Paint

What this tool does

Paint is a tool for drawing with a mouse or a touchscreen right inside the browser. The interface follows the layout of the Paint app built into Windows 11: three tabs along the top, which are File, Home and View, a ribbon of groups underneath, the canvas in the middle and a status bar at the bottom. Everything you draw stays inside your own browser, so the picture is never uploaded anywhere and never saved onto a server.

What it can do is essentially what the desktop Paint does. You can scribble freely, circle things on a screenshot, sketch a simple diagram, fill areas with colour and add text labels. You can also open a picture and crop it, rotate it or change its size before exporting the result as a PNG or a JPEG file.

What is included

• Tools: pencil, fill with colour, text, eraser, colour picker and magnifier, plus a rectangular select for working on one part of the picture
• Brushes: brush, calligraphy brush, calligraphy pen, airbrush, oil brush, crayon, marker, natural pencil and watercolour brush, nine in all, each with a different stroke texture
• Shapes: line, curve, ellipse, rectangle, rounded rectangle, polygon, triangle, diamond, arrows, stars, heart, lightning and speech bubble, twenty in all, each with its own outline colour, fill colour and line thickness
• Size and colours: four thicknesses, which are 1px, 3px, 5px and 8px, plus two swatches, colour 1 for the foreground and colour 2 for the background. Edit colours opens a custom picker and the colour picker tool samples a colour straight off the canvas
• Image: crop, resize by pixels or by percentage, rotate left 90, rotate right 90, rotate 180, flip horizontal and flip vertical
• Editing and viewing: undo, redo with up to 40 steps, copy, cut, paste, select all and clear image, together with zoom from 12.5 percent up to 1600 percent and optional gridlines, rulers and a status bar

How to use it

1. Pick a tool from the Tools group, for example the pencil
2. Click a swatch in the Colours group to choose the colour you want to draw with, or click Edit colours for anything else
3. If you need to, choose a thickness of 1px, 3px, 5px or 8px under Size
4. Hold the mouse button down on the canvas and drag, then release to finish the stroke
5. When you are finished, choose File and then Export PNG, and the browser downloads the picture

Useful shortcuts: Ctrl+Z to undo, Ctrl+Y to redo, Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+V to paste, Ctrl+A to select everything, Delete to remove the selection and Ctrl+S to export. Hold Shift while dragging to draw a straight line or a regular shape.

Things to keep in mind

• The canvas starts at 800x600: change it under File and then Properties, or open a picture and the canvas simply takes that picture size
• Fill is a flood fill: the bucket recolours every pixel of the same colour that connects to where you clicked, so a gap in the outline lets the colour spill out, which is simply how flood fill behaves
• Text cannot be edited once placed: clicking away from the box turns the words into part of the picture and only undo will bring them back, exactly as it works in Windows Paint
• The eraser paints with colour 2: that is the background colour, white by default, so tick the transparent background option in properties first if you want to erase to transparency
• Zooming only changes the view: it does not change the real pixel size of the canvas, so use Resize when you want different dimensions. Exporting a JPEG fills transparent areas with white, so export a PNG when you need transparency