Aiming at the problems that the machine sketch image drawn by the manipulator lacks realism, artistic sense, and the hardware equipment is complicated, and hard to popularize, this paper proposes a machine sketch method based on image hierarchy. With this method, it extracts image contours and image inner filling areas as binary target images from the processed images based on the application of some pre-processing methods such as Gray-scale Transformation, Filtering and Binary in dealing with the original character image. Through traversing the target images with simple path planning, then using XY-type simple manipulator to draw the image contours while painting the images with hierarchical drawing modes, it ultimately achieves the drawing of the character sketch image. Experimental results show that the method can draw arbitrary curve according to the image contours, through the hierarchical drawing model, which take the environmental factors into consideration, achieving the purpose of flattering the sketch image and making it more hierarchal.