The Painter's Hand a hand that sketches and paints while you watch
A real hand holding a pencil, a stick of charcoal, a pastel or a brush draws a picture on paper, stroke by stroke: The Starry Night, The Great Wave, the Taj Mahal, Moraine Lake. Forty pictures in seven media, a new one about every minute.
Free to install. The Painter's Hand unlocks with Pro, $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year. Cancel anytime.
What you see on every new tab
The Painter's Hand puts a sheet of paper on the New Tab page and a photographed hand above it. The hand starts with a light pencil underdrawing, blocks in the big shapes, then works down to the fine marks, and you watch the picture arrive.
Forty pictures: eighteen classic paintings (Van Gogh, Monet, Hokusai, Klimt, Vermeer, Turner, Munch and more), thirteen landmarks from the Taj Mahal to the Brooklyn Bridge, and nine landscapes from Yosemite to the Dolomites.
Seven media: graphite pencil, charcoal, ink wash, watercolour, oil, pointillism and pastel, each with its own paper and its own tool in the hand.
The rhythm: about forty-five seconds of drawing, a few seconds to look at the finished picture, then the paper is wiped for the next.
Nothing is a video. Every stroke is planned from the picture and laid down live on your graphics card, and the medium is picked at random, so the same picture rarely comes out the same way twice.
What it reacts to
Mouse and music: nothing. This one is for watching.
Memory: every picture is shown once before any comes round again, and a new tab carries on through the same deck.
Night: the paper and the hand dim after dusk.
Free or Pro?Pro
Ambient New Tab is free to install, with three free themes. The Painter's Hand is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, cancel anytime, and it unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as we release it. You can preview The Painter's Hand full screen before you buy: open the Themes panel and rest your mouse on it. Changed your mind? 14-day refund, no questions.
Open a new tab and click the Themes pill in the bottom-right corner.
Pick The Painter's Hand. Done.
The Painter's Hand on a 1280×800 New Tab page.
Questions
Does it show the same pictures over and over?
No. All forty are shuffled and each is shown once before any repeats, even across tabs. The medium changes too, so The Great Wave may be ink one day and watercolour the next.
Is The Painter's Hand free?
It is a Pro theme. Pro is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year. It unlocks every Pro theme, music sync, and every new theme as it is released. Cancel anytime.
Where do the pictures come from?
The paintings are public-domain works from Wikimedia Commons and Google Art Project. The landmark and landscape photos and the hand photos are CC0 or public-domain images.
Does it work on my phone?
No. It's a desktop browser extension for Chrome and Edge on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. If you're reading this on a phone, send yourself the link.
