Art Studio

About Art Studio

Art Studio is a drawing program that does not stop at the drawing. You can paint on a blank canvas, or open one of the built-in pictures and colour it in, which is a much friendlier starting point for anyone who freezes at an empty page.

The part that makes it different is what happens next. Anything you draw can be turned into frames, played back, and exported as a video file — so a picture becomes a short animation without moving to another program. There is a Surprise me button for when you want a starting point rather than an idea.

It runs entirely in the browser with nothing uploaded and no account. Undo and redo work throughout, and you can bring in your own image file as a character to animate.

How to use Art Studio

Pick a mode along the top. Draw gives you a blank canvas with ten brushes and a choice of style presets. Colour in opens a library of ready-made pictures to fill or paint. Both have undo, redo and clear, and Save PNG downloads whatever is on the canvas.

To animate, switch to the Animate mode and build up frames — add a frame, copy the previous one and change it slightly, delete any that do not work. Press Play to watch it back, and Export video to download it as a .webm file you can upload anywhere.

How to use Art Studio, tab by tab

1. Start on the Draw tab. Pick a Style preset — Pencil sketch, Oil painting, Watercolour, Comic ink or Neon — to set brush, size, opacity and colour in one go, or leave it on Free and choose each yourself from ten brushes, a 16-colour palette and a colour picker.
2. For a ready-made outline, switch to Colour in and press Choose a picture. Use Fill to flood an area or Brush to paint by hand, and press Surprise me whenever you want a fresh mandala to work on.
3. To animate, open the Animate tab. A strip of numbered thumbnails appears along the bottom; click any of them to jump to that frame, then use Add, Copy and Delete to build the sequence.
4. Set the Speed slider anywhere from 2 to 24 frames per second, press Play to preview, and Export video when it looks right.
5. To move a single drawing around instead, go to Bring to life. Turn what you drew into a character or a background, choose a motion and an effect, click Set start and Set end on the picture, pick a length, then Play or export.
6. Finally, the Make a game tab turns those characters into sprites. Choose the kind of game, say who is the hero, who is dangerous and what is a prize, then Play it or download it.

Art Studio tips

• Use Copy for smooth movement. Copy duplicates the current frame, so you only redraw the part that moves. Add gives you a blank page.
• Tune the onion skin. The faint ghost of the previous frame is set to 28 per cent by default. Turn it up to line up small movements, or slide it to zero to switch it off when the page gets crowded.
• Exported videos play the sequence twice. If the clip is too short, add frames or lower the speed.
• Keep characters off pale colours. When a drawing becomes a character, near-white pixels are removed along with the page and the result is cropped to what you drew. Very light shades inside the drawing can vanish with the background.
• Undo has a limit. The studio remembers your last 24 steps, so save a PNG before a big experiment you might want to reverse.
• Press harder with a stylus. Pen pressure is read automatically, so a pressure-sensitive pen gives thicker lines as you push.
• Watercolour switches off in Animate. If the Watercolour brush is selected when you open the Animate tab, the studio swaps it for the Ink pen.

Bringing drawings to life and making a game

The Bring to life tab treats each drawing as an actor. Motions include Walk across, Glide, Hop along, Float, Spin, Grow in, Fade in, Wobble and Stay put, and on top of the path each character gets an effect such as Squash and stretch, Breathing, Hand-drawn wobble, Jelly wave, Sway, Pendulum, Rubber run, Pulse or Shiver. Sliders set how strong the effect is and how big the character appears, a button flips which way it faces, and the scene can run from one to twenty seconds. Use an image file brings in a picture from your device as a character in the same way.

Make a game offers three kinds of game. Dodge and collect drops things from the top while your hero runs underneath with three lives. Treasure hunt lets the hero roam freely against a 45-second clock, with every prize adding two seconds back. Flappy has you tap or press Space to fly through gaps, and touching anything ends the run. Difficulty runs from very easy to brutal, and you can give the game its own title.

Download the game saves a single .html file containing everything, drawings included. It opens with a double-click in any browser, so it can be emailed or shared like any other file.