Scratch Pad Node
Draw freehand with a mouse, trackpad, or stylus, and let connected chats see your sketch as an image.
Last updated: September 21, 2026
The Scratch Pad Node is a piece of paper on your canvas. Sketch a diagram, a rough layout, a formula, or a quick doodle, then connect it to a Chat Node and ask about it. The chat receives your drawing as an image.
Creating a scratch pad
- Press S on the canvas, or pick Scratch pad from the toolbar, then click where you want it
- Choose Scratch pad from the Add new node menu in the sidebar
- Drag a connection out of an image node or another scratch pad and pick Scratch pad
Drawing
Any pointer draws: a mouse, a trackpad, a touch screen, or a stylus. A stylus that reports pressure gets thicker ink when you press harder; a mouse gets natural-looking variation from the speed of the stroke.
The toolbar row at the top of the pad holds:
- Pen and Eraser. The eraser removes whole strokes it touches.
- Ink colors: black, red, blue, and green
- Pen widths: thin, medium, and thick
- Undo and Redo for your last strokes, eraser passes, and clears
- Clear to empty the pad
Move the node by its header, as with every node. Dragging the pad's right or bottom edge gives you more paper without scaling what you have drawn. Scrolling or pinching over the pad still zooms the canvas.
Undo
Every stroke, eraser pass, and Clear is a canvas action. Press ⌘Z to undo the last one and ⇧⌘Z to redo, exactly as you would undo a node move, or use the Undo and Redo buttons in the pad's toolbar. The buttons light up only while the next thing to undo or redo happened on that pad, so they never undo a node move by surprise.
Using a scratch pad in a chat
- Connect the pad's right handle to a chat node
- Ask something like "What did I draw?" or "Turn this flowchart into steps"
At send time the pad is turned into an image on its paper background and attached to the request, so the model sees exactly what you see. The image is not saved anywhere; it is rebuilt from your strokes each time you send, which means editing the pad and asking again always uses the current drawing. An empty pad sends nothing.
Scratch pads reach chats several hops upstream too, because context follows every incoming connection.
Scratch pads do not yet act as reference images for Image mode generation. Connecting one to a chat in Image mode has no effect on the generated image for now.
In the sidebar
Opening a scratch pad in the sidebar shows the same drawing surface, scaled to fit the panel, so you can keep sketching while reading a chat.