Skisa: Photo to Sketch
Line drawings on real paper
Free · In‑App Purchases
Not a filter. A drawing made with real instruments on real paper. Trace it, print it, color it, or cut a stencil from it. One purchase, no subscription.
Not a filter. A real drawing. Skisa takes a photo and draws it with a real instrument on real paper, right on your device.
Most apps run your photo 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.
Every instrument has its own hand. A fineliner lays an even, confident line. A ballpoint skips and pools. A pencil varies 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, 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 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. Build a tattoo stencil. Put an underdrawing beneath your painting. Trace a portrait onto canvas or a lightbox. Cut a craft template. 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 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: more instruments, including silverpoint, quill and litho crayon; more shading, including burin, aquatint and mezzotint; any ink color and any tint for the plain sheet, mixed yourself; your own saved templates; no limit on saved sketches; and full-resolution export. One purchase, not a subscription.
Pay once, and it is yours. Your photos stay on your device.
Ratings & Reviews
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Skisa draws your photo with a real instrument on real paper. Enhance brings out a flat photo's contrast before the first line, and crop and rotate stay open to change, with the original always kept.
Lines can be dotted or dashed for tracing and stitching, any sketch can be duplicated, and the live drawing responds faster as you adjust it.
The developer, Paintingstack Technologies SpA, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
- Purchases
- Identifiers
- Usage Data
- Diagnostics
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Paintingstack Technologies SpA
- Size
- 47.6 MB
- Category
- Graphics & Design
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 15.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 15.0 or later. - iPod touch
Requires iOS 15.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 12.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
English and 16 more
- English, Arabic, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Turkish
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- In-App Purchases
Yes
- Skisa Premium $9.99
- Copyright
- © 2026 Paintingstack