Your index finger is the stylus and the air in front of your webcam is the surface. There is nothing to buy, nothing to plug in, no driver to install and no account to make — it is a browser tab that happens to be a drawing pad.
Free · no hardware · works in seconds
A pad works by sensing a pen against a surface. This works by watching your hand, which means the two most basic actions — pen down and pen up — have to come from somewhere else. They come from a pinch.
Put your thumb and index finger together and the pen is down. Move your hand and the line follows your index fingertip, so the ink appears exactly where you are pointing rather than somewhere near it. Open the pinch and the pen lifts. That one gesture is what separates a drawing from a single unbroken scribble, and it is the reason letters and separate strokes are possible at all.
Because a real hand is never perfectly still, a low-pass filter runs underneath at three strengths depending on how fast you are moving — light when you are idle, heavier when you are drifting, almost off when you move quickly, so fast strokes stay responsive instead of lagging behind you.
Before any of that, the app spends about three seconds measuring your hand: two with an open palm, one with a pinch. The gap between one person's thumb and index finger is not the gap between another's, so the threshold is placed inside the gap it just measured on you rather than at an average. That is why the pen goes down when you pinch, and not slightly before or slightly after.
If you are reading this with a hardware product page open in another tab, these are the six things you are weighing. Taken one at a time, and without pretending the answer is always "better" — sometimes it is just "different, and free".
The honest summary is that a graphics tablet is still the better instrument for precision work at a desk, and nothing here pretends otherwise. What this does that a pad cannot is cost nothing, need nothing, travel to any machine with a camera, and put your hand and your drawing in the same video frame. If you are buying a pad to letter and illustrate for hours a day, buy the pad. If you are buying one because you want to draw and do not currently have a way to, open a tab first and see how far it gets you.
One real requirement, stated up front: a camera, and enough light for it to see your hand. Backlight is what breaks it — a bright window behind you turns your hand into a silhouette, and a silhouette has no knuckles to track. Face the light rather than sitting in front of it and most problems disappear.
The one worth trying first. Stroke width follows hand speed, with a taper on entry — the closest thing here to the expressiveness people buy a pressure-sensitive pad for.
The workhorses. A flat opaque marker, a glowing neon line that stacks without muddying, and a clean monoline for lettering and diagrams.
The two that exist for video. Rainbow cycles hue along the stroke and Sparks scatters light off it — both read well in a recording, which is where most of this ends up.
Neon, Sunset, Ocean, Y2K, Monochrome and Forest — grouped rather than dumped into a wheel, because eight colours that already agree beat sixteen million that do not.
A pad puts express keys down one edge. Here the same jobs are done by which fingers you raise, so there is nothing to reach for and nothing to remap.
Pinch thumb and index, and move.
Raise index and middle together, then pinch an option — DRAW, ERASE and the rest.
Choose erase from that menu, then pinch over the strokes you want gone.
Raise index, middle and ring together — undo lives here.
Pinch thumb, index and middle together and move your hand.
Pinch thumb and middle, then move up or down.
Extend your index finger alone and a star pointer follows it — for showing rather than drawing.
Draw roughly, then hold the pinch still and the stroke snaps to a line, circle, ellipse, arc, triangle, rectangle or polygon.
A graphics tablet gives you the artwork. It does not give you footage of the artwork being made, and on every platform that matters the process is what travels further than the result.
Because the camera is already running, the recording is free in every sense: press record and you get up to sixty minutes of video — MP4 where the browser can manage it, WebM otherwise — of your hand and your drawing in the same frame. The timelapse export at 2×, 3× or 5× is the version that actually gets posted. Stills come out as full-resolution PNG.
Every export carries a small getairva.com mark in the corner, on images and video alike, and videos end with a short card. It is deliberately small, and there is no paid tier that removes it.
The hand tracking runs inside your browser tab — a self-hosted MediaPipe model reading twenty-one points on your hand about thirty times a second. Your camera feed never leaves your device: not uploaded, not recorded, not sent to a server. There is no account system anywhere in the product, so there is nothing for a drawing to be attached to and nobody to attach it to.
Still stuck? Open the canvas and try it — the thing answers faster than reading about it does.
Try it FreeIt solves the same problem with a completely different input. A graphics tablet senses a pen on a surface; this watches your hand with the camera you already own. There is nothing to buy, nothing to plug in and no driver to keep up to date — but it is genuinely a different instrument, not a software clone of one.
No. Thumb and index finger together is the pen: pinch to put it down, move your hand to draw, open the pinch to lift. Your index fingertip is the nib, so the line appears exactly where you are pointing.
There is no pen pressure, because there is no pen touching anything — and any page telling you otherwise is guessing. What exists instead is speed: the Velocity brush maps how fast your hand is travelling to how wide the stroke comes out, so a quick flick tapers and a slow pull swells. It is not a substitute for pressure, but it is expressive in most of the same places.
Yes, in the browser — you need a camera and a reasonably modern browser. There are two canvas modes, portrait and landscape, so a tablet held either way works.
The tracking and the smoothing both run locally in your browser, so there is no round trip to a server in the drawing loop. The smoothing is tuned by speed — lighter when your hand is drifting, almost off when you move fast — which is what keeps a line from feeling like it is dragging behind you.
Fully. No account, no trial, no paywall, no in-app purchases. Exports carry a small getairva.com corner mark, on images and video alike, and there is no paid tier that removes it.
A snapshot writes a full-resolution PNG. A recording captures up to sixty minutes of video, MP4 where the browser can manage it and WebM otherwise, and there is a timelapse export at 2×, 3× or 5×.
Nothing conflicts. This is a browser tab, not a driver, so it does not touch your tablet setup. Plenty of people keep both and use this for the things a pad is awkward for — drawing while on camera, or sketching on a machine that is not their own.
Open a tab, hold up your hand, and the surface you were about to buy turns out to be the air in front of you.