AI Prompt Turns Photos into Hand-Drawn Doodle Style Without Redrawing

On October 4, 2026, the AI section of DEV Community published a post about a single AI prompt that turns an ordinary photo into the hand-drawn doodle diary style that has been circulating on Instagram and TikTok — without repainting the original image.

The look the post describes is familiar: thin hand-drawn lines tracing a person or a bowl of noodles, a couple of arrows, and two lines of handwritten notes such as "this was so good." It reads like something that took a steady hand and an hour of work, but the post says it takes about 10 seconds and one prompt. The catch, according to the post, is that most attempts at this style fail. People paste instructions along the lines of "make this photo look like a doodle," and the model either redraws the entire photo as a cartoon or smears the text across the subject's face.

The point the post keeps returning to is that the original photo should not be redrawn: the source image stays in place, and the doodle-style lines, arrows and handwritten text are layered on top of it rather than regenerated from scratch. The post does not specify the exact wording of the prompt, which model or tool it targets, or how many photos were used to test it. As it stands, the item is an introduction to this prompting approach rather than a report of a release, a benchmark or a measured comparison.