Open a tab. Hold your hand up. Draw. There is no project to create, no canvas size to choose and no account in the way — which matters, because the gap between having an idea and being able to draw it is where most ideas go. Your webcam watches your hand; a pinch of thumb and index finger is the pen.
Free · no account · nothing to install
Half a minute, most of which is the browser asking about the camera. Nothing here is a loading screen, and that is deliberate: the model that reads your hand starts downloading the moment the page opens, not after you grant the camera. By the time you have decided to say yes, the wait is usually already over.
Second visit, the camera permission is already granted. It is closer to ten seconds.
That number is the whole pitch. A sketchpad competes with a napkin, the back of an envelope and the Notes app — not with a drawing program. Anything that takes a minute to open has already lost to the envelope, because the thought does not wait.
The three seconds of measuring are the one cost, and they buy something specific. The gap between your thumb and index finger when you pinch is not the same as anyone else's. Measuring it means the pen goes down exactly when you pinch — not slightly early, not slightly late. Guess that number and every stroke afterwards feels wrong in a way that is hard to name.
A sketchpad is for thinking, not finishing. Three things make a rough stroke usable without slowing you down.
None of them try to make you a better draughtsman. They exist because a hand held in mid-air has a specific set of problems — it drifts, it cannot rest on anything, and it has no edge to run a line along — and each of these closes one of them without asking you to slow down or aim.
A hand in mid-air is never still. A low-pass filter runs at three strengths keyed to speed — so a quick stroke stays quick and a slow one stays steady.
Draw a rough rectangle and hold the pinch still. It becomes a real one — or a line, circle, ellipse, arc, triangle or polygon. If it cannot tell what you meant, it leaves your stroke alone.
Extend your index finger and a star pointer follows it. For the half of sketching that is showing someone else.
The thing people reach for a sketchpad to do is almost never "make a picture". It is to get a shape out of their head and look at it.
A box, an arrow, another box. Half of sketching is working out whether the thing you just said actually holds together, and it usually does not until it is drawn.
Rough rectangles in rough positions. Snapping turns them into real rectangles the moment you hold still, which is the difference between a sketch and a mess.
Draw it now, snapshot it, close the tab. Nothing to name, nothing to file, nothing to find again later.
There is a fourth that comes up more than expected: drawing on top of yourself. The canvas floats over the live camera view, so you can circle a thing you are actually holding, point at the part that matters, and record the whole explanation as one clip. That is closer to talking with your hands than to sketching, and it is the use people tend to find by accident.
All three have the same shape: short, disposable, and worthless if the tool takes a minute to reach. That is the entire reason this page is about seconds rather than features — a sketchpad that is slow to open is not a slow sketchpad, it is one you stop using.
A snapshot writes a full-resolution PNG to your device. That is the whole save story: no project file, no cloud, no account.
A snapshot is one gesture from the session menu — raise index, middle and ring together — so it costs about as much as deciding to take one. Most people export twice: once when the idea is legible, and once at the end when it is finished.
Which also means the other option is real. Close the tab and it is gone. For a sketchpad that is usually the correct behaviour — most sketches should not survive — but it is worth knowing before you spend an hour on one. If you want the whole session instead of a still, the recorder captures up to sixty minutes and the timelapse export runs at 2×, 3× or 5×.
A paper pad has a last page. A drawing app asks you to pick a canvas size before you have any idea how big the thought is. Both of those are decisions made at the worst possible moment — before you start — and both quietly shape what you end up drawing.
Pan with a three-finger pinch. Zoom with thumb and middle. There is no canvas size chosen at the start and no edge to reach — nine sketches fit beside each other as easily as one, and you find that out by pulling back rather than by scrolling.
In practice people use the space rather than the zoom. One idea goes down, then the next one goes beside it instead of on top of it, and after twenty minutes there is a wall of thinking rather than a single overworked drawing. That is the difference between a pad and a page, and it is the reason a fixed canvas quietly changes how you think in it.
Everything runs in the tab: hand tracking is a self-hosted model reading twenty-one points about thirty times a second, and the camera feed never leaves your device. It is not uploaded, not recorded and not sent to a server. There is no account system anywhere in the product, so there is nothing for a sketch to be attached to and nobody to attach it to.
Two honest limits, since a sketchpad is exactly where they bite. There are no layers — everything lands on one surface. And it needs a connection to open, because it loads like a web page; once open, the drawing itself runs entirely on your machine. You also need enough light for the camera to see your hand, and a bright window directly behind you is the usual reason a first attempt feels unreliable.
Still stuck? Open the canvas and try it — the thing answers faster than reading about it does.
Try it FreeNo. There is no account system at all — open the tab and the pad is there.
Yes, as a full-resolution PNG in one gesture. There is no autosave and no cloud, so if you do not export it, closing the tab loses it. For a sketchpad that is usually the right trade; for anything you care about, snapshot as you go.
Yes. Draw a rough box, arrow or circle, hold the pinch still for a moment, and it snaps to the clean version — line, circle, ellipse, arc, triangle, rectangle or polygon.
Yes, in portrait or landscape. You need a camera and a reasonably modern browser.
Completely. No account, no trial, no paywall. Exports carry a small getairva.com corner mark, on images and video alike.
No. A pinch of thumb and index finger is the pen, and your fingertip is the nib.
The gap between having a thought and being able to draw it is where most thoughts go. This closes it to about ten seconds.