With our new Art Jam feature among other exciting updates, this release was focused on making Magma even more social, collaborative, and accessible! Check out what’s new.

Start & join Art Jams (Beta)

Drawing with others is at the core of our platform, so we want to make finding collaborators easy for any artist. 

Though there are currently a couple of ways to invite specific friends to join your canvas, we’ve noticed people often share canvas links in more visible spaces — everywhere from Twitter and Tumblr to our trusty Discord server. Sharing a canvas publicly can help artists find new drawing buddies, introduce more collaborators to their drawing, and lead to a more active exchange of ideas — all of which we want to facilitate! For those reasons, we’re launching a way to showcase and discover canvases directly in Magma.

Designed to help artists connect and draw together, our new Art Jams feature will showcase active Magma canvases in a filterable feed. Users can join a canvas and instantly draw with others, or start their own jam on a topic they care about. Read more about how to start and join Art Jams below.

Get Started With Art Jams

When logging into your Artdesk, you'll find the Art Jams icon directly below your Artdesk icon.

Once you’re there, you can explore art jams by browsing through the list of all canvases or filtering based on the genre that you're interested in.

To create your own jam, hit either of the two highlighted buttons, then input information like your title, description, genre, tags, and rules. Any new joiners will have to accept your rules in order to join your jam.

As a canvas owner, you should make sure that your Art Jam is a safe and inclusive environment for other artists — watch this video guide to learn more about admin controls and how to protect your canvas. 

Host Video Calls & Share Your Screen

Try Video Calls

We’re rolling out the ability to host video calls to all Blaze users! This is designed to help you feel closer to friends or teammates and to make collaborating in Magma even easier. 

When joining a video call, you can customize your camera and microphone settings, as well as the call layout. You can select one of three different views: 

• Column layout places the camera of each user in a line above one another

• Focus places the active speaker in a larger window

• Video on cursor replaces the avatar on the cursor with your camera view instead

Tip: Click “Enable transparency” to make the camera windows semi-transparent and show the canvas contents behind them.

Share Your Screen

Sharing your screen with others on a call makes it easier to brainstorm, exchange ideas, and learn from other artists. To share your screen, start a call, then click the “Share Screen” icon. A browser window will appear and ask you to select a tab, window, or entire screen to share with others.

Use Magma in Japanese (Beta)

We want to make Magma accessible to artists all over the world — and we’ve started by translating our platform and website to Japanese! We hope this gives the many Japanese artists using Magma a more comfortable drawing experience. Over time, we also intend to add more supported languages.

Change Your Language

To change your language in Magma, open a canvas and go to the Edit menu -> Application Settings -> General and update the language setting accordingly. This feature is still in beta, so if you speak Japanese, we’d love your feedback on our translations!

We can’t wait for you to try out our latest features and hope you enjoy everything we’ve been working on. To share your thoughts on what we should release next, go to the Feature Requests page in Magma to let us know. Happy drawing!