How to turn kids’ drawings into vinyl decals

A drawing on paper is one of the easiest pictures to cut: dark lines, a plain background, one or two colours. Most of the work is in the photo and in the size you cut it at.

Written by the developer of Decaly · Published 21 October 2026

Short answer

To turn kids’ drawings into a vinyl decal, have the drawing done (or gone over) in dark marker, photograph it flat and straight on in even light, then trace it into one or two colours to get an SVG your cutting software can cut. Before cutting, check the thinnest lines at the size you’ll cut: a line that shrinks below about 0.8 mm is hard to weed.

Get Decaly Traces a picture into cut layers on your Android phone. Tracing is free, with no account.

What kind of drawing makes a good decal?

A cutting machine cuts outlines, so it likes drawings that are already mostly outlines and flat colour. Craft tutorials that do this project agree on the same few things: thick, dark lines on white paper, and a design kept simple, because every small enclosed shape is one more piece to weed.

Marker beats pencil and crayon. A felt-tip line is solid and even; a pencil line is faint and grainy. If the drawing is already done in pencil, an adult can go over the lines in marker.
Bold beats fine. The drawing will usually be shrunk to fit a mug, a water bottle or a shirt, and every line shrinks with it (there is a table below).
One or two colours. Each colour is its own sheet of vinyl and its own layer to line up. A black outline drawing makes a one-colour decal; an outline with one filled colour makes a two-layer one.
Scribbled colouring-in is the hard part. Hatching and gaps traced at their real size become dozens of slivers. Either leave the colouring out and cut only the outline, or accept that the fill will be rebuilt as a flat shape.

How to photograph a drawing for cutting

Lay the paper flat in daylight or even room light. Hold the phone so its shadow doesn’t fall across the page.
Shoot straight down, so the drawing isn’t stretched into a trapezoid, and let the paper fill the frame. A table edge or a shadow along the border of the photo can be mistaken for part of the background.
Leave a little blank paper around the drawing rather than cropping into the lines.

In Decaly, the Camera button on the start screen (“Take a photo of a drawing”) opens your camera app and brings the photo straight into the trace, turned the right way up. A scan or a photo you already took works the same through Open your picture.

Two things help a drawing on paper in particular. The background is read as the colour most common along the edge of the picture, which is the paper, so the paper is never cut. Off-white paper and a faint tint of it are merged into that background instead of becoming a ghost colour; when that happens, the screen says so under Colours to cut (for example “1 colour matched the paper, so 2 are cut”). And when a drawing has no real dark ink at all, such as light pencil, its contrast is raised before tracing so the faint lines still register.

Tracing it into a cut file

Set Colours to cut to 1 for an outline, 2 for an outline plus one colour. Start low; add a colour only when it brings back detail you want.
Try Simple detail first for a hand-drawn line; fewer, plainer outlines usually cut and weed more cleanly. Use the magnifier to look along an edge before you decide.
Use Recolour on each tile to set it to the vinyl you’ll cut, and Leave this colour out for a colour you don’t want to cut at all (a smudge, a crayon shadow). Its pieces take the colour around them.
Check the White tile. White that is enclosed by the drawing, like the inside of an eye or the hole in a letter “o”, is shown as pieces inside the design. Leave it as the surface showing through, or switch on Cut it to cut it from white vinyl.
For two colours, pick Stacked (the bottom colour is cut whole and the other sits on top, which the app describes as best for layered vinyl and iron-on) or Side by side (each colour cut only where it shows). How to layer vinyl without overlapping goes through the choice.

For more on which photos trace well and which turn into blotchy bands, see photo to SVG.

What size should a kid’s drawing decal be?

Measure the place it is going, then set the Cut size to that, on the long side (Decaly takes 0.5 to 24 inches). The catch is that a drawing made on a sheet of paper is usually being shrunk, and every line gets thinner in proportion. Say the drawing is 10 inches across and its marker lines are 2 mm wide:

Decal size (long side)	Scale	A 2 mm line becomes
8 in	80%	1.6 mm, easy to weed
5 in	50%	1.0 mm, fine
4 in	40%	0.8 mm, at the limit
3 in	30%	0.6 mm, likely to tear
2 in	20%	0.4 mm, too thin

Worked example: line width × decal size ÷ drawing size. Measure your own drawing’s lines; a pencil line starts far thinner than 2 mm.

Decaly does this check for you at the size you set: any piece narrower than 0.8 mm is ringed as too thin to weed, with three choices: Make it thicker (grown to 0.8 mm), remove it, or keep it. Bits under 2 mm across, like stray dots, are removed by default; if the drawing has small dots you want (freckles, raindrops), switch off “Remove bits too small to weed” in the size settings. Vinyl too thin to weed? explains the 0.8 mm figure.

Cutting it: adhesive vinyl or iron-on

Save the trace for your machine: one SVG with every layer for Cricut Design Space, or one DXF file for each layer for Silhouette Studio (saving is part of Decaly Pro). Upload it, check the size on the canvas, and cut.

Adhesive vinyl (mugs, water bottles, lunch boxes, a window): cut it as it is, weed, and apply with transfer tape. A design with lots of small separate pieces is harder to lift on transfer tape, which is one more reason to keep it bold.
Iron-on (heat transfer vinyl) for a shirt or a tote: mirror the design before cutting and put the vinyl shiny side down on the mat, as most iron-on guides say. Design Space has a Mirror switch for each mat in the preview before you cut. Follow the vinyl maker’s heat and time settings.

Doing it without an app

You can do this on a computer too. In Design Space, Upload → Upload Image takes a photo of the drawing, asks how complex the image is, and lets you erase the background with its Select and Erase tools before choosing to cut it (as described in Cricut’s help pages as of October 2026). The upload comes in as one image, so it suits a one-colour outline best; for two or more colours cut from different vinyl, a traced SVG keeps each colour as its own layer (PNG to SVG for Cricut explains why). Silhouette Studio has its own trace tool for the same job. The phone route is simply shorter: the drawing is on the table, the phone is in your hand, and nothing is uploaded on the way.

Decaly: image to SVG, in layers you can cut

Photograph a drawing on your Android phone and watch it trace into colour layers, free. Decaly Pro saves it as an SVG for Cricut Design Space, one DXF per layer for Silhouette Studio, or a PNG for Print Then Cut.

Get Decaly on Google Play