Hake
Watercolour that behaves like watercolour
Most painting apps draw a picture of a wash. Hake runs the water. Pigment travels because there is fluid under it, settles where the paper's tooth catches it, and dries with the hard edge a real wash leaves behind. You do not paint the effect. You set up the conditions and let the sheet do its half of the work.
Android · coming to Google PlayThe fluid is the point
Water and paint are two separate things here, exactly as they are on a desk.
Wet-on-wet, properly
Wet the paper first and it holds water in two places: a film standing on the surface, and water soaked into the fibre. Paint dropped into the film travels. Paint dropped onto damp fibre softens and stays. That one distinction is the difference between a bloom and a blur, and it is simulated rather than faked.
Switch the wetness view on and the sheet shows you where it is damp, where it is pooled, and where a wash will refuse to go — before you commit any colour to it.
Edges that form themselves
A wash left to dry against its own boundary pulls pigment outward as it evaporates and leaves the dark rim every watercolourist knows. Hake does not draw that rim. It falls out of the evaporation at the pinned edge, which means it appears when the physics says it should and not when a filter decides.
Tendrils, backruns, cauliflowers and soft joins all arrive the same way — as consequences, not presets.
Pigment that mixes like paint
Blue and yellow make green. That sentence should be unremarkable and in most software it is false — mix them as light and you get grey mud. Hake mixes subtractively through a pigment model trained on measured absorption and scattering, so two colours combine the way two pans of paint combine.
Depth, not just opacity
A glaze laid over a dry wash adds to the load beneath it rather than averaging with it. Three thin veils of the same colour go deeper than one thick one, which is the whole reason glazing exists as a technique.
Masking fluid that actually masks
Because scraping highlights back out of a finished wash is not a technique, it is a rescue.
Import or pick
Import any black-and-white image as frisket — white takes paint, black holds it out — or drop in one of the built-in shapes. Move it with one finger, resize and rotate with two, and a turn snaps square at any quarter turn.
A real wall
Paint, water, wicking and every last tendril stop dead at the line. A wash pressed up against the edge dries with the dark rim it would leave against real frisket.
Lift it early or late
Hiding the red keeps the mask working. Releasing the lock is the real switch — do it while a wash is still wet and the wash runs on across the sheet, exactly like pulling frisket off too soon. Dry the layer first if you want everything to stay put.
Everything else you would expect
And a few things you might not.
Up to sixteen
Paint layers, imported references you cannot paint over by accident, and masks that live under the layer they protect. Blend modes and opacity per layer, drag to reorder, duplicate and rename as you go.
Sheets with tooth
Choose the surface and how strongly its grain joins the stroke. The tooth is not a texture laid on top — it is where pigment collects, so granulation happens for the right reason.
Decide how fast it dries
Ten seconds for decisive moments, thirty for everyday work, ninety for glazing — or keep the sheet workable until you dry it yourself.
1× to 200×
Film the painting to an MP4 in your gallery. At 30× half a minute becomes a second; at 1× it is real time, every frame, exactly as fast as you painted it. Time spent thinking is never recorded.
On paper, or transparent
Save the painting as you see it, or drop the sheet and keep the paint with a real alpha channel — for texture work, compositing, or painting over a UV map and putting the result straight onto a 3D model.
Fingers are fine
Pressure and tilt are used the moment a stylus reports them and never assumed. Every feature works with a finger on ordinary hardware — that is a requirement, not a fallback.
- Four tools. Water lays wetness, Paint lays pigment, Pencil sketches dry, Erase lifts.
- Seven controls, always to hand. Size, Flow, Load, Edge on one rail; Smooth, Spread, Tendrils on the other.
- Load is the tank behind Flow. Turn it down and the brush runs out partway through a stroke, like a real one.
- Mixing tray. Fifteen pigments, mix into what you are already holding, edit any pan, save whole palettes.
- Eyedropper. Drag across the painting with a live ring showing what you are about to pick up.
- Gestures. Two fingers pan, zoom and rotate the canvas. Two-finger tap undoes, three-finger tap redoes.
- Projects. Save a checkpoint and come back to every layer, mask, reference and even the wetness still on the sheet.
It does not phone home
Hake has no internet permission. Not "we promise not to use it" — the permission is absent from the app, so the operating system itself will not let it open a connection. There is no account to make, no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising, and no third-party code of any kind collecting anything.
Your paintings, your palettes and your settings live on your device and stay there. When you export a picture or a time lapse it goes into your own gallery, because you asked it to.