Drawing Some

Getting Started With Drawing Some

I have spent the last three years working with digital illustration tools across commercial projects, and Drawing Some has become my default workflow for quick visual concepting. It is not a full-fledged raster editor like Photoshop or a vector powerhouse like Illustrator. What it does well is let you capture ideas fast without getting bogged down in layers, gradients, or file size management. Drawing Some is a lightweight, browser-based sketching application designed for rapid ideation and rough visual communication. It runs entirely in the browser, requires no installation, and handles basic brush tools, shape primitives, and layer grouping in a way that feels familiar if you have ever used any digital painting software. The interface strips away everything that slows you down — no plug-ins, no color management dialogs, no export pipelines that take five minutes. When I first tried it, I expected something too simple to be useful for client work. I was wrong. The constraint of having fewer tools actually forces you to make decisions faster, which is exactly what you want when you are brainstorming or iterating through design alternatives before committing to a final piece.

Installation and Setup

There is no installation. You open the Drawing Some website in Chrome, Firefox, or Safari, and you are working within about four seconds. No account required for basic usage. If you want to save projects to the cloud, you can sign up with Google or GitHub, but most people I know just export to PNG or SVG and store files locally. The one thing you should configure immediately is your keyboard shortcuts. The default brush size slider is mapped to the scroll wheel, and the eraser is E by default. If you use a Wacom or iPad Pen display, the pressure sensitivity kicks in automatically. I had trouble with the default pressure curve being too aggressive on my Cintiq 22, so I adjusted the min-to-max threshold in the preferences panel from 0.3 to 0.6, which brought the line variation into a range that matched my hand speed.

Core Workflow for Drawing Some

The typical process looks like this. Open the canvas. Select a brush — the soft round and the technical pen are the two I use 90 percent of the time. Draw your initial shapes as rough blocks. Lock opacity on the layer if you are doing line art, then fill in values. Export when it is good enough. Here is where most beginners lose time. They try to make every stroke perfect before moving forward. Drawing Some handles undo history with a stack that goes back about 200 actions, but that does not mean you should use all of them. I have seen junior designers spend 45 minutes on a single character sketch because they were erasing and redrawing the same line repeatedly. The workaround is simple — commit to a direction after three attempts, then move on. You can always revisit later. Another common mistake is layer management. The app supports nested groups and blend modes, but using more than five blend modes per layer usually slows down performance on lower-end machines. I encountered this during a tight deadline last year when I was rendering a complex scene with ten layers set to multiply and overlay. The canvas dropped to 12 frames per second on my MacBook Air. I resolved it by flattening intermediate layers and keeping only the top two blend modes active. The process went from nearly an hour to about 15 minutes.

Advanced Techniques

Once you are comfortable with the basics, there are a few things that will save you significant time. The shape tool with path editing is particularly powerful. You can draw a rectangle, convert it to a path, and adjust individual anchor points without leaving the tool. This cuts the process down from about three minutes to 45 seconds per shape compared to switching between separate drawing and editing modes. The custom brush builder is another feature worth learning. You can create brushes from reference images or modify existing ones by adjusting spacing, angle, and scattering parameters. I built a custom textured brush from a scanned watercolor paper reference, which gave my digital sketches an organic feel that matched traditional media. The downside is that custom brushes increase file size by about 2 to 4 megabytes per brush definition, so keep your library lean if you work with large canvases.

Export and File Management

Drawing Some supports PNG, SVG, and a proprietary project format that preserves layers and brush data. The PNG export defaults to 72 DPI, which is fine for screen work but insufficient for print. I always switch to 300 DPI in the export dialog when sending files to a printer. The one thing that catches people off guard is that the SVG export strips transparency data, so if you need alpha channels, stick with PNG or the native project format. This tool is not a replacement for professional-grade software. If you need CMYK color mode, advanced typography controls, or photo-realistic retouching, Drawing Some will frustrate you within the first hour. The color picker lacks HSB and LAB mode support, and the brush engine does not handle complex texture blending the way Substance Painter or Procreate do. I recommend this for quick sketches, mood boards, and early-stage design exploration, but switch to a full-featured application once you are ready to produce final deliverables. If your workflow involves heavy collaboration with art directors who need to annotate specific regions, the native comment feature is limited to basic sticky notes. I worked around this by exporting to PDF and adding comments in Adobe Acrobat, which added about 10 minutes to each review cycle but kept the feedback organized.

I have also found that the app crashes occasionally when working with canvases larger than 8000 by 8000 pixels on machines with less than 16 gigabytes of RAM. The workaround is to split the canvas into sections and work on each part separately, then composite them in another tool. This usually adds about 20 minutes to the process but prevents data loss from unexpected crashes. The community around Drawing Some is active but small. Official documentation covers basic features well, but advanced techniques require experimentation or community forum research. I spent about two weeks learning the custom brush API by reading source examples from other users, which was not intuitive but ultimately worth the effort.