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GifBench
Brush, eraser, undo

Draw on GIF — Brush, Pen and Eraser

Draw straight onto the canvas — circle a detail, scribble an arrow, blank out something you would rather not share. Strokes live on their own layer, so the frames underneath are never touched.

Open the workbench

Draw with a mouse, a trackpad or a stylus.

  • No upload
  • No sign-up
  • No watermark

Drawing on a frame

Strokes are vector paths, so they stay crisp at any export size.

  1. 1

    Load your animation

    Open a GIF, a video or a set of images and find the frame you want to mark up.

  2. 2

    Add a drawing layer and draw

    Pick a colour and brush size, then draw on the canvas. The eraser removes your own strokes rather than punching a hole through the picture.

  3. 3

    Choose which frames it covers

    By default a drawing shows on every frame. Give the layer a frame range and it appears only where you want it.

How the drawing layer behaves

Non-destructive

Strokes are stored as paths on a separate layer. Hide the layer, delete it, or clear it, and the original frames come back untouched — there is no flattened pixel edit underneath.

An eraser that erases the right thing

Each drawing layer is composited on its own surface, so erasing removes your strokes and stops there. In tools that draw directly onto the frame, the eraser cuts a transparent hole in the video.

Scales with the output

Brush width is a fraction of the canvas height. Draw at preview size, export at 640 px, and the stroke keeps the same relative weight instead of turning into a hairline.

One undo per stroke

A stroke is committed when you lift the pointer, so undo removes the whole line — not the last twenty pointer samples.

Redaction is not the same as covering something up

Drawing an opaque block over a name in a screen recording is genuinely safe here, because the export re-encodes the frames from scratch: the pixels underneath are not written to the file in any form. There is no hidden layer to peel back and no original embedded in the metadata.

What still deserves care is motion. If the thing you are hiding moves between frames, a single stroke across all frames may not cover it everywhere. Step through the frames and check, or shorten the clip to a range where the position is stable.

Annotating so it reads at GIF sizes

Annotations are usually viewed at a fraction of their authored size, embedded in a chat window or a ticket. Thin lines vanish and pale colours disappear into the background, so err heavier and more saturated than feels right while you are drawing.

High-contrast colours also survive quantisation better. A pure red or magenta stroke keeps its own palette slot; a subtle grey-blue gets merged with whatever it sits on and turns muddy in the exported file.

Questions people actually ask

Can I draw on just one frame?
Yes. Give the drawing layer a frame range covering that single frame, and the stroke appears only there.
Does drawing damage the original file?
It cannot. Your source file is never modified — it is read into the tab and everything you do produces a new file at export.
Is a stylus supported?
Yes, along with mouse and trackpad. Pressure sensitivity is not currently mapped to brush width.

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Everything above runs in this tab

No upload, no account, no watermark. Open the workbench and see for yourself.

Start editing — free