The Zen circle, painted in one breath: generate an ensō as a brush painting, with the dry-brush streaks where the ink runs out, on rice paper with a red seal, or draw your own. Download it as SVG or PNG. No sign-up and no libraries.
- New enso: a new circle, different every time, from a seed kept in the address so it can be shared.
- Opening: from a closed circle (the brush overlapping its start) to a wide gap.
- Weight and Dry brush: how heavy the stroke is, and how soon the brush runs dry.
- Ink (sumi black, indigo, vermilion, gold), paper (rice paper, white, or transparent) and the seal, a red hanko reading 円, "circle".
- Draw your own: paint the circle yourself with the mouse or a finger; slow strokes are heavier, fast ones lighter.
- Download as SVG (vector, for print or a laser cutter) or PNG (1200 × 1200).
The stroke is drawn as a bundle of 46 bristles following one path. Each bristle carries its own ink, which runs out along the stroke at its own pace (the edges of the brush first), so the end of the circle breaks into dry-brush streaks, the kasure of Japanese calligraphy. An SVG filter roughens the edges like ink bleeding into paper.
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with no dependencies and no build step. Just open index.html. The three color themes (dark, light and blue) are shared with my other projects (copied from omg-themes).
Enso-Maker is open source at GitHub with MIT license.
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You may also be interested in my other projects Zen-Garden (demo), Mandala-Maker (demo) and Sacred-Geometry (demo). For more mystic arts as small web apps, see Esoterica.
Copyright (c) 2026 Olivier Giulieri.