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Best Drawing and Sketching Websites for Teachers and Students
Author: By Med Kharbach, PhD
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The purpose of this post is to share with you this selection featuring some good drawing websites I curated specifically for use with students in or out of class. These educational resources are meant to help students develop their drawing skills and boost their expressive competencies using art-based tools. Check them out and share with us if you have other suggestions to add to this list. For Chromebook users, check out best drawing tools for Chromebook.
1. Google Quick Draw
This is a simple drawing game that is part of Google’s AI experiments. Users start drawing a shape and the machine guesses what it is. The more you draw the better the machine learns and the better it becomes in guessing drawings. AutoDraw can help students practice their drawing skills in fun and engaging environments. Their drawings will also be saved to the program to help enhance AI research.
2. AutoDraw
AutoDraw is a web-based drawing website where you can have fun creating drawings. You can draw solo with the Draw tool or use the Shape tool to make shapes. You can then select colors using the color picker and insert text using the Type tool. Use the Select tool to resize, move, and rotate your drawings. Once your drawing is ready, you can easily download it as a PNG or share it with others.
3. Let’s Draw.it
Let’s Draw is another good drawing website to use with students in school. The site and the accompanying app offer various drawing games and tutorials to help students of all skill level learn and develop their drawing skills. For instance, in the How to Draw section, users learn how to draw different shapes and objects through guided video tutorials and help from other users of the site. The Simple Draw game is a drawing and animation editor where students can draw fun things to save as picture or SVG animation. Let’s Draw also offers a number of engaging multiplayer games including Guess n Draw Draw Best, and Finish It.
4. Aggio.io
Aggie.io is a collaborative painting application by MAGMA. Students can use it to work together on the same drawing project in real-time. Simply create a new canva and share the link with collaborators to start drawing pictures together. It offers all the tools and features necessary for creating awesome work of arts.
5. Pixilart
Pixilart is an online pixel drawing platform that allows users to create pixel art and animated GIFs. The editor is simple and easy to use and includes all the tools needed to get engage creating beautiful artwork such as pens, pencils, brushes, eraser, stamp, selection tool, gradient tool, hand tool, filter tool, text tool, and many more.
6. Sketchbook
Sketchbook is another good drawing tool for students. It works on desktop, mobile, and tablet and offers all the tools students need to draw, sketch, and doodle. Some of the features it offers include: tools to draw smooth lines (e.g. traditional rulers, ellipse, curved lines, etc), dynamic symmetry tools, natural pen interaction, layers and color fill, brushes, and many more.
7. Rapid Fire Art
In Rapid Fire Art, artist Darlene Nguyen provides step by step tutorials and instructional videos to help you draw. I spent some time going through her tutorials and I find them very helpful. Some of her popular drawing lessons include how to draw a realistic eye, how to draw lips, how to draw realistic hair, learn how to draw a face in 8 easy steps, how to shade and pencil shading techniques, and many more.
8. Kleki
Kleki is an online drawing editor where you can easily draw, sketch and paint. Kleki is web-based and does not require any software download or installation. Some of the features it provides include a wide variety of tools (e.g., text tool, shape tool, paint bucket, etc), the ability to save your images as PNG or PSD, import images and use them in your drawing projects, stabilizer to control your lines, and many more.
9. Easy Drawing Guides
Easy Drawing Guides is a website that offers step-by-step drawing tutorials, drawing guide printouts, and how to draw videos. These drawing tutorials cover numerous categories including : how to draw animals, how to draw characters from comics and cartoons, how to draw flowers and trees, how to draw man-made things, how to draw people, among others. Users can also use the search functionality to search for specific tutorials and guides. Some of the materials provided in Easy Drawing Guides is restricted to registered members only.
10. Sumo Paint
Sumo Paint is both a painting and an image editing application. Some of the features it offers include: a wide range of layers, 20 filters and effects (e.g., blur, distort, pixelate, sharpen, threshold, posterize, etc), painting tools (e.g., over 300 brushes), saturation tools, selection tools (e.g., lasso, magic wand, elliptical selections, etc), image enhancement tools, and more.
11. Brush Ninja
Brush Ninja is an animated GIF maker that is suitable for kids and students of all ages. Using the platform’s integrated tools (e.g., brushes, colours, marker, pencil, etc), students can draw their own animations, turn them into animated GIFs and share them with others. The process is simple and easy and does not require any log-in or software download.
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Simply open Brush Ninja’s online editor from the homepage and start drawing your animated GIFs. You can type in or handwrite text, add shapes and lines, upload images to use as background, change colour, add captions to frames, and many more. You can add as many frames as you want and when you are done click on Play button to preview your animated GIF. Use the Frame Rate feature to adjust the speed of your animation.