Can I carve a design I made in Canva, Procreate or a phone drawing app?

Vector or picture decides everything

The official user guide draws the line clearly. Bitmaps are grids of pixels and are not directly useful for most toolpaths. Vectors are lines and curves, and most toolpaths need them. Some file types hold only bitmaps (BMP, PNG, JPG), and others such as PDF and SVG can hold vectors, bitmaps or both. So the question for any app is whether it can hand you real vectors.

Canva

Canva's download list offers SVG, PDF Standard, PDF Print, PNG and JPG. Canva states that SVG download belongs to its paid plans (Pro, Teams, Education and Nonprofits).

1. Build the design from shapes, graphics and text rather than photos.
2. Download as SVG if your plan allows it. Otherwise try PDF Print.
3. In the software choose File > Import > Import Vectors / Bitmaps.
4. Click the result. If you can select individual outlines, you have vectors. Check that lettering arrived as outlines.
5. If parts arrive as a picture, or the import reports only bitmap data, those parts were pixels inside the file. Trace them (see the entry on bitmap tracing).

Procreate and other painting apps

Procreate's share menu lists its own format, PSD, PDF, JPEG, PNG and TIFF. There is no SVG or DXF option, because it is a painting app that works in pixels. Plan on tracing.

1. Draw in solid black on a white or transparent background at the largest canvas you can.
2. Use Actions > Share > PNG. Procreate describes PNG as lossless, and it keeps transparency. JPEG trades quality for file size, which softens edges.
3. Import the PNG and use the trace tool, then clean up the result.

Pro tips

• Bold shapes with few colors trace best. The user guide names logos, cartoons, icons and signs as suitable images.
• From version 12.5 the software also imports WebP images as bitmaps.
• A traced or imported design has no trustworthy size. Scale it to a real dimension before toolpathing (see the entry on scaling a drawing to a real measurement).