Introduction to MS Paint

MS Paint is the simplest drawing program on Windows — built in, no installation needed, and still the fastest way to sketch an idea, crop a screenshot, or draw a quick diagram.

Search "Paint" in the Start menu. The blank white area is the canvas — everything you draw lives inside it, and its size in pixels is exactly the size of the final image file.

Every tool lives in one Ribbon along the top — pencil, brush, shapes, eraser, fill, text, and a color palette below it. Click a tool once, then click or drag on the canvas to use it.

Ctrl+Z undoes the last action, and you can press it repeatedly to step back through your whole session — there's no reason to be afraid of making a mistake.

The zoom slider in the bottom-right corner changes how large the canvas appears on screen — it never changes the actual image. To change the real dimensions of the image itself, use Image → Resize instead, which asks for exact new pixel dimensions or a percentage.