The modern bottega
Make art
the way the masters did.
Art has always been collaborative. DrawLab is a digital workshop where you and your people
gather, talk, and create together — drawing on 600 years of artistic tradition.
No ads. No strangers. Just the craft.
Art has always been collaborative.
The idea of the "lone genius" is a 19th century myth. For most of human history, art was made in workshops — shared studios where friends, apprentices and masters worked side by side. DrawLab brings that tradition into the digital age.
1460s
Florence
Verrocchio's Bottega
Andrea del Verrocchio's Florentine workshop trained a young Leonardo da Vinci alongside Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino. Apprentices worked on the same canvases as the master, contributing drapery, backgrounds, and eventually figures under supervision.
1510s
Rome
Raphael's Workshop
Raphael ran one of the largest studios of the High Renaissance with over 50 assistants, all contributing to the Vatican Stanze. The "masterpieces" we attribute to Raphael alone were almost entirely collaborative works.
1600s
Antwerp
Rubens' Studio
Peter Paul Rubens ran the most productive studio of the 17th century. Specialists painted different elements — landscapes, animals, drapery, faces — with Rubens orchestrating and adding finishing touches.
1870s
Paris
The Café Guerbois
Monet, Renoir, Degas, Manet and Pissarro gathered at this Paris café weekly, debating, critiquing, and shaping Impressionism together. Not a formal workshop, but the same principle: art as communal practice.
1925
Paris
54 Rue du Château
Breton, Prévert, Tanguy and Duhamel shared a house in Paris where they invented the Exquisite Corpse — a game where players drew sections of a figure without seeing what others drew. Pure workshop collaboration, deliberately communal.
1919
Weimar
The Bauhaus
Walter Gropius revived the workshop tradition for the 20th century. Students and masters worked together on crafts, design and art — collapsing the hierarchy between "fine art" and craft. The modern design world still lives in its shadow.
1977
NT, Australia
The Utopia Homelands
The women of Utopia — Emily Kame Kngwarreye, the Petyarre sisters, and many others — paint side by side in shared studios, developing styles collectively. The late Gloria Petyarre's Bush Medicine Leaves technique (Wynne Prize, 1999) continues through the women of her family, passed on through kinship and shared practice.
Today
Anywhere
DrawLab
A digital bottega. Open a room, share a code, turn on your mic, pick up your tools. The same ancient practice — friends gathered around a shared canvas — reimagined for a generation that might otherwise scroll alone. Verrocchio would recognise what you're doing. He just wouldn't believe the tools.
"Every masterpiece started in a workshop."
The first principle of DrawLab
Everything you need. Nothing you don't.
Built for serious creative sessions, not corporate whiteboarding. Real tools for real drawing.
Live Cursors
See everyone drawing in real time. Up to 8 people on one canvas — no lag, no waiting.
Proper Drawing Tools
Pencil, brush, marker, pen, eraser — each with its own feel. Pressure sensitivity, opacity, and size controls.
Shapes & Text
Drop in shapes, add formatted text, use stamps and stickers. Build layouts or just mess around.
Layers
Organise your work with layers. Reorder, hide, lock — proper layer management like the real deal.
Session Replay
Watch your entire session back as a timelapse. Export it as video to share your creative process.
Gallery Snapshots
Save your best moments to the gallery. Take snapshots at any point and come back to them later.
Games artists have played for centuries.
Every game mode in DrawLab is a real exercise from the workshop tradition — Surrealist studios, Victorian parlours, art therapy sessions. The host opens the workshop; the group picks an exercise.
Challenge Mode
Everyone draws the same prompt on their own private canvas. When the timer runs out, all drawings are revealed and the group votes. Highest score wins. Ties trigger a draw-off.
Host picks a category — Animals, Food, Feelings, Scenes, or The Impossible Round
Everyone draws on their own canvas — 1 to 5 minutes on the clock
All drawings revealed — rate each one and crown the winner
Relay Mode
One shared canvas, but you take turns. Each player gets a short burst to draw before the pen passes. Watch the drawing build as everyone adds their bit.
Host sets the turn length — 10, 20, or 30 seconds — and an optional theme
Take turns drawing while spectators react with live emojis
Reveal the finished canvas together — then replay it turn by turn
You're playing art history
These aren't games we invented — they're games humans have been playing for generations. DrawLab brings them into a shared digital canvas.
Cadavre Exquis
Paris, circa 1925. The Surrealists — Breton, Prévert, Tanguy — folded paper and drew without seeing each other's work at 54 rue du Château. The name came from their first collaborative sentence: "The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine." Our Blind Relay is its digital descendant.
Consequences
A Victorian parlour game from the mid-1800s. Each player writes part of a story without seeing what came before — then reads the absurd result aloud. The Surrealists knew this game well. Our Challenge Mode draws from the same tradition of simultaneous creation and dramatic reveal.
The Squiggle Game
Invented by child psychotherapist D.W. Winnicott in the 1960s. The therapist draws a random squiggle, the child turns it into something — then they swap. It creates what Winnicott called a "potential space" — a shared creative zone between two people.
Sand Mandalas
Since the 11th century, Tibetan Buddhist monks have worked together — four at a time, one per quadrant — building intricate mandalas from coloured sand. When it's finished, they sweep it away. The act of creating together is the point, not the result.
Why drawing together actually matters.
This isn't just a drawing app. Humans have been creating together for thousands of years — and the science shows why it bonds us.
What the research says
Your brains sync up
When people collaborate on creative tasks, their prefrontal cortices literally synchronise. A meta-analysis of 13 studies with 890 participants found this happens every time — and the more synchronised, the better the collaboration.
Czeszumski et al., eNeuro, 2022
The great equaliser
Most people think they "can't draw" — and that's exactly why drawing games bond us. Shared vulnerability triggers endorphin release through laughter (Dunbar, 2022), and productive failure in group settings creates solidarity and psychological safety (Kapur, 2015).
Dunbar, Phil. Trans. Royal Society B; Kapur, Learning: Research & Practice
Beyond words
Drawing together bypasses verbal fluency, vocabulary, and accent — all the things that can create social hierarchies. The non-verbal nature of collaborative art creates a distinct form of connection that art therapy has used for decades.
Landgarten, Family Art Psychotherapy; Snir & Wiseman, Arts in Psychotherapy, 2016
A tradition that crosses every culture
Australian First Nations — painting together as Country
In the Utopia homelands of the Northern Territory, artists have painted side by side for generations — sharing ideas, discussing colours, developing styles collectively. The late Gloria Petyarre's Bush Medicine Leaves technique, recognised with the 1999 Wynne Prize, continues through the women of her family. In the Kimberley, the Ngurrara Canvas — an 8-by-10-metre collaborative painting by over sixty artists — was presented to the Federal Court as evidence of connection to Country, and helped secure native title over 76,000 square kilometres.
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands where these traditions live, and pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging.
Across the world — creating together is human
Southern Africa — Ndebele women paint the walls of their homes together, families and friends
turning it into a social event, passing styles from mothers to daughters.
Tibet — Buddhist monks work four at a time on sand mandalas, each taking one quadrant,
building outward from the centre over weeks — then sweeping it all away.
Medieval Europe — In monastic scriptoria, scribes, illuminators, and gilders each contributed
their skill to a single manuscript. No one person made the book.
Paris, 1925 — The Surrealists folded paper and drew without seeing each other's work.
They called it Cadavre Exquis. It's still one of the best party games ever invented.
Play it digitally. Then try it for real.
DrawLab is your starting point — but these games are even better around a table with actual paper. Fold a piece of A4 into thirds and play Exquisite Corpse. Pass a sketchbook and give everyone 30 seconds. The games are centuries old. The connections are brand new.
Three steps. That's it.
No accounts. No downloads. No tutorials needed.
Create a Room
Hit "Start Drawing" and you've got a room. No sign-up, no email, no fuss. You get a room code instantly.
Share the Code
Send the room code to your mates. Text it, DM it, yell it across the room. Anyone with the code can join.
Draw Together
Everyone's on the same canvas in real time. Pick your tools, choose your colours, and create something brilliant.
Your digital art supply shop
Every tool feels different — just like the real thing. Pencils scratch, brushes flow, markers lay down flat colour. Pick your favourite.
Pencil
Fine lines, precise control
Brush
Soft strokes, natural feel
Marker
Bold, flat colour
Pen
Smooth vector lines
Eraser
Clean up mistakes
Shapes
Rectangles, circles, lines
Text
Formatted text labels
Stamps
Stickers and decorations
DrawLab is just the start.
Dive Deep Vibe is a growing family of apps designed for young adults — building connection, resilience, and self-awareness through play, reflection, and real conversation. Each one is lighter than you'd expect, and deeper than it looks.
Discover all Vibe appsDive Deep Dialogues
Open your workshop.
No sign-up. No credit card. Share a room code, gather your people, pick up your tools. The modern bottega is waiting.
Enter the Workshop"Every masterpiece started in a workshop."