GPS Art

RouteDoodle is a free app for GPS Art, where you draw a picture by biking or running. It's also called Strava Art or drawing with your feet.

Your picture has to be one unbroken line: a GPS trace is a single line from the moment you press start to the moment you press stop.

Following roads, connecting dots, or roaming free

A person in mid-stride, running along the streets of San Francisco
Lenny Maughan, Walk Run, 2020

Road-map art

In this kind of GPS art, every line is a road or path you actually travel along. It's the most constrained kind — the challenge is designing a picture that looks good and fits the streets.

A cyclist on a racing bike, drawn in straight lines across the streets of Victoria
Stephen Lund, Ryder Hesjedal on his Cannondale, 2015

Pause-plot art

Here the picture is connect-the-dots. You pause the recording, travel to the next point, resume for a moment, and pause again — so the trace joins the points with straight lines, wherever the roads go.

An eagle's head drawn freehand across open ground, away from any roads
Gustavo Lyra, Aprenda com as águias, 2023

Free-form art

Here you leave the roads behind and draw across open terrain — a grassy field, a desert, even a lake. A blank canvas, with nothing to constrain the line.

Road-map art is the hardest kind to design. Your picture has to fit real streets. That's what RouteDoodle is great at: you draw, it finds the roads.

How to make your own

Start from a picture, or draw your own. Either way, RouteDoodle turns your line into real roads.

  1. A picture of a dragon laid over a street map of Brooklyn
    1 Draw a Wireframe
    Drop in any picture and RouteDoodle traces it. Or draw one yourself, right on the map.
  2. The dragon traced as a blue line on the map
    2 Fit it to the map
    The blue line is yours to move, stretch and reshape until it sits over streets you'd like to ride.
  3. The dragon as a red route that follows the streets
    3 Ride the Route
    RouteDoodle finds real roads that follow your line — the red Route, ready to export.

New here? Take the tutorial — it walks you through your first doodle, one step at a time, right on the map. Or pick one of the other tutorials.


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