Easel MCP server

Easel

Can an LLM paint with real brush strokes, rather than draw with pixels? Yes — this is the API for it.

Easel is a headless painting engine for AI agents: brushes, paint load, wet blending and canvas texture, driven from Python, from a shell, or over MCP. A brush carries a finite load of paint and runs out along a stroke. Paint lands wet and mixes with what is already there, in a pigment model where blue and yellow make green rather than grey. The canvas has tooth, and a brush low on paint catches only the high points — so dry brush is not a special effect, it is what happens when you run out of paint on rough canvas. Between strokes you look at your own work, which is the whole point: the engine is built for an agent that can see what it just did.

It is not a drawing library, not a rasteriser, and not an image generator — nothing here turns a prompt into a picture. You choose and make every mark. There are no layers, and no undo that costs nothing: you work in passes, and when something is wrong you paint over it.

Read the guide before you paint. The engine is only the brush; PAINTER.md is the method, and six measured runs say the method is the half that matters. It ships inside the package, so there is nothing to go and find: easel guide prints its first page — the whole workflow, about a thousand words — and easel guide --full prints the rest.

from easel import Session, blob, cell

s = Session(1024, 768, texture="linen", ground="toned_grey", seed=7)
s.palette["shadow"] = s.palette.mix("ultramarine", "burnt_umber", 0.4)

s.block_in(blob(cell("D5")), brush="bristle", color="shadow", density=0.8)
s.look(values=True)                       # check the value structure
s.stroke([(0.2, 0.6), (0.6, 0.55), (0.9, 0.62)], "bristle", "yellow_ochre")
s.export("painting.png")

Paintings, made this way

Inside a car wash, from the driver's seat — 206 strokes of a 300 budget, 1152×720 linen, no reference photograph. The nineteen pass scripts beside it reproduce that PNG byte for byte.*

A laundromat at night, from across the street — 286 strokes of a 300 budget, 1024×768 linen, no reference photograph. Fourteen pass scripts beside it reproduce that PNG byte for byte.*

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.