Online Drawing Pad: Sketch Freehand with Pen or Stylus

A freehand sketching canvas for quick diagrams, no install and no account.

Drawpad is a freehand canvas that opens straight into a working sketch, autosaved to IndexedDB about half a second after your last stroke, with Save as… for keeping named sketches beside it. Pen and highlighter strokes respond to stylus pressure in both width and opacity, the canvas can use a preset or any custom size from 200 to 4000 pixels per side, and a sketch exports either as a PNG image or as a Strokes JSON file you can import again to keep editing.

How to draw online with Drawpad

  1. Pick Pen or Highlighter, choose one of the eight colour swatches or open the custom colour picker, and set the brush width anywhere from 1 to 40 pixels.
  2. Choose a canvas: Wide 1600×1000 is the default, alongside HD 1920×1080, Square 1200×1200, A4 portrait or landscape, Classic 900×560, or a custom width and height.
  3. Draw with a mouse, a finger or a stylus; Undo takes back the latest stroke, and Focus mode fills the screen with the toolbar and canvas.
  4. Type a name in the project bar and use Save as… to file the sketch under Open; later strokes on a named sketch save to it automatically.
  5. Open Export and pick PNG image for a picture, or Strokes JSON for a file that Import turns back into an editable sketch.

The working sketch and named sketches

Drawpad always opens into an unnamed working sketch stored under a fixed row in a database called bt-drawpad, and every change to it autosaves 500 milliseconds after you stop. Reopening the tool, even after closing the browser, brings that canvas back exactly as you left it, with no naming step forced on you.

Save as… writes a separate named copy, and from then on each edit to the open sketch also updates that named row. The Open list lets you switch between saved sketches, rename them, duplicate them or delete them, and New starts a blank canvas at the default size without touching anything you saved.

Fifty named sketches are free, the always-present working sketch does not count toward that number, and Pro removes the cap. Clear, by contrast, empties whatever is on the canvas right now, so save or export first if you might want it back.

How a pointer path becomes a pressure-aware line

Each stroke records every sampled point's x and y position alongside the raw pressure value reported at that instant, plus the color, brush type, and the width and opacity slider settings in effect when the stroke started. Rendering draws each segment as a curve through consecutive point midpoints, a standard freehand-smoothing technique that avoids a jagged polyline without a heavier curve-fitting library.

Per-point width scales the slider's base width between roughly forty and one hundred sixty percent depending on pressure, and opacity scales in a similar range, so a stylus stroke can taper and fade along its length. A plain mouse always reports a fixed mid-level pressure, which is why mouse strokes render at a uniform width instead of tapering.

Drawing on a phone, tablet or with a stylus

Mouse, touch and pen input all run through one Pointer Events handler rather than separate mouse and touch code, and the canvas blocks the browser's own touch gestures, so dragging a finger across it draws instead of scrolling the page. When the browser supplies coalesced pointer samples, every one of them is added to the stroke, which keeps fast pen movements from turning into straight chords.

Pressure changes the line only when the device actually reports it. Width then runs from 40 to 160 percent of the slider value and opacity from 55 to 100 percent; an input that reports nothing is treated as mid pressure and draws an even line. Focus mode relies on the browser's full-screen support, and where that is missing the tool says so instead of failing silently.

Undo, the confirm-before-clear flow, and exporting

Undo removes the most recent stroke and redraws the rest, and pressing it again keeps stepping back through the stroke list, including strokes drawn in an earlier session, because a sketch is stored as that list rather than as a flat bitmap. There is no redo. Clearing the canvas requires a second confirming click within four seconds, and that armed state cancels itself automatically if you move on without deciding, rather than sitting ready indefinitely.

The PNG is taken from the canvas backing buffer, which is the chosen canvas size multiplied by your screen's device pixel ratio, so a Wide 1600×1000 sketch downloads at 3200×2000 on a 2× display. It has a white background and a filename built from today's date. Strokes JSON instead saves every point, pressure value, colour and brush setting plus the canvas size, named after the sketch.

Backup that stays off unless you turn it on

The mechanism matches every other Workspace tool: a fine-grained GitHub token scoped to one repository lets every autosave also push the open sketch's stroke data as JSON to a drawpad folder in that repository, straight from your browser to GitHub's own servers. A failed push shows a dismissible error banner but never blocks or reverts the local save.

With backup off, which is the default, nothing about your drawing ever leaves the browser tab it was drawn in.

What Drawpad cannot do

Questions people ask about Drawpad

Is this drawing pad free, and do I need an account?
It is free with no account and no sign-up. Drawing, PNG and Strokes JSON export, import and GitHub backup are all available on the free tier, which keeps up to 50 named sketches; Pro lifts only that saved-sketch limit.
Can I save more than one drawing in Drawpad?
Yes. Name the drawing and choose Save as… to keep it in the Open list, then use New for a blank canvas. The free tier holds 50 named sketches, Pro holds any number, and the unnamed working sketch the tool opens into is always kept on top of those.
Can I draw with my finger on a phone or tablet?
Yes. Touch goes through the same pointer handler as a mouse or pen, and the canvas stops the page from scrolling while your finger is on it. Fingers usually report no real pressure, so finger strokes draw at an even width set by the slider.
Does my drawing tablet's pressure sensitivity actually do anything here?
Yes — each sampled point's reported pressure value drives both the stroke's width and its opacity as you draw, so a light touch tapers thinner and fainter than a hard press. A mouse reports a fixed mid-level pressure, so mouse strokes come out a uniform width instead of tapering.
Can I save as JPG or SVG instead of PNG?
Not directly. Export offers a PNG image or a Strokes JSON file, and the JSON only reopens in Drawpad. For a JPG, run the PNG through the Image Converter; for vector paths, the PNG to SVG converter can trace the drawing, though traced output is an approximation of your strokes.
Is there an eraser?
No. Undo removes strokes one at a time from the newest backwards, and Clear wipes the whole canvas after a confirmation. Because the canvas and the exported PNG have a white background, painting over a mark with the pen set to pure white also hides it.
Is my sketch automatically backed up somewhere other than this browser?
Only if you have opted into GitHub backup in the backup settings. Left off, the drawing exists solely in this browser's local storage, so clearing that storage loses it. To move a sketch to another browser without GitHub, export Strokes JSON and import that file on the other side.

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Content reviewed 2026-09-27.