Barely Drawn: An App That Draws Your Photo Badly on Purpose
Barely Drawn is an app that redraws your photo, just not very well. You pick one photo and one drawing style, and it hands back a picture that is clearly you but somehow off. The Korean name is 그려는드림, roughly “well, I did draw it”, and the English tagline on the web version is “We draw. ‘Well’ is extra.” It is available on Google Play, and an iOS update is being prepared.
Competing on the joke, not on quality
There are plenty of AI tools that make polished portraits. Barely Drawn deliberately doesn’t try to win that contest. The product document lists what it competes on instead:
- The time from choosing a photo to seeing the result is very short.
- The original is recognizable, but something about the result is clumsy.
- The app never apologizes for the result. It just hands it over.
- The result is the kind of thing you want to send to a friend.
- You never have to learn how to write a prompt.
That last point shaped the whole interface. There is no text box. The style cards do the work a prompt would do, and their names describe the outcome rather than a technique: Wonderfully Wonky, Squish & Shape, Scribble & Shade, Warm & Fuzzy, Bold & Neat, Block by Block and Marker Mayhem.
A voice with rules
An app whose whole personality is “confidently bad at drawing” can go wrong quickly, so the voice has written rules:
- Short, plain sentences, like a friend who is completely unbothered.
- It may joke about its own drawing skills. It never comments on the person in the photo: not their looks, age, gender, ethnicity or disability.
- Error messages say what happened and what to do next first. A small self-deprecating joke can come after that.
- Privacy notices, ad terms and credits are written straight, with no jokes at all.
The second rule matters most. When a joke is aimed at the app, it’s a brand. When it is aimed at the face in the photo, it’s an insult, so that line is fixed.
From mini-app to stores to the web
Barely Drawn started as a mini-app inside Toss, a Korean finance app, then became native iOS and Android apps built from the same product rules. The most recent step, at the end of September 2026, is a no-install web version, which is built but not public yet. People who search for how to turn a photo into a drawing can try it in the browser before deciding whether to install anything.
The web version shares its style list and wording with the apps, so a style name or a line of copy changes in one place. The build covers 48 language and region versions, and the store release notes went out in 49 languages.
A consent lesson worth passing on
One fix in the iOS 1.0.1 update was about consent order. If a player in a region that requires privacy consent declines it, the app should not then show the system prompt asking for tracking permission. Declining should mean declining. The fix was to skip the tracking request entirely after a refusal. It’s a small rule, but it applies to any app that shows ads in those regions.