live preview and the final file come from the same engine, so the saved drawing matches the screen exactly, at full resolution. Skisa never enlarges a photo past its own size.

Free is a real tool, not a demo: a full set of instruments, all the papers, several ways to shade, every slider, the ink colors and the sheet tints, and transparent export. Premium unlocks the full workshop: every instrument and shading technique, any ink color and tint mixed yourself, your own saved templates, no limit on saved sketches, and full-resolution export.

Pay once, no subscription. Your photos stay on your device.

What’s new

First release. Turn any photo into a clean line drawing with real instruments and papers, from a fineliner on smooth stock to charcoal on kraft. Shade it with techniques from the history of printmaking, from stipple to mezzotint. Draw in white chalk on the dark grounds, export with a transparent background, and unlock the rest with one purchase.