webpaint.ing: free drawing and painting in your browser

webpaint.ing (also written webpainting) is a paint, comic and animation studio that opens in a browser. Draw with pressure-sensitive brushes, pencils and watercolor, make pixel art, use layers, selections and gradients, animate frame by frame with onion skin, export your work as pictures or MP4 video, and draw together with other people in a shared drawing. It saves on your device and keeps working offline. It needs a browser with WebGPU, and you sign in with a webpost.ing account.

webpost.ing is the blogging site it works with: drawings can be posted there.

What the tools do

• Brush: Draws a round, soft-edged line on the layer in hand.
• Pencil: A thin, grainy line like graphite on paper.
• Pixel brush: Draws whole pixels with hard edges, for pixel art.
• Flat: A flat, square-ended tip for painting in planes.
• Material: Paints with a picture, such as a fabric or a patch of your drawing.
• Dither brush: Paints whole pixels in a pattern, for texture instead of solid color.
• Eraser: Rubs out what is on the layer in hand.
• Fill: Fills a joined area with the color in hand.
• Gradient: Drag from A to B to fade the color in hand across the layer.
• Select a rectangle: Drag to select a rectangle; painting stays inside it.
• Lasso: Draw round what you want to select.
• Select by color: Press an area to select its joined pixels of nearly one color.
• Selection library: Keeps selections with the drawing to call back later.
• Transform: Drag the selection to move, scale, rotate, warp or rig it.
• Eyedropper: Press to take the color you see; a magnifier shows it first. Esc stops.
• Rotoscoping: Pose a 3D model under your drawing to draw over.
• Two-finger line: The line between two fingers is what you draw.
• Curve: Tap to place points; the line runs through them.
• Perspective: Lays a perspective grid over the picture.
• Made brushes: Brushes you make in the Brush maker, from a tip picture and nine settings.
• Warp: Bends the picture on the layer with the brush, then lands it.
• Watercolor: Transparent paint in water that stays wet for a while.
• Paper: Lays textured paper on a new layer above.
• Chalk: Dusty, pale color that shows the paper grain.
• Oil pastel: Thick, nearly solid color, smooth or grainy.
• Lock to a layer: Keeps your painting inside or outside another layer's paint.
• Smudge and blend: Drags the paint under the brush along as you draw.
• Mixer: Stirs the paint already on the layer into thin, sharp swirls.
• Panels (comics): Draws the panel borders of a comic page.
• Lettering (comics): Puts speech balloons, captions and sound effects on a page.

About webpaint.ing and webpost.ing

Webpainting and webposting are designed by Mae Pigeon (me). I leave software implementation to a rational AI text model. I have architected the application features and provided the model with core technologies and feedback to build what I want out of the application.

While I disclose that the code for the application is mostly written by AI, I do not train on or collect user drawings for any form of AI training. Nor do I include AI-generated artwork within the application.

I aim to have the brushes and tools grounded in math, physics, and computer graphics technology, with some defaults programmed by AI. It will eventually contain functionality that allows users to create custom scripts in the application using GDScript and WebGPU compute shaders to achieve highly custom brushes and effects in the app, using a plugin platform identical to the one the AI uses to create the defaults.

I see web app development, to an extent, as a means to an end to build a useful system, and don't see AI assistance for coding as necessarily bad. I understand that there is a lot of disdain towards generative AI in the world of arts, and would love to hear thoughts on the matter. I think the issues generally concern using generative AI to create artwork, which I think is kinda bad. One of the great things about artworks is that they are based on the human lived experience, and reflect a person's unique perspectives and creative ideas. I don't like generative image generation or creative writing; there is something uncanny about it, and how corporations tend to approach it resembles stealing from artists. Artists spend so much time developing their art style and direction, and generative AI "art" definitely feels wrong to me.

I guess reasoning and coding skills in LLMs come from AI stealing code, but to an extent I feel okay with having agents write code for me; it helps me develop and iterate on my ideas faster. The technology is unlikely to go away, so I guess I see it as a higher-level abstraction that can convey my ideas into code for me using machine reason and engineering skill.

I'd love to hear opinionated thoughts on these matters, so please do reach out to me through my contact form or socials on maepigeon.com.