List of FREE art making websites

Gartic is like a digital, interactive game of Pictionary. Players draw while others have fun guessing what the player is drawing. If you guess right, you get points!

Notes: there are ads, 10 players per game, and you can make your own “room”

This free web-based app allows you sculpt a 3d model. There are cool tools like drag, crease, twist, flatten, and more! You can also add textures and color to your digital model.

A super easy to use virtual exploration of Jackson Pollock’s drip painting. Just click to change the color and see what you can create!

Hands-down Kleki is my favorite, free drawing program. Why? It’s user-friendly, ad-free, reliable, and very teachable. It has all the essential tools (brush, layers, and a few custom edit options) to create cool art without getting overwhelmed by an overload of options. Check out this post about how to draw this misty forest using Kleki step by step.

This is a simple pixel drawing program that is really fun to use. You can even add frames in the bottom to make animated pixel GIF’s. Note: there are ads in this program.

I love checking out this website, This Exquisite Forest. You can totally get lost in the forest of art animations. So what is the forest? It’s an interactive digital drawing collaboration. Each tree has many branches that evolve and adapt the drawing before it.

This simple website generates random art prompts. You can choose the # of prompts to generate (1, 5 or 10), and customize how elaborate you want your prompt to be. This a great website for those stuck in creative blocks.

This free digital mandala program rocks! You can customize color, size of line, points of symmetry and more. You can also save your work as a .png file!

This is a great tool to remove the background of photographs to be used for image editing. Files can be saved as .png with a transparent background. A great tool for digital artists!

Mr. Doob is a quirky website with an array of creative things to explore. At the top, there is a tool bar that features different things- like the harmony drawing app, the voxels (pictured here) cube builder, and more.

An easy to use drawing app with some really funky, expressive brushes. It’s like a virtual action painting exploration! It’s very engaging!

Sumopaint is really great free web-based drawing app. I really like some of the features it has, like the radial symmetry tool, the custom shape tool, and the ability to create layers on your digital canvas. Some features are for “PRO” users only, but you can do quite a bit for free!

Pixlr is a pretty fantastic and free alternative to Adobe Photoshop. The program offers two different versions– Pixlr X, which is a quick and easy graphic design tool for photo editing and Pixlr E, which is an advanced editor. You can customize images, add filters/effects, use layers, and so much more!

Coolors is a free site that generates color schemes. Artists have the ability to customize their color scheme or generate random color schemes to use for inspiration.

Cloud Stop Motion is a free web-based stop motion animation creator that allows you to export your work as a mp4. It’s really user friendly and you can even create multiple movies within the ‘cloud.’

If you are looking to incorporate comics into your class, this is a super fantastic tool! Teachers can create a class page and set up access accounts for students. Students can create digital comics and they are shared right to the teacher page. It’s fun, easy to use and very engaging! Avatars can be totally customized and students have a lot of fun with this! Best of all– totally free!

A virtual Mondrian-inspired art tool. The website describes itself as “The MONDRIMAT is a simple system which lets you experiment with space, color and visual rhythm in accordance with the theories of Piet Mondrian. Images created with this system are ephemeral.” It’s fun to get lost in the primary colors and geometric shapes. Check it out!

Google has developed this comprehensive website full of high resolution art images, gallery walk throughs, interactive art activities and so much more. “Google Arts & Culture is an online platform of high-resolution images and videos of artworks and cultural artifacts from partner cultural organizations throughout the world.” (Wikipedia). Some of my favorite things are the Kandinsky Painting activity, which art work looks like you, and the daily art challenge.

This cool website is chock full of a fun step by step drawing tutorials with an awesome format for presentation. There are thousands of drawings to pick from ranging from easy to more complex, cartoony to realistic. Note, there are some ads on this page.

On Tate, students can “play free games and quizzes, find art activities, explore homework help” and much more! There are so many great resources for art history and I love the art making games it features- like a street art drawing program, fill in the missing ‘art parts’ game, and a moving Kandinsky-inspired virtual artwork creator.

This demo version of Rebelle allows you to experiment with some of the fantastic features of this virtual painting program by Escape Motions. The website states that “Rebelle is a natural media paint program with a focus on real watercolors and acrylic.”

This is another free demo version of a cool drawing program that allows you to paint a glowing flame. It even has a cool mandala feature. Brought to you by Escape Motions, a full version is also available.