Help & FAQ

Tap + on the Sketches screen and choose Gallery or Camera. The drawing appears as soon as the photo loads, so there is nothing to wait for and no button to press. From there you can change how it looks and export it.

iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Android. Your Premium unlock carries to every device signed in to the same App Store or Google Play account.

Not to draw. Everything that makes your drawing happens on your device, so you can work with no connection and no account. The one thing that does need a connection is buying or restoring Premium, because that goes through the App Store or Google Play.

Yes, free to start, and there is no subscription. Premium is a one-time purchase, with the price shown in the app in your local currency. Free gives you six of the nine instruments, all six papers, three of the six ways to shade, every slider, the six ink colors and the plain sheet's tints, transparent export, five sketches, and export up to 1024 px on the long side. There is no watermark either way.

Three more instruments (silverpoint, quill, and litho crayon), three more ways to shade (burin, aquatint, and mezzotint), any ink color you mix yourself and any tint for the plain sheet, saving your own templates, unlimited sketches, and export up to 4096 px on the long side. That is a ceiling, not a promise: Skisa never enlarges a photo past its own size. One purchase, kept for life.

On a new device or after reinstalling, open the Premium tab at the bottom and tap Restore purchase, signed in to the App Store or Google Play account that bought Premium. Premium is yours for life on every device tied to that account.

The controls sit under your image in the editor, and beside it on a wide screen. In the Line section, Type picks the instrument that draws the line, from a fineliner or a ballpoint to charcoal, a quill, or silverpoint, and Color sets the ink. Four sliders in this section tune the rest: Detail decides how much of the photo survives, Thickness how bold the strokes are, Looseness whether the hand is precise or searching, and Continuity how far broken edges are joined into long lines.

It is the shading: how the drawing gets its greys. Pick one of six techniques from the history of printmaking, from stipple (tone built out of dots) to mezzotint (the lights burnished back out of a black plate), then set how much of it you want with the Coverage slider. Leaving Coverage at zero means no shading at all, which is where every new drawing starts.

Surface is the sheet you are drawing on, and its grain changes the line. Kraft and toned grey have a real tooth, so a charcoal stroke breaks up across the fibres while a fineliner glides over the same sheet almost untouched. 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. Plain paper has no grain at all, and you can tint it ivory, pale blue, indigo, or burgundy.

Yes. Skisa comes with three templates you can apply to any photo, and with Premium you can save your own: get a drawing looking the way you want, save it as a template, and one tap puts the whole setup on the next photo.

It saves your drawing as a PNG with nothing behind the lines, so you can drop it over a photo, a color, or another drawing in any other app. The switch is in the export panel, so you choose it at the moment you make the file. The paper still does its work on the strokes, only the sheet itself is left out.

Tap the export button at the top of the editor. On iPhone and iPad this opens the share sheet, where saving to your photos is one of the options. On Android you choose Share or Save. On Mac it opens the system save window so you can pick a folder. You can also do it without opening anything: the three-dot menu on any sketch in the Sketches screen has Export beside Rename and Delete.

On your device only. There's no account, and your photos and drawings stay with you: they are never uploaded and never sent to a server. The only thing that ever leaves your device is a small, anonymous diagnostic report, the kind that flags a crash or notes which features get used, so we can fix what breaks. It carries no images and nothing that identifies you. Because everything lives on your device, uninstalling Skisa removes your sketches, so export anything you want to keep.