In this paper, an example-based facial sketch system is presented, which automatically generates a sketch from an input image. All the example sketches are drawn with a particular style. There are two key elements in this system, a non-parametric sampling method and a flexible sketch model. Given an input image pixel and its neighborhood, the conditional distribution of a sketch point is computed by querying the examples and finding all similar neighborhoods. An expected sketch image is then drawn from the distribution to reflect the drawing style. Finally, good quality facial sketches are obtained.