How to paint and export a card — the Painter's Cards guide

Six steps, one workflow

1. 11 · Pick a studio

   Choose the hand you want: Van Gogh's swirls, Cézanne's patches or Monet's light. Each opens on its own site, and the tools are identical across the family.

2. 22 · Pick a palette — or bring a photo

   Twenty-seven palettes per studio, each named after the painting it came from. Or drop in a photo: the studio extracts its colours and harmonises them toward the painter's world.

3. 33 · Set the mood and steer the strokes

   Mood presets — serene, luminous, vibrant, melancholic — re-tune the whole card. Then steer: density, direction, texture, glow, and bias sliders that push the painting outward, inward or to a side.

4. 44 · Add text and hand-painting

   Double-click the canvas to add calligraphy — nine typefaces, with size, spacing, rotation and opacity. The brush lets you draw your own strokes in any palette colour, layered over the engine's work.

5. 55 · Refine the frame

   Drag the white borders and the corner-radius handle; lock anything you want to keep, then paint another variation of the same card.

6. 66 · Export

   Seven formats from one menu: stills, vector, animation, embed code or print. Everything renders locally — there is no upload step at all.

The seven export formats

Each format is rendered from the card itself — including your text and hand-painted strokes — at up to 3× scale for stills, so what you export is what you painted.

• PNG

  Lossless still, transparent outside the rounded corners — best for layering and print.

• JPEG

  Small still on a white ground — best for email and messaging.

• WebP

  Modern still with the smallest file size — best for websites.

• SVG

  Vector export with the strokes embedded and the typefaces inlined — scales to poster size.

• GIF

  The painting as an animation: the card paints itself stroke by stroke.

• HTML

  A self-contained page snippet — paste it into any site and the card renders there.

• PDF

  A print-ready page at poster scale, for home printers or print shops.

Small tricks that help

• Lock the palette but re-roll the composition: same colours, new arrangement.
• Low density with outward bias makes wallpaper-quiet cards; high density and centre bias makes poster drama.
• Use the GIF export for greetings — a painting that finishes itself is a better card than a still.
• Export SVG when you might print big later: the vector file keeps the typefaces inlined.

Workflow questions