In this paper, we propose a novel face photo retrieval system using sketch drawings. By transforming a photo image into a sketch, we reduce the difference between photo and sketch significantly, thus allow effective matching between the two. To improve the synthesis performance, we separate shape and texture information in a face photo, and conduct transformation on them respectively. Finally a Bayesian classifier is used to recognize the probing sketch from the synthesized pseudo-sketches. Experiments on a data set containing 606 people clearly demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm.