# Convert a drawing to SVG. Scan or photograph an ink drawing, pencil sketch or hand lettering, drop it on this page, and pic2svg traces it into filled SVG paths. Below is what survives the trip, measured on real traces. Text of . The page itself also carries the working image converter. > **Short answer** > > To convert a drawing to SVG, scan or photograph it flat, crop to the drawing, and drop the image on the converter above: it is traced into filled vector paths you can preview straight away. Inked lines with strong contrast trace cleanly; pencil shading and hatching turn into well over a hundred small grey shapes. Each line becomes a filled outline rather than a single stroke, and the paper becomes a background shape you can delete. ## What does a traced drawing look like? One potted plant, drawn three ways in code so the inputs are exactly known, prepared the way this site uploads them and traced by the real engine on its default settings. Sizes and path counts are read from the files the engine wrote. ### Black ink, anti-aliased edges - Input: PNG, 900 × 640 px, 50.0 KB: ![Black ink line drawing of a potted plant with seven leaves on a white background](https://pic2svg.com/examples/uc-drawing-to-svg/ink-drawing.png) - Output: SVG, 5.5 KB, 23 paths, polygon mode, Balanced preset: ![SVG trace of the ink plant drawing: the lines as one dark filled shape on a white background](https://pic2svg.com/examples/uc-drawing-to-svg/ink-drawing-balanced.svg) The lines come out as one large near-black shape plus 3 smaller near-black ones; the other 19 paths, the background included, are white. 23 paths in all. ### Same ink, thresholded to black and white - Input: PNG, 900 × 640 px, 6.7 KB: ![The same potted plant drawing reduced to pure black lines on pure white](https://pic2svg.com/examples/uc-drawing-to-svg/ink-drawing-threshold.png) - Output: SVG, 5.1 KB, 22 paths, polygon mode, Balanced preset: ![SVG trace of the thresholded plant drawing in two colours, black and white](https://pic2svg.com/examples/uc-drawing-to-svg/ink-drawing-threshold-balanced.svg) With no grey edge pixels left, the trace drops to 22 paths in two colours: black lines, the white background, and the white areas enclosed by the lines. ### Pencil sketch with hatching, JPEG - Input: JPEG, 900 × 640 px, 29.5 KB: ![Grey pencil sketch of the potted plant with wobbly lines and diagonal hatching on off-white paper](https://pic2svg.com/examples/uc-drawing-to-svg/pencil-sketch.jpg) - Output: SVG, 32.8 KB, 148 paths, polygon mode, Balanced preset: ![SVG trace of the pencil sketch: grey filled shapes for the strokes and hatching over an off-white background shape](https://pic2svg.com/examples/uc-drawing-to-svg/pencil-sketch-balanced.svg) This site sends a shaded sketch like this as a JPEG. Grey strokes, hatching and off-white paper: 148 paths in 72 colours. The first path is a full-canvas rectangle in the paper colour. ### Same pencil sketch, Compact preset - Input: JPEG, 900 × 640 px, 29.5 KB: ![Grey pencil sketch of the potted plant with wobbly lines and diagonal hatching on off-white paper](https://pic2svg.com/examples/uc-drawing-to-svg/pencil-sketch.jpg) - Output: SVG, 31.2 KB, 135 paths, polygon mode, Compact preset: ![Compact SVG trace of the pencil sketch with fewer, merged grey shapes](https://pic2svg.com/examples/uc-drawing-to-svg/pencil-sketch-compact.svg) Compact merges near-identical greys: 135 paths, 9% fewer than Balanced on the same file, with the hatching still there as shapes. ## How do you convert a drawing to SVG? The converter at the top of this page does the tracing; there is nothing to install. 1. **Ink it, then capture it flat:** Go over the pencil lines you want to keep in black ink and erase the rest. Scan the page, or photograph it from straight above in even light: a shadow or a tilt across the paper is traced as shapes too. 2. **Crop, and raise the contrast:** Crop to the drawing. Every upload is fitted into 600,000 pixels before tracing, so an A4 page scanned at 300 dpi (about 8.7 million pixels) is traced at roughly 650 × 920, and cropping spends those pixels on the lines. If your scanner or editor offers a black-and-white or threshold mode, it is worth a try, though on our clean ink sample it changed little: 23 paths to 22. 3. **Drop or paste it, with the right preset:** Choose the trace preset first — it applies to images you add after the change — then drop the image on the converter, click to pick a file, or paste it from the clipboard. Balanced is the default; for pencil or shaded drawings, try Compact. 4. **Preview, then download:** The traced SVG previews on the page as soon as it is ready. Tracing, previewing and the SVG download are free and need no account; PDF, EPS, AI and DXF from the same trace depend on the [plan](https://pic2svg.com/pricing/). ## What survives the trip from paper to paths? The engine is a colour tracer: it finds regions of similar colour and writes each one as a filled shape, stacked from the background up. Every quirk below follows from that. - **Lines become filled outlines, not strokes:** There is no centerline or single-line mode. Each pen line is written as a filled shape with an edge on both sides; none of the four SVGs above contains a stroke attribute. Fine for printing, cutting shapes out or the web; not for a pen plotter or single-line engraving. - **The paper becomes a shape:** Whatever colour the paper is becomes the first path: a rectangle the size of the canvas, #EFEEE9 on our off-white pencil sample. Transparency does not survive either — an alpha channel is flattened onto white before tracing, as on [PNG to SVG](https://pic2svg.com/png-to-svg/). Delete that rectangle in a vector editor if you need a see-through background. - **Shading and hatching multiply shapes:** Every tone the tracer can tell apart becomes its own region, so pencil greys, hatching and paper tone each add paths — 148 on our small sketch, against 23 for the inked version. Expect a posterised look; Compact helps, inking over the lines helps more. - **Shaded drawings go up as JPEG:** The converter shrinks each image to fit its pixel budget, then sends clean line art like the two ink samples as a lossless PNG and a shaded image like the pencil sketch as a quality-0.85 JPEG, whose compression noise is traced too. - **Specks are filtered, and so are the tiniest dots:** The tracer drops specks up to about 4 × 4 pixels (16 px of area). A 3 × 3 px speck added to our ink sample vanished from the trace; a 9 × 9 px dot survived as one extra path. That clears scanner dust, but the filter works on the downscaled canvas, so a small dot in a large scan can shrink below it. - **Handwriting stays a drawing, not text:** There is no text recognition. Lettering and handwriting are traced as shapes, which keeps their character, but you cannot edit the words or install them as a font. - **Straight-edged output, chosen for you:** The engine counts colours on a 256-pixel thumbnail: 48 or fewer quantised colours gives straight-segment polygons, more gives splines. All four samples above traced as polygons; the page offers no override. - **CAD drawings are a different job:** A SolidWorks, AutoCAD or Fusion 360 drawing already exists as vectors in its own program; export it from there instead of tracing a picture of it. To turn a scanned image into polylines for a cutter, see [image to DXF](https://pic2svg.com/image-to-dxf/). ## How many shapes does each kind of drawing make? Traced on 2026-10-22 with the engine's defaults, the pixel cap and colour precision the hosted converter sends, from each input as this site uploads it (Pillow standing in for the browser's encoders). Synthetic 900 × 640 inputs. Indicative for these images only. Source: `scripts/examples/drawing-to-svg.py` | Input | Preset | Paths | Colours | What you get | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Black ink, anti-aliased (PNG) | Balanced | 23 | 5 | One large near-black line shape plus a few small ones | | Ink thresholded to black and white (PNG) | Balanced | 22 | 2 | Black lines, white background, white enclosed areas | | Pencil sketch with hatching (JPEG) | Balanced | 148 | 72 | Posterised greys; paper as a full-canvas shape | | Same pencil sketch (JPEG) | Compact | 135 | 64 | 9% fewer paths; hatching kept as shapes | | Ink with a 3 × 3 px speck added | Balanced | 23 | 6 | Speck filtered out — same count as without it | | Ink with a 9 × 9 px dot added | Balanced | 24 | 6 | Dot kept as one extra path | ## Drawing to SVG questions ### Can I convert a hand drawing to SVG for free? Yes, as an SVG: tracing, the preview and the SVG download are free and need no account. PDF needs Starter or higher, and EPS, AI and DXF need Pro or Advanced — see [pricing](https://pic2svg.com/pricing/). ### Will my lines come out as single strokes? No. Each line becomes a filled outline with an edge on both sides. A pen plotter or single-line engraving needs a centerline tracer, which this engine is not. ### How do I remove the white paper background from the SVG? Open the file in a vector editor such as Inkscape or Illustrator and delete the first shape: a rectangle the size of the canvas, in the paper colour. The engine never outputs transparency. ### Why did my pencil sketch turn into hundreds of shapes? Pencil greys, hatching and paper tone are separate colours to the tracer, and each region becomes a path. Ink over the lines, threshold to black and white, or try Compact. ### Can I turn my handwriting into a font or editable text? No. There is no text recognition: handwriting is traced as shapes, so it keeps its look but cannot be edited as words or installed as a font. ### Can I convert a line drawing I photographed with my phone? Yes — a JPEG photo works, but shadows, tilt and uneven light are traced as shapes too, so shoot straight on in even light and crop tight. [JPG to SVG](https://pic2svg.com/jpg-to-svg/) explains how compressed photos trace. ### Will the SVG work in cutting or engraving software? It is a standard SVG of filled paths with no embedded bitmap, which you can confirm with [how to check if an SVG is a real vector](https://pic2svg.com/how-to-check-if-svg-is-a-real-vector/). Delete the background rectangle first, or the software sees a shape the size of the page; we have not tested every machine's software. ## Related converters and guides - **Signature to SVG:** [Turn a scanned signature into a vector for letterheads, stamps and engraving.](https://pic2svg.com/signature-to-svg/) - **TIFF to SVG:** [Trace a scanned or print-ready TIFF, including large, CMYK and multi-page files.](https://pic2svg.com/tiff-to-svg/) - **JPG to SVG:** [Trace a JPG photo or scan, and see how compression noise changes the paths.](https://pic2svg.com/jpg-to-svg/)