# Im2Pencil: Controllable Pencil Illustration from Photographs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08682 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08682/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Learning to generate line drawings that convey geometry and semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12691/) (2022)
- [CLIPascene: Scene Sketching with Different Types and Levels of Abstraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17256/) (2022)
- [Picture that Sketch: Photorealistic Image Generation from Abstract Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11162/) (2023)
- [SketchAgent: Language-Driven Sequential Sketch Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17673/) (2024)
- [Neural Neighbor Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13215/) (2022)
- [Neural Strokes: Stylized Line Drawing of 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03900/) (2021)
- [Facial-Sketch Synthesis: A New Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15439/) (2021)
- [SketchDreamer: Interactive Text-Augmented Creative Sketch Ideation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14191/) (2023)
- [Deep Image Synthesis from Intuitive User Input: A Review and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04240/) (2021)
- [DeepPortraitDrawing: Generating Human Body Images from Freehand Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02070/) (2022)
- [Human-Inspired Facial Sketch Synthesis with Dynamic Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00216/) (2023)
- [CoProSketch: Controllable and Progressive Sketch Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08259/) (2025)
- [ShadowDraw: From Any Object to Shadow-Drawing Compositional Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05110/) (2025)
- [Image In painting Applied to Art Completing Escher's Print Gallery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02536/) (2021)
- [Flow-Guided Controllable Line Drawing Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07540/) (2023)
- [Optimize and Reduce: A Top-Down Approach for Image Vectorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11334/) (2023)
- [Content-Conditioned Generation of Stylized Free hand Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04739/) (2024)
- [Doodle Your Keypoints: Sketch-Based Few-Shot Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07994/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a high-quality photo-to-pencil translation method with fine-grained control over the drawing style. This is a challenging task due to multiple stroke types (e.g., outline and shading), structural complexity of pencil shading (e.g., hatching), and the lack of aligned training data pairs. To address these challenges, we develop a two-branch model that learns separate filters for generating sketchy outlines and tonal shading from a collection of pencil drawings. We create training data pairs by extracting clean outlines and tonal illustrations from original pencil drawings using image filtering techniques, and we manually label the drawing styles. In addition, our model creates different pencil styles (e.g., line sketchiness and shading style) in a user-controllable manner. Experimental results on different types of pencil drawings show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against existing methods in terms of quality, diversity and user evaluations.