Nomadic computing often refers to people using computer support working anywhere, anytime and not necessarily attached to a specific location or time of the day. Mobile computing and wireless ad-hoc networks are important elements in this kind of scenarios. Nowadays it is common to see architects, engineers, geologists and/or designers working on the field and sharing ideas on a collaborative media using sketches and freehand writing. On this scenario, data overflow among the peer applications often happens, since the sketches have to be distributed among all participants in real time. This paper presents a work on characterization and compression algorithms for sketches, with and without loss of information, to be used on mobile devices, in order to reduce the data traffic. We focused our study on three parameters of the algorithms: time required characterizing and compressing the sketch, size of the resulting information and human perceived of lost information. Our results present algorithms with a compression ratio lower than 1% the size of the original image without information loosing under human perception. © 2011 IEEE.