Vexy Lines: it redraws your photo out of engraving lines, waves and halftone dots

In 2007 Dmitry Apanovich released Strokes Maker, a tool that built engraving-style drawings out of ordinary images. Dmitry is at FontLab now, and we spent a long time rewriting that idea into something with a calmer interface and much more control. That became Vexy Lines.

The image you drop in isn't the artwork, it's the signal. Vexy reads its light and shade and draws vector strokes that thicken wherever the source goes darker. There are a dozen fill styles, from plain linear hatching through waves, spirals, halftone dots, wireframe, scribble, autotrace and a Text fill that pours words along the pattern. You stack them on layers, confine each one behind a mask you paint yourself, bend a layer over a mesh, sample color straight from the photo, and add handmade strokes wherever the algorithm needs supervision. Nothing gets flattened, so you can reopen and change any of it, and it exports to SVG, PDF and EPS.

Four things we made with it, since the work explains it better than a feature list:

An East German football poster by Albert Kapr, rebuilt from a book scan and redrawn by one Linear fill, then pushed into color and brutalist versions Kapr's single-ink budget never allowed.

A 1024-pixel airbrush wordmark, fine on a phone and hopeless on a poster, turned into layered vector lettering on hot pink.

A Wall Street Journal-style hedcut portrait, normally most of a day's work, built in four steps from masked fills. The document and PDF are downloadable.

A poem poured into the silhouette of a flame, where pixel brightness picks the instance of a variable font. My favorite.

The practical part: €$99 lifetime, one user, two computers, no subscription, runs offline, macOS 12+ and Windows 10+. The demo is free with no time limit and export switched off. There's a CLI, an MCP server and Python bindings too, if you'd rather script it.

Playlines is the browser version with five free patterns and nothing to install, and Linestra puts the same patterns into Illustrator 2024+ as a live effect for €$29.