Remove Background from Sketch
Line art has a special requirement the usual photo cutout doesn’t: the white inside enclosed shapes should disappear too, so only the lines remain. That’s what makes a sketch usable as a tattoo reference, a logo draft, or a base for digital colouring. bgclear lifts ink and pencil lines off the page into a clean transparent PNG.
Get the best result
Ink your lines for the cleanest lift
High-contrast ink lines separate from paper almost perfectly. Soft pencel shading lifts with partial transparency — which can be exactly right for textured art, but ink your outlines if you need them solid.
Smudges count as marks
Charcoal and graphite smudges read as drawn content, not background. Clean stray smudges with an eraser before photographing — cheaper than editing them out after.
For digital colouring, keep lines pure
After extraction, set your art app’s layer mode to multiply and colour beneath the line layer. The transparent PNG from a well-lit sketch behaves like a proper line-art layer.
Common use cases
- Tattoo design references on transparency
- Logo and lettering drafts from paper sketches
- Line art bases for digital colouring
- Pattern and motif extraction for textiles
How it works
- 1.Photograph the sketch flat in even light and upload it (JPG, PNG, or WebP up to 10MB).
- 2.The AI keeps the drawn lines and removes the paper — including inside enclosed shapes.
- 3.Download the transparent PNG for tattoo refs, logos or colouring layers.
FAQs
Is the white inside closed shapes removed too?
Yes — paper showing inside loops and enclosed regions is treated as background, leaving only the linework.
Pencil or ink — what works better?
Ink gives crisp, fully opaque lines. Pencil lifts with soft semi-transparency that preserves shading character — both work; choose by the look you need.
Can a tattoo artist use the output directly?
Yes — a transparent PNG of clean linework is a standard reference format; print or import it into stencil software as usual.
My sketch is on graph paper — problem?
Grid lines are close in tone to pencil and can partially survive. Re-draw final pieces on plain paper for a clean extraction.
Is bgclear free to use?
Yes — free, unlimited, with no signup and no watermark on downloads.
Which image formats can I upload?
JPG, PNG and WebP files up to 10MB. Output is an HD transparent PNG.