Primal sketch performs an important role in early vision. In this paper, we propose a novel method to obtain the primal sketch of natural images by integrating empirical mode decomposition (EMD) techniques and image gradient. 2D EMD approach can decompose the image into a finite number of intrinsic mode functions (IMF), and each one represents the original image in a different scale, with the 1st IMF representing the finest scale. To enhance the information represented by the IMF, we multiply the 1st IMF by the image gradient. This enhanced IMF highlights intensity changes in the image. By linking all the maximal points in the enhanced IMF, we obtain a primal sketch of the original image. Compared with the existed primal sketch extraction methods, our method is fully driven by the image data, and it needs neither to choose filters nor to learn the image bases. The experiment results show that our method is fast and effective.