Free · runs in your browser
A photograph,
2,600 lines
of thread.
Give it a photo and it works out the winding order — one continuous thread, wrapped nail by nail around a ring. Print the nail map, hit play, and follow the numbers.
- No account
- No upload
- No watermark
- Works offline
Solved by the same engine the studio runs. Subject drawn for this page.
240
nails on a 21 in ring
2,600
chords in a portrait
1.1 km
of thread, give or take
3–6 h
of winding
The whole process
Four steps between a photo and a wall.
- 01
Frame the photo
Drag to crop inside the board outline, then set the shape, the size, the nail count and how dark the thread should read. A live preview shows exactly what the solver sees.
- 02
Solve the winding order
A greedy solver picks chord after chord, each one the single line that removes the most remaining darkness. A few thousand of them add up to a photograph.
- 03
Print the nail map
Every board size comes as a tiled PDF at true scale, with a 10 cm ruler bar on the cover so you can prove your printer did not shrink it.
- 04
Wind and follow
The player reads the nail numbers out loud and keeps your place, so both hands stay on the thread. Close the tab; it remembers where you stopped.
Same engine, three subjects
Watch it wind.
Each of these is a real solve: 240 nails, black thread, no touch-ups. They draw themselves at roughly a hundred lines a second — a real board takes an afternoon.
The subjects above are illustrations drawn for this site, not customer work. The sequences behind them come from the same solver you get in the studio.
What you get
Built by working backwards from the board.
Every number this tool shows you is a physical one: millimetres between nails, metres of thread, hours at the frame. Nothing is decorative.
Nothing is uploaded
Your photo is decoded, solved and rendered on your own device. There is no server in the loop at all.
Solves in seconds
The solver runs in a worker thread, so the preview draws itself while it works and the page never freezes.
Circle, square, heart
Nails are spaced by arc length along whichever outline you pick, so the gaps stay even the whole way round.
Black or CMYK
One black thread for the classic look, or four passes of yellow, cyan, magenta and black for a colour piece.
True-scale PDFs
Vector, not raster. Nail dots are 1.2 mm, every tenth is bold, and the tiles butt edge to edge with crop marks.
Take it off-screen
A printed winding sheet, a large-print one for tired eyes, plain text, or a project file that moves the sequence and your progress to your phone.
No photo needed
Nail templates, printed at true scale.
Pick a shape, a size and a nail count and get a tiled PDF with every dot numbered. Nail 1 at the top, clockwise, every tenth in bold — the same convention the player speaks. Useful even if you never touch the solver.
- Circle, square or heart
Nails spaced by arc length, so the gaps stay even. - 60 to 600 nails
Any count, any board from 10 cm to 3 m. - A4 or US Letter
Tiled with crop marks and a page map. - A 10 cm ruler bar
Check the print before you cut anything.
Questions
Before you buy nails.
More depth in the craft guides, including the sources behind every number.
Is String Art Maker free?
Yes, and there is no account, no watermark and no export limit. The solver, the PDF writer and the player all run inside your browser, so there is no server bill to pass on to you.
Do my photos get uploaded anywhere?
No. The photo is read by the page, processed on your device and never sent anywhere. You can put the browser in aeroplane mode after the page loads and everything still works.
How many nails should I use?
For a 21 in (53 cm) circle, 240 nails gives about 7 mm between nails, which is comfortable to wind. Fewer nails is easier and blockier; more nails resolves finer detail but needs thinner thread. Below about 4.5 mm of spacing the design is really a pen drawing, not string art.
How long does one piece take?
Budget roughly 4.5 to 8.5 seconds per line once you have a rhythm. A 2,600 line portrait is therefore about 3 to 6 hours of winding, plus an evening of hammering nails and a day for the paint to dry.
How much thread do I need?
A mean chord is about 0.64 times the board width, so a 21 in board with 2,600 lines uses roughly 1.1 km of thread. Two 1,000 m spools of 100 to 150 dtex sewing thread cover almost any portrait; the studio tells you the exact figure for your settings.
Can I use a colour photo?
Yes. Black thread is the classic look and reproduces tone best. There is also a CMYK mode that splits the image into yellow, cyan, magenta and black passes, wound in that order — much more work, but a colour result.
Which photos work best?
Front lit faces on a plain background, one clear subject, and real contrast between light and dark. High-key photos with a dark background are ideal. Busy backgrounds, backlighting, sunglasses and hats all fight the medium.