A few summers ago, a friend’s daughter — five years old, very serious — handed me a printed coloring page of a generic cartoon dog and said, “But I want to color in MY dog.”
We tried to find one. There wasn’t one. There were thousands of dogs you could color in. None of them were hers.
That sentence ended up being the entire pitch for Lineora.
A coloring page made from your own life
Most coloring books are printed for everyone. They’re warehouses of cartoon dogs and cartoon castles and cartoon pumpkins — perfectly fine, mass-produced, optimized to be sold next to a cash register. They’re also nobody’s life in particular.
There’s a quieter category, though, that has always existed in art: a drawing made from a specific thing. Not invented. Not stylized for a market. Drawn from a single photograph of a single living dog, sitting on a specific couch, in a specific patch of afternoon light.
Lineora is a tool for making that second kind of picture — fast, and from any photo you already have.
You pick a photo. You pick a style. Seconds later you have a line drawing you can save, print, color in, frame, mail, or tuck into a book. The dog in the drawing is your dog. The house is your house. The grandmother is your grandmother.
That’s the whole product. Everything else is just doing that well.
Why “line drawing,” specifically
A line drawing has an unusual property: it leaves space for you.
A photo is finished. A painting is finished. A line drawing is not — by design. The outline is the part that’s hard to get right, and it’s the part Lineora does for you. The interior — the shading, the color, the texture of the cat’s fur — is the part that’s yours to fill in, or leave alone, depending on what you want.
That’s why a line drawing makes a perfect coloring page (a kid fills it in), a perfect contour study (an art student copies it onto a fresh sheet), and a perfect handmade gift (you frame the print itself, unfilled, and the recipient sees their own face in clean, careful lines).
The same output — the same fifty seconds of work — fits all three uses, because the unfinished quality of a line drawing is the feature, not a limitation.
Three styles, three uses
We launched with three:
- Contour — continuous outlines, no shading. The cleanest read, the one to print for a child. Reads as a coloring page the second you put crayons in front of it.
- Pencil — soft graphite, light cross-hatching. Reads as an artist’s study. Good for someone learning to draw the human face without copying every photograph perfectly.
- Anime — bold weighted outlines, simplified shading. Prints sharp at any size. Frames well. The one we keep seeing people use for gifts.
Each style is its own model, trained for a different texture. You can switch between them mid-render and compare side-by-side — the result is cached, so the second tap is instant.
We will add more styles. We will not add hundreds. The goal isn’t a filter aisle.
A library that follows you
Lineora doesn’t ask for your email. There’s no password. There’s no social graph.
What there is, instead, is a single recovery code — six short groups of characters — that you save somewhere safe. Paste that code into the app on a new phone, and your entire library reappears. Every drawing you’ve ever made, every original photo, the styles, the order. The app is the same app; the library is yours.
We did this because we noticed that the people most likely to love a tool like Lineora — parents, grandparents, art teachers, hobbyists — are also the people most worn out by app accounts. The recovery code is the smallest possible amount of “account” we could ship and still let your library survive a new phone.
What Lineora is not
It is not a creativity tool. It does not generate new images out of nothing. It does not invent a cat that doesn’t exist; it draws the cat you already photographed. The work of deciding what to make a picture of is yours, and that’s the part we think matters most.
It is also not a subscription. You buy a credit pack, you spend it as you draw, you stop when you stop. No recurring charges, no “pro tier,” no annual renewal we hope you forget about. We charge for the cloud compute that does the rendering, and that’s the entirety of the relationship.
Lines from life
The tagline on our homepage reads “Lines from life.” — three words and a punctuation mark.
We picked it carefully. Lines: a line drawing, a single contour, the thing the app makes. From life: drawn from a specific moment, a specific dog, a specific person who exists. Lines from life is what an art student writes at the top of a sketch they made of a real model in a real room, as opposed to a line they invented at a desk.
That’s the version of drawing we wanted to make easy for everyone who has a phone full of photos and not enough hours in the day to sit with a pencil.
If that’s something you’d use — for a kid, for a study, for a gift, or just because you wanted to see what your kitchen window looked like as a line drawing — we’d love to have you try it.
Welcome to Lineora.