Bringing Your Canvas to Life with JavaScript

Now that your Flask app displays a blank drawing canvas, let’s make it interactive! In this lesson, you’ll use JavaScript to turn your canvas into a real sketchpad where users can draw, erase, and submit their creations.

What You'll Learn

You will discover how to:

  • Capture mouse events so users can draw lines on the canvas.
  • Add buttons to clear the canvas or submit their drawings.
  • Convert your drawing into a format that can be sent to the server for recognition.
Making the Canvas Interactive

To start, you’ll need to grab the canvas element and get its drawing context:

You’ll listen for mouse events to know when the user starts and stops drawing:

You’ll also set up the drawing style, like line width and shape:

Adding Useful Buttons

You’ll add a Clear button so users can erase their drawing:

And a Submit button to send the drawing to your Flask backend:

Why This Matters

Making your canvas interactive is a key step in building any drawing or recognition app. By learning how to handle user input and work with the HTML canvas, you gain skills that are useful in many web projects — from games to art tools to educational apps. Plus, you’ll see how JavaScript and Python can work together to create smart, interactive experiences.

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