It shipped with Windows 3.0 and 3.1, and for a great many people it was the first drawing program they ever used — the one where you found out what a flood fill was, and what happened when you used it on a shape you had not quite closed. Windows 95 replaced it with Paint. This is that tool, rebuilt to run in a browser.

Fourteen tools: pencil, brush, line, curve, box and filled box, ellipse and filled ellipse, polygon, flood fill, eraser, text, airbrush and a colour picker. Five line widths, and the sixteen-colour palette the era ran on.

How do the two colours work?

There are two at once, a foreground and a background, shown as the overlapping pair at the left of the colour strip. Left-click a colour to set the foreground, right-click to set the background. Left-click on the canvas paints with the foreground, right-click with the background, and the filled shapes use the background for their interior. That is exactly how the original behaved.

CTRL+Z, twenty times. It works by keeping a copy of the pixels under each stroke before you make it, rather than by replaying your strokes — replaying a brush stroke gives you something very slightly different each time, and very slightly different adds up.

What do I get when I save?

A real PNG in your downloads, at the canvas size, ready to use anywhere. Re-encoding through the canvas means the file carries no metadata at all — no camera tags, no location, nothing about you.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes. Draw with a finger — the canvas takes touch directly rather than scrolling the page under you.

PLAY · OPEN SHELF

Paintbrush — Draw in the Browser

Sixteen colours, fourteen tools, and a real PNG at the end. It runs in the browser, it costs nothing, and finishing a game pays bits into the Bit Bank.

NAME

— · BRUSHNO BITS YET

Contour field plate, an interference landscape banded into iso-lines, ink-soft on bone — FIG. — FROM THE MANUAL · PLACEHOLDER PLATE

How it works

Pick a tool from the palette down the left, a width beneath it, and a colour from the strip along the bottom.
Left-click paints with the foreground colour and right-click with the background — the filled shapes use the background for their interior.
The status bar reads out where the pointer is, and the size of a shape while you drag it. CTRL+Z undoes the last twenty strokes.
SAVE PNG puts a real file in your downloads and banks the bits.

Questions, answered honestly

What was Paintbrush?: It shipped with Windows 3.0 and 3.1, and for a great many people it was the first drawing program they ever used — the one where you found out what a flood fill was, and what happened when you used it on a shape you had not quite closed. Windows 95 replaced it with Paint. This is that tool, rebuilt to run in a browser.
What can it draw?: Fourteen tools: pencil, brush, line, curve, box and filled box, ellipse and filled ellipse, polygon, flood fill, eraser, text, airbrush and a colour picker. Five line widths, and the sixteen-colour palette the era ran on.
How do the two colours work?: There are two at once, a foreground and a background, shown as the overlapping pair at the left of the colour strip. Left-click a colour to set the foreground, right-click to set the background. Left-click on the canvas paints with the foreground, right-click with the background, and the filled shapes use the background for their interior. That is exactly how the original behaved.
Can I undo?: CTRL+Z, twenty times. It works by keeping a copy of the pixels under each stroke before you make it, rather than by replaying your strokes — replaying a brush stroke gives you something very slightly different each time, and very slightly different adds up.
What do I get when I save?: A real PNG in your downloads, at the canvas size, ready to use anywhere. Re-encoding through the canvas means the file carries no metadata at all — no camera tags, no location, nothing about you.
Does it work on a phone?: Yes. Draw with a finger — the canvas takes touch directly rather than scrolling the page under you.