HappyPaint Beta

A real painting app. In your browser.

Natural-media brushes, paint that mixes like paint, layers, and an Apple Pencil that feels like a pencil. Nothing to install.

Start painting See what it does

Free and open source · no account · works offline

Three ornate fantasy character designs — two in ink linework, one fully rendered in red, gold and grey — drawn in HappyPaint.
Character designs by Shriraj Naikwadi, drawn and painted in HappyPaint.

It runs on whatever you're holding

An iPad with an Apple Pencil. A Wacom on a desktop. A Surface pen, a trackpad, a plain mouse, a phone on the train. The same app, the same files, at the same URL — because it's a web page, not five separate downloads.

Pressure and tilt come straight from the pen. Hardware that reports no pressure gets a stroke-velocity taper instead, so lines still thin out at speed rather than going flat and dead.

The HappyPaint editor with three ornate fantasy character designs open — two in ink linework, one fully rendered in red and gold — over a 14-layer stack, with the tool palette and brush library either side.
Character designs by Shriraj Naikwadi, drawn and painted in HappyPaint.

Paint that mixes like paint

Blend yellow into blue in most digital tools and you get grey — the two colours share no wavelengths, so averaging them just drains the life out of both.

HappyPaint mixes subtractively, the way real pigment does: each paint absorbs part of the spectrum and whatever they both reflect survives. Yellow into blue makes green. Same two paints, below — ordinary blending on top, ours underneath.

Two gradient bars mixing the same yellow and blue. The top bar, ordinary digital blending, passes through grey. The bottom bar, HappyPaint, passes through green.

Change your mind a month from now

Adjustments live on their own layers — blur, curves, colour grades — stacked, reordered, masked and switched off without ever touching the pixels underneath.

Selective Color+ grades by sampled colour range: eyedropper the sky, set how far the selection reaches, shift its hue. Stack another for the skin, another for the foliage. Come back next month and move them again.

Selective Color+ open over the treehouse painting: a sampled green with reach, softness and hue-shift sliders, previewing live on the canvas.

What else is in here

  • Perspective guides that snap

    One-, two- and three-point, isometric — and fish-eye, which Photoshop still can't do. Strokes snap softly or hard.

  • It animates

    Onion skinning, an exposure sheet, tracks and holds. Export to MP4, WebM or GIF.

  • Wet paint and impasto

    Paint that stays wet and shoves colour around, with relief that catches the light.

  • Text and vector paths

    Editable text and a pen tool, both resolution-independent until you choose to bake them.

  • Brushes you already own

    Import Photoshop .abr and Procreate brush sets, or capture a brush tip from the canvas.

  • Works with the plane in the air

    Install it and it keeps working offline. Your documents were never on a server to begin with.

Your art never leaves your device

No account to make. No telemetry, no analytics, no upload. Your documents live in your own browser's storage, and the only time anything is sent anywhere is if you connect Google Drive and press save.

That's not a policy page — it's how the app is built.

Free, and yours to keep

No subscription, no trial, no "pro" tier holding the good brushes hostage. HappyPaint is licensed under the AGPL-3.0.

Your files are plain, open formats — export to PNG, JPEG, PSD or the app's own .happypaint, and take them anywhere.

Open a canvas and make a mess

No sign-up, no download, no trial clock. It's a link — and there's a blank canvas on the other side of it.

Start painting