ABC Tools
String Art Generator illustration

String Art Generator

String art portraits are made from a single thread wound back and forth across a ring of nails — thousands of straight lines whose overlaps build up the shades of a photo. This generator works out the whole winding for you. Drop in a photo, frame it in a circle or square, choose the number of nails, the frame size and your thread thickness, and watch the picture being woven: from each nail it picks the line that covers the most still-missing darkness, and every line darkens the pixels it crosses by the share of each pixel the real thread would cover. You get a true-to-scale preview, the length of thread to buy, a 1:1 nail template to print and tape to your board, the nail sequence as a text or CSV file, and a step-by-step player that reads the next nail number aloud while you wind.

Runs 100% in your browser — your images and designs never leave your device.

Notes

  • Contrast matters more than resolution: faces with strong light and shadow and a plain background come out best. Crop tight and push the contrast slider until the grey preview looks almost like a sketch.
  • The preview draws every thread at its real width for the frame size you set, so what you see is close to the finished piece. Thread adds up fast: a 50 cm frame with 3,000 threads needs about 1 km, because the average chord across a circle is almost two thirds of its diameter.
  • Skipping the nearest nails keeps the algorithm from wasting thread on short chords near the rim; raise it if the edge of the circle comes out too dark.
  • Runs 100% in your browser — your images and designs never leave your device.

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