How to build a drawing app with p5js

The theme for week #5 of the Weekly Coding Challenge is:

Creating a Drawing Application

This is the first application that we are building in the #weeklyCodingChallenge program. So far we have built smaller projects, so this is pretty exciting if you ask me! 😄

In this article we’ll use p5js, a drawing library, to build a Drawing Application:

Check out the CodePen here:

If you want to learn more about p5js and what it does, you can visit their official website. Basically, I am using it because it works very well on top of the browser’s canvas element by providing a clear API.

The HTML

As you can notice in the example above, on the left side of the screen we have a .sidebar. We'll put inside it our 'tools' - a color picker, a weight selector and the clear button (trashcan icon):

The CSS

Using CSS we’ll move the .sidebar and everything that’s inside it in the left side. We will style it a little bit to make it look nicer (nothing fancy, basic CSS):

Now for the important part…

The JS / P5JS

As you might have noticed, we haven’t added a canvas element into our HTML since p5js will create it for us.

There are two important functions which we’ll use from the p5js library:

• setup — is called once when the program starts. It’s used to define initial environment properties such as screen size and background color.
• draw —is called directly after setup(). The draw() function continuously executes the lines of code contained inside its block.

Before moving forward, let’s stop for a moment and see what we want to achieve.

So, basically, we want to add a mousepressed eventListener to the canvas that will start 'drawing' a shape inside it as long as the mouseIsPressed.

We’ll create an array of points which we’re going to use to create a path (or a shape) using the beginShape and endShape methods to draw this shape inside the canvas. The shape is going to be constructed by connecting a series of vertices (see vertex for more information).

As we want this shape to be re-drawn every time, we’ll put this code inside the draw method:

As you can see, p5js has a mouseIsPressed flag that we can use to detect when the mouse buttons are pressed.

Everything might look good so far, but there is a big issue. Once the mouse button is released and we try to draw another shape, the last point from the previous shape will be connected to the first point of the new shape. This is definitely not what we want, so we need to change our approach a little bit.

Instead of having one array of points (the path array), we’ll create a pathsarray and we are going to store all the paths inside it. Basically, we’ll have a double array with points. Also, for this, we will need to keep track of the currentPath while the mouse is still pressed. We’ll reset this array once the mouse button is pressed again. Confusing? 🤔 Let’s see the code and I bet that it will become clearer:

I also added some comments in the code above, make sure you check them out.

The mousePressed function is called once after every time a mouse button is pressed — p5js stuff! 😛

Great! Now we can draw individual shapes in our canvas! 😄

The last thing to do is to hook up those buttons that we created in the HTML and use the values that are inside them to style the shape:

And with this, we have finished our little application! Yay! 😃

The entire JS code

Also, make sure that you import the p5js file in your html too before importing this js file.

Conclusion

I hope that you liked this drawing app that we’ve built. There are a bunch of functionalities that could be added to this app and I challenge you to let your creative mind to come up with new ideas! 🙂

What if you could save the drawing as an image (.png or .jpg)? 🤔 (you can do this with the p5js library).

As of now, we are only checking the mouse events. Maybe you could make it work on mobile, too, by figuring out the touch events? The sky is the limit with the amount of functionalities that could be added to this app!

I’d love to see what you are going to build! Tweet me @florinpop1705 with your creation!

You might also like one of the other challenges from the Weekly Coding Challenge program. Check them out here.

See ya next time! Happy Coding! 😇

Originally published at www.florin-pop.com.