Turn a picture or a place into pen paths

Pick what you want to plot. Then frame it, choose a look, and export an SVG your plotter can draw.

Drag and drop a photo anywhere on this panel.

Choose a photo

Faces and clear subjects plot best. Strong light and a simple background give the cleanest lines.

Choose the subject

Or draw it yourself with the tools on the photo.

Tool settings

Snap to edges Slack Brush size Brush softness Brush opacity

Skipping this is fine — the whole photo is then drawn evenly.

Find a place

A town or city by name — “Breda”, “Kyoto”, “São Paulo”. Not street addresses.

Choose a mountain

Real elevation, not an illustration — every metre is measured. Each one is framed to the window that suits it.

Choose a subject

Every line is read off a real 3D model, so nothing here is traced or drawn by hand. Pick the elevations you want and they are drawn together, all at one scale.

Layout

Views

Sheet and pen

Start here: the size and the pen change what every look below turns into, so the cards are rendered for the sheet you pick.

Paper size

Orientation

Margin Colour

Pen width

Pick a look

Every card is rendered from your own photo, on the sheet above. Drag the divider on the canvas to compare.

Hold back the background

Pick a look

How much of the street network to draw. Every card is rendered from this exact window, on the sheet above.

Line weight comes from extra passes beside the road, not from a wider nib — a pen has only one width.

Frame and title block

Title Subtitle Caption Follows the window until you change it. Drawn with a single-stroke font, because a pen cannot fill a letter.

Pick a look

Two readings of the same height grid. Contours turn a cone into rings; a ridgeline reads a jagged massif that contours would thicket. Both cards are rendered from this exact window.

Frame and title block

Title Subtitle Caption Follows the mountain until you change it.

Sheet furniture

There is nothing to choose about the line work: every line is an edge the model actually has, so there is no look to pick. What is left is what goes around it.

Spec table Frame and title block

Title Subtitle Caption Where the model came from. Follows the subject until you change it.

Result

The sheet at true size, margins included. This is what the plotter will actually draw.

Method

Algorithm A preset sets this and every slider below. This changes the algorithm only.

Tone

Denoise Gamma Contrast Brightness Invert

Structure

Draw the subject outline Outline smoothing A selection edge is ragged at pixel scale. Traced literally it reads as a machine artefact rather than a drawn line. Mask feather Softens the fade so the detector does not trace the selection boundary as an edge of its own. Local contrast Expands contrast within each neighbourhood. This is what recovers faces, which occupy too narrow a tonal band for any global curve to separate. Texture prefilter Edge-preserving. Removes tarmac and brick without softening the boundary you want.

Edges

Detail octaves One scale finds structure of one size only: where a silhouette resolves, an eye is below the noise floor. Detail scale Selectivity Line weight passes A pen cannot vary its width, so weight comes from passes: an extra stroke beside a strong line widens it, the way a draughtsman thickens a contour by drawing next to it. Weight threshold

Hatch

Tone bands Spacing Angle Angle per band Stop hatching at edges Follow the form Bends each stroke along the image instead of ruling it across the page. Needs the coherent detector, which supplies the tangent field. Max coverage Bounds the ink a dark region may lay down. Without it, five bands of a 2 px pen at 6 px spacing is 170% coverage, and shadows fill in solid.

Wave / spiral

Spacing Amplitude Frequency Pen-lift level

Flow

Seed spacing Stroke length Pen-lift level

Cleanup

Join strokes within Tracing breaks a contour at every junction, and every break is a pen lift. The leftmost stop joins any gap narrower than the pen, which the line's own round ends already cover — the drawing does not change, it just stops lifting. Wider than that and the joins start to show. Prune whiskers

Contours

Threshold Levels Upper level

Cleanup

Simplify Min length Background fade Ink coverage Caps how much of the page gets ink, measured from this photo's own tone. The quickest way to shorten a long plot.

Output

Export resolution