About – Paint Toys

Where it started

I discovered paint.toys one evening and lost two hours to it without noticing. There was something magical about opening a browser tab and instantly being inside a creative tool — no login screen, no tutorial, no friction. Just a canvas and your imagination.

That experience stuck with me. I'm a developer, and I kept thinking: how hard would it be to build something like this from scratch? Not with a framework, not with someone else's boilerplate — but with a clean custom PHP MVC, a Canvas API, and a genuine love for each drawing technique.

What Paint Toys is

Paint Toys is a collection of free, browser-based drawing toys hosted at http://dizaynurfa.com. Each tool is inspired by a real art form — oil painting, marbling, pixel art, symmetry drawing, scratch art, sand art, zen garden raking, and continuous line drawing.

Everything runs in your browser. No file is ever uploaded to a server. No account is needed. No data is collected. You open a tool, you create, you save your artwork as a PNG — that's the entire experience.

How it was built

The backend is a custom PHP MVC framework — no Laravel, no Composer dependencies, no third-party bloat. Every route, controller, view, and SEO helper was written by hand. The drawing tools are pure vanilla JavaScript using the HTML5 Canvas API. The whole thing runs on Apache over Oracle Cloud (CentOS 7) with a PostgreSQL-ready model layer for future features.

Building it this way was a deliberate choice. When you write every line yourself, you understand every line. And understanding every line means you can make every line exactly right.

The philosophy

The best creative tools get out of the way. They don't ask you to read a manual. They don't interrupt you with notifications. They open, and they work, and they let you make something. That's the standard every tool on Paint Toys is held to.

Art shouldn't require an expensive software subscription. A Zen Garden or a Symmetry Painter or an Oil Paint canvas should be one URL away — free, instant, and beautiful. That's the whole point.

What's next

More tools are being added regularly. The roadmap includes a watercolor simulator, a fluid dynamics canvas, a mosaic tile builder, and a generative art playground. If you have an idea for a drawing toy you'd love to see, get in touch — the contact page is always open.