Turn a flat drawing into an editable SVG with Recraft

A small flower drawing becomes easier to reuse when its petals and leaves can be edited separately. Recraft’s AI vectorizer converts a raster image into a vector, giving your own flat artwork a route into editable shapes and an SVG file.[1]

This walkthrough follows Recraft’s current browser documentation; we have not run the conversion in a product session. The task is deliberately small: import one drawing, change one recovered shape, then confirm that the downloaded SVG remains editable.

Choose the artwork and the account

Start with your own PNG or JPEG containing a few solid colours and clear boundaries. A simple flower, leaf or abstract emblem makes a useful first exercise. Recraft cautions that photographs, 3D renders and textured artwork can produce vectorisation artefacts. Keep the original visible so a simplified edge can be judged against what you drew.[4]

Before creating an asset for commercial use, choose the appropriate plan. Recraft says images generated under its free plan are public and lack a commercial-use licence; paid-plan generations receive commercial rights and remain private. Its Basic plan is listed at US$12 with monthly billing, or US$120 billed annually. Check the current checkout for your account.[7][8]

Open Recraft Studio in a browser and sign in, creating an account if necessary. From Projects, choose Create new project to open a blank canvas. These steps use the browser workspace, so you do not need to install a separate graphics application.[2]

Drag your image file onto the canvas, or use Upload image and select it from your computer. Click the imported artwork so its contextual controls appear.[3]

Convert, then make one deliberate edit

1. Choose Vectorize in the image’s context panel.
2. Inspect the converted version, especially small gaps and corners.
3. Adjust Color Reduction if the result contains more colour regions than you want. Use Swatches to work with individual colours, or Spectrum for colour ranges.

Treat simplification as a design choice. In the flower exercise, a narrow gap between two petals may be part of the drawing, while a tiny speck beside the stem may be expendable. Reduce the palette only while those useful distinctions remain visible. This is a suggested inspection exercise, not a claim about a result we generated.

1. Double-click the vector to enter its individual shapes.
2. Select a shape and choose a new fill colour.
3. To adjust its outline, double-click that shape again and drag a point or edge. Work on one visibly uneven curve first.
4. Click outside the vector when finished. This temporary editing route keeps the result as one vector image with your edits retained.

Download the SVG and reopen it

Select the completed vector and choose Export in the context panel, or right-click and choose Export as. Set the format to SVG, specify the required dimensions and confirm Export. Give the downloaded file a recognisable name such as flower-edited.svg in your chosen save location.[6]

Import the saved flower-edited.svg into a new project. Recraft supports editing imported SVGs: double-click the illustration, select a petal and try another fill colour. This checks the downloaded file’s shapes as well as its appearance.[5][3]

If you used Turn into frame and SVG export is unavailable, check for raster elements inside the frame. Recraft requires every element to be a vector for that export.[5]

Keep the original raster and the exported SVG together. The first preserves the drawing you started from; the second is the version to reopen when you want a different petal colour, a cleaner curve or a new arrangement.

Report an error or suggest a correction