Much of the work in a BasePaint canvas sits beneath the finished image.
BasePaint artists share one grid for 24 hours, building on and painting over one another's work. The minted artwork is the top coat of that history. On day 1080, 68 artists placed 139,618 pixels on a 65,536-pixel canvas. Later coats covered 57.4% of those placements.
Underpaint replays every stroke of any canvas so you can see what's underneath.
Day 1080, one coat down. Contributions from 29 artists reappear, while work from 8 surface artists falls away because it had no earlier coat beneath it.
Scrub through the day, peel back coats, isolate or hide individual artists, and bring the underpainting forward.
The attribution panel lists every participating artist and updates with the current view. Artists whose contributions are fully covered remain in the panel so their work can still be explored.
Hover over any pixel to see its complete stack: the earliest coat at the bottom and the surface coat at the top.
Remix palette applies another canvas's colours while preserving the original paint and attribution.
Each remix records its palette day in the URL, so shared links reproduce the same result. Have fun remixing old paintings to see how they look, then share!
Compose a variation by changing time, coats, artists, or palette, then paint on top. Peel a painting back, remix colors, then paint on top of it and create something new!
Your brush keeps a borrowed palette. Own colours restores the canvas while your coat stays in the remixed palette, so you can remix until one catches your eye and then paint another canvas's palette onto this one. Brush: own colours hands it back.
The attribution panel includes your pixels in the visible total and updates each artist's displayed share as you paint.
The archive contains 1,089 settled canvases, sortable by covered paint, coverage, depth, artist concentration, late activity, and earnings. Later layers cover 61.9% of all recorded painting in BasePaint history.
Day 569, Ship of Theseus, has the archive's highest covered share at 92.0%, with 19% coverage and an average depth of 12.5 coats per painted pixel.
Each variation is encoded in its URL and rebuilt from the strokes when opened. Nothing is stored server-side, and the same link produces the same image.
/canvas/1080?t=1784875315&p=2&c=102&b=102&s=8&n=68&d=1f2a03…
│ │ │ │ │ │ └─ your own coat, XXYYCC per pixel
│ │ │ │ │ └────── the cast this link was made under
│ │ │ │ └────────── showing only artist 8
│ │ │ └──────────────── your brush in day 102's palette
│ │ └────────────────────── the canvas in day 102's palette
│ └────────────────────────── two coats stripped
└─────────────────────────────────────── as it stood at hour 14
Download PNG exports whatever is on screen with the recipe in the filename.
Code is MIT. BasePaint artwork is CC0.
Built for the BasePaint hackathon, August 2026.