English

Language

Shared canvas · up to 16 people · no sign-up

Draw Together

A shared drawing board that lives at a link. Open one, send it to your friends, and up to16 of you draw on the same canvas at the same time — every line appearing on everybody's screen as it is made. Free, no account, and nobody can find your board unless you sent it to them.

You get a link. Anyone who opens it can draw on the same canvas straight away.

Private by default — there is no public list and no way for a stranger to wander in. The link is the door.

How it works

  1. Open a board

    One button. No account, no download, nothing for anyone else to install. You land on a white square with a link at the top of it.

  2. Send the link

    Paste it into your group chat. Everyone who opens it picks a nickname and can draw immediately — up to 16 of you on the same canvas. People can arrive late and the whole drawing is there waiting for them.

  3. Draw at the same time

    Lines appear on everybody’s screen as they are made, not when you let go. When you are done, one button saves the whole thing as a PNG.

A drawing board that lives at a link

Most online drawing boards ask you to pick a username, or to install something, or they drop you into a room full of people you have never met. This one is a URL. You open a board, the address bar has six characters on the end of it, and whoever you send those six characters to is drawing with you about ten seconds later. Nothing is installed and nothing is signed up for.

It is deliberately small: one square canvas, 12 colours, five brush sizes, and no rounds, scores or timers of any kind. If you want the game with the words and the guessing, that is Draw & Guess — this is the shared piece of paper you leave open on the table while you talk.

Private on purpose

There is no list of public boards on this site, and there is no button that drops you into a stranger's canvas. That is not a missing feature. A blank shared canvas that anyone can walk into is the single hardest thing to moderate on the internet, and every site that has tried it has learned the same lesson in the same order. Until we can do that properly — reporting, room-owner controls, the ability to roll a board back — the honest version of this is the one where the link is the door.

The two rules that make a shared canvas survivable are built into the board rather than bolted on. Undo removes your own last line and nobody else's, so an argument can never become a race to erase each other's work. Clear wipes everything, so only the person who opened the board has it. Everything else — colour, brush, saving the picture — everyone can do.

The board that people call oekaki

Drawing together in a browser is not new. Japan has been doing it since the shi-painter and PaintBBS applets of the early 2000s, under the name お絵かき — oekaki — and the tradition is still alive there in boards with proper layers, pressure and replay. Nothing here is trying to replace those. What this page is for is the other half of the need: the four people in a group chat who want a canvas right now, on their phones, without anybody making an account first.

So the vocabulary is small on purpose, the page is one tap deep, and the whole thing works on a phone with a finger. If you get attached to what you made, the save button flattens the board into a PNG inside your own tab — nothing is uploaded, and there is no gallery for it to end up in.

What one board holds

A board keeps about 300 lines. When it is full it stops taking new ones instead of quietly discarding the oldest, because a canvas that slowly eats the drawing at the bottom while people are still working on it is worse than one that politely says it is out of room. Save the PNG, clear the board, keep going. Rooms close on their own a few hours after the last person leaves.

If you are on your own

A board with one person in it works perfectly well as a plain drawing pad while you wait for everybody else to turn up. For something with a bit more push,Doodle Dash gives you sixty seconds and a new prompt every time you finish, and the idea generatorwill tell you what to draw if the white square is the problem.

Questions people ask

What is this, exactly?
A collaborative drawing board that lives at a link. One canvas, up to 16 people, everyone drawing at the same time and watching each other's lines appear. There is no round, no timer, no score and nothing to win — it is the shared piece of paper, not the party game.
Do I need an account or a download?
Neither. Press the button, send the link, and pick a nickname when you land on the board. It runs in a browser tab on a phone, a tablet with a pen, or a laptop with a mouse.
Can somebody rub out my drawing?
Undo only ever removes your own last line — it is not possible to undo somebody else’s work, no matter how many times you press it. The one destructive button is Clear, and only the person who opened the board has it. That is deliberate: on a shared canvas, the ability to erase other people is the first thing that gets abused.
Can strangers find our board?
No. There is no public list of boards, no browse page and no matchmaking button here, so the only way in is the link you send. A code is six characters out of thirty-two, which is over a billion combinations — guessing one is not a practical way to spend an afternoon.
What happens if I join late, or my phone drops the connection?
The board is kept on the server, so when you arrive — or come back — the whole drawing is redrawn on your screen exactly as it stands. Nobody has to re-send you anything, and your seat is held while you are away.
How much fits on one board?
About 300 lines. When it fills up the board stops accepting new ones rather than quietly deleting the oldest — nobody's drawing disappears behind their back. Save the PNG, then the host can clear it and you all start on fresh paper.
Is what we draw sent anywhere?
The lines go to the server so that the other people in the room can see them, and they are thrown away with the room a few hours after the last person leaves. The PNG is put together inside your own tab — saving it writes a file straight to your device and uploads nothing.

Next up

More to draw while the board fills up.