Free drawing games

What makes a good drawing game

A drawing game hands you a canvas and a set of tools and lets the picture be the point. Some give you a blank page, some a line drawing to fill in, and some a pattern to copy as closely as you can. What they share is that you make something you can look at afterwards, and most of them let you keep it, either saved in your browser or as a PNG picture on your device.

People look for drawing games to relax, to doodle with a child or to try an idea quickly without paper and pens. The games on this page run from pixel art and comic strips to colouring, falling sand and mirrored mandalas, with two seasonal carving and painting games on top. Most have no score at all, and every one of them has undo, so a stray stroke costs nothing.

Drawing games to start with

For free drawing, Doodle Pad is the easiest start: eight brushes that each behave differently, from a grainy pencil to a wet brush and a rainbow line, plus a paint bucket, seventy-one stickers and a mirror that turns one stroke into eight. Kaleido Draw is calmer still. You drag across a round plate and the line is copied around the middle up to forty-eight times, so every scribble comes out symmetrical.

If you would rather colour in, Colour Book has thirty-one line-art pages, and each tap pours colour into a shape and stops exactly at the line, with glitter, gradients and patterns in the tray. Colour Mix is made for ages four to ten: an octopus cheers you on while you mix two paints in a bowl, paint by number and sort shades from light to dark.

For something to build, Pixel Painter lets you draw sprites pixel by pixel and animate them across up to twelve frames, then export a PNG or a sprite sheet. Story Builder makes a comic page from scenes, characters, props and speech bubbles. Sand Art is a jar of twenty materials that react, where lava sets into stone and oil floats and burns. In season you will also find Pumpkin Carver, where you trace a stencil to carve a lantern, and Egg Decorator, where you dye and paint eggs to match a card.

Drawing with a mouse, a finger or a stylus

Every drawing game here works on a computer, a tablet and a phone. With a mouse you click to place a mark and drag to paint a stroke; on a touch screen you do the same with a finger. Kaleido Draw also reads a stylus, which draws a fatter line the harder you press. A tablet is the most comfortable screen for most of these games, because there is room for the canvas and the tool tray side by side.

On a keyboard the shortcuts save time. Z undoes and Y redoes in most of the games, number keys pick colours or jars, and the square brackets change the brush size in Doodle Pad, Sand Art and Kaleido Draw. Pixel Painter picks its tools with letter keys, such as P for pencil and F for fill. When you have made something you like, use the save or PNG button before you close the tab.

Frequently asked questions