I am thrilled to share with you the exciting journey behind my latest creation - a free web based drawing app that will unleash your artistic potential. Inspired by popular drawing apps like Microsoft Paint and Procreate on iOS, this painting app is designed to let your creativity flow freely. And guess what? You can start using it right now, directly in your browser!
A screenshot of the Brush Ninja drawing app - sorry about the dreadful artwork.
A Passion for Painting Apps
I have a long history of building painting apps and programs. It all started about 25 years ago when I crafted my very first one using Visual Basic. It wasn’t the most mind-blowing app out there, but hey, it got the job done (kind of). Since then, I’ve been dabbling in creating these digital art tools on and off. There’s no big reason behind it; I simply enjoy the process of bringing ideas to life.
My latest app uses vanilla JavaScript with Reef.js to create a simple, speedy tool for painting in your web browser. It comes with an array of brushes that will allow you to draw whatever you like, and save your images as pngs. It couldn’t be simpler.
AI: Accelerating Creativity
Like many of my recent creations, this drawing app owes its speedy development to AI magic. Without AI, I might not have built this gem at all; certainly not as quickly as I did. Drawing upon my experience of crafting paint tools in the past, I knew exactly what I wanted and how to build it but using AI helped me to do it 100x quicker, and add features I had only dreamed of before.
I feel really excited about AI, at least from a coding perspective. It truly sets me free. I’ve never really considered myself a programmer. Instead, I inhabit this uncomfortable middle ground between designer and programmer. But thanks to AI, the boundaries have blurred, and possibilities increased! While my programming knowledge is needed for editing and improving the code, combining the snippets, and fixing bugs, AI fills in all the gaps in my expertise.
The biggest thing I am learning from this is how to express my thoughts. I feel that if I ever went back into the workplace I would be a much better team player since using AI I have to clearly explain my requirements so that the AI can understand them. I have to be very specific about what I want, and how I want it to work. This is a skill that I think will be very useful in many areas in the future.
There’s More to Come
Currently, my drawing app is all about creating new artworks from scratch. However, one of the first additions on my to-do list is allowing users to load images and edit them! I also want to add tools for adding annotations and a highlighting brush, along with a bunch of other features that will make the tool more powerful and enjoyable. But the core functionality is there and user-friendly. I’m excited to see what people create with it!
Looking ahead into the future, my ultimate goal is to allow embedding this app on other websites. This is a new idea for me and I’m excited to see how it is used. I will start by adding it to some of my sites eventually opening it up to anyone to use. There will be a WordPress plugin, and script embeds for other sites. I think it will be a fun feature to add, with some added customisations (that I am still planning) that will make it useful for a wide range of sites.
It would be great if you would head over to Brush Ninja and give it a try.
Let me know what you think on Mastodon, or BlueSky (or Twitter X if you must).
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