Color for drawings, built to respect the lines
This tool is built for drawings, not photographs. Our free AI photo colorizer predicts realistic color for black-and-white photos; this page does the artist's version of that job: it takes manga panels, lineart, and inked sketches and fills them with clean anime-style color. The model reads the drawing first, so a school uniform gets one consistent color everywhere it appears, skin and hair stay coherent, and backgrounds pick up palettes that fit the scene.
The linework itself is treated as sacred: the instruction preserves every line exactly as drawn. Coloring happens inside and around your lines with cel shading layered on top, the flat-then-shadowed look of professional anime production, so the result reads like a digitally colored version of your art rather than a repainted-over one.
Who this is for
Manga artists who work in ink and want to preview or publish colored versions, illustrators who sketch in line and want fast color drafts to pick a direction, and fans coloring favorite panels. It also rescues scans: pencil or ink drawings photographed from a sketchbook colorize surprisingly well, as long as the lines are clear.
If your drawing is a photo of a person you want turned INTO anime art, that is the reverse direction; use the free photo to anime converter instead, which restyles photographs into anime rather than coloring existing line drawings.
What to expect
Clear, closed linework colors best; very sketchy or broken lines force the model to guess where regions end. Color choices are the model's own; if you need a specific palette, say a character's canonical hair color, run the result through the free AI image editor with an instruction like "make the hair silver". The tool accepts JPG, PNG, and WebP up to 4096px per side, and the colored artwork returns near one megapixel; print-resolution pages are a job for the free AI image upscaler, which is particularly strong on anime-style art. Your scan is held only while the colors render, then discarded.