There’s a second kind of skeptic, and this one can draw. They’ve got the calluses and the Procreate muscle memory. They poke at this thing, see “runs in a browser tab, works on a phone,” and deliver the verdict before the first stroke:
“Yeah, it probably has a ‘brush.’ One round dab, fixed width, no pressure. It’s a web toy. It is not Procreate. It is not Photoshop. It is not Krita. There’s no way a tab on my phone draws for real.”
Fair guess. Honest tools earn that suspicion, because most in-browser “paint” demos really are one hard circle and a color picker.
This one isn’t. Let me show you the actual engine.
Yes, it reads your pen - pressure and tilt
This is the part people assume a web app can’t do, so let’s lead with it. Hyperdraw collects real Pointer Events, which means it reads pen pressure and tilt straight off your stylus - Apple Pencil, Wacom, Surface Pen, S Pen. Press harder, get more flow. Tilt the pen, and brushes that bind to tilt respond. That’s not a simulated pressure-from-velocity hack (though it does that too, on purpose); it’s the genuine signal from the digitizer, in a browser, on the device in your hand.
Try Pressure Brush and lean into a downstroke. It tapers like it should.
A real stamp brush engine, not one round dab
Under every preset is a configurable stamp engine. The knobs are the ones you’d expect from a desktop app, exposed in the tool settings panel:
- Tip shape: circle, square, triangle, star, even a scratch tip
- Hardness and a real falloff curve - gaussian, cosine, smoothstep, or a Photoshop-style edge
- Flow (per-stamp opacity for layered buildup) and spacing
- Ellipse ratio + angle - squash the tip and tilt it for a true chiseled, Calligraphic nib
Distance-based resampling keeps the line smooth at speed instead of
turning into a string of beads. This is the boring infrastructure that
separates a brush engine from a lineTo() loop.
Brushes that behave like materials
Presets aren’t just different-sized circles. The dynamics layer modulates each stamp as you go, and several presets are full time-based simulations:
- Airbrush - dwell-time deposition. Hold still and paint accumulates; flick across and it fades. Exactly like leaning on a real airbrush trigger.
- Ink Brush - a velocity-sensitive reservoir. Slow strokes pool and go rich; fast strokes skim and run dry.
- Velocity Brush - slow is opaque, fast fades out.
- Copic Marker / Soft Round - low-flow layered blending for gradients.
- Triangle Hacksaw - the tip rotates to follow the stroke direction.
- Scatter, Rainbow, Pulsing - scatter stamps, hue-cycling, size oscillation, all composable.
Pressure→flow, velocity→flow, orientation, hue cycle, size oscillator, scatter - these are stackable bindings, not hardcoded gimmicks. You can build your own brush out of them in the settings panel.
You can make your own tip
Want a custom bitmap stamp - a texture, a leaf, your own scribbled mark? There’s a dedicated tip layer for authoring one; paint the shape, and the brush stamps that. Custom brushes, in a browser tab.
And the rest of the kit is there
Eraser. Fill. Liquify for push-and-pull warping. Color Picker with alt-click sampling. Per-stroke blend modes (Lighten, Darken, Color Dodge, and the rest). Opacity. Layers with their own blend modes and opacity. Undo/redo. The fundamentals you actually reach for, all present.
The honest part
I’m not going to tell you it’s a 1:1 Krita with thirty years of panels, or that it replaces your desktop suite for a 200-layer commission. It doesn’t pretend to. What it is: a genuine, configurable, pressure- and tilt-aware brush engine - with dynamics, material simulations, and custom tips - that happens to run with no install, on the phone already in your pocket.
So the surprising claim isn’t “it’s better than Procreate.” It’s the one you were sure was impossible: a browser tab, on mobile, draws for real. The thing you doubted is the thing it does.
You can draw. Now go find out this can too - open hyperdraw.art, grab the B key, open the brush preset picker, and put your pen on the glass. Start with Pressure Brush or Ink Brush and press like you mean it.