Ripple Garden
Rake the sand, drop a stone, breathe. A tiny zen garden you draw with your cursor — drag to carve flowing ripples, click to place stones and moss, and watch the grooves bend gracefully around them. No score, no timer, nothing to win. Just a calm break.
How to use
Rake the sand
Drag anywhere across the sand to carve flowing highlight-and-shadow ripples that follow your cursor.
Drop stones
Pick Stone, Rock, Moss or Lantern, then short-click to place it. The ripples bend and wrap around every object.
Adjust the rake
Use the − / + stepper or keys 1–5 to change how many grooves the rake carves at once.
Save or reset
Hit Save to download your garden as a PNG, or Clear for a soft palm-wipe and a fresh bed of sand.
A raked sand garden that fits in a browser tab
Ripple Garden is a digital version of a karesansui — the dry rock garden where the work is not planting anything but dragging a wooden rake through gravel in long, deliberate lines. There is no score, no timer, no failure state and nothing to unlock. You drag, the sand opens behind your cursor, and that is the whole loop. It exists to give your hands something slow to do while your head works on something else.
The rake carves between one and five grooves at once, spaced nine pixels apart, and each groove is drawn as a paired highlight and shadow so the sand reads as displaced rather than merely coloured. A small amount of wobble is added along every stroke on purpose. A mathematically perfect line looks printed; a line that drifts by a fraction of a pixel looks pulled by a hand. That deliberate imperfection is most of why the result feels hand-made instead of generated.
Why the ripples bend around the stones
Every object you place carries an invisible field of influence, reaching out to a little under three times its own radius. Any groove drawn inside that field is pushed outward from the object's centre, strongly close in and tapering smoothly to nothing at the edge, so the lines curve around a stone the way real gravel does when it meets an obstacle rather than stopping dead against it. The displacement is capped, so even a cluster of overlapping rocks bends the sand instead of tearing it apart.
This is also why order matters. Ripples are deflected by the objects present when you rake them, so placing a stone first and raking around it gives you a clean flowing contour, while raking first and dropping a stone on top leaves the older lines running underneath it. Neither is wrong. Alternating the two is how you get depth.
Who it is for
It is for anyone who wants a two-minute pause that does not involve a feed, a streak or a notification. It works well as something to do with one hand during a long call, as a reset between tasks, and as a quiet thing to hand a restless child. Because every finished garden saves as a PNG, people also use it to make plain, calm backgrounds and header images — the exported file is yours to use however you like. If you want that background to tile across a larger surface rather than sit at one fixed size, our Seamless Pattern Maker blends the edges of a PNG into a repeat with no visible seam. Inkblot Bloom is the other toy here that hands you a file at the end, if you would rather have a symmetrical ink blot than raked sand.
The whole garden is drawn on an ordinary canvas in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored on a server, and no account exists to make. If you have asked your system to reduce motion, the animations respect that setting and the palm-wipe becomes an instant clear.
Frequently asked questions
What is Ripple Garden?
A miniature digital zen garden. Drag to rake flowing sand ripples, click to place stones and moss, and watch the ripples bend gracefully around them. There's no score and no way to lose — it's a calm little toy for a mental break between tasks.
How do I control the rake and place stones?
Drag anywhere to rake. Press 1–5 (or use the − / + buttons) to change how many grooves the rake carves; ↑ and ↓ step the width by one. A short click drops the currently selected object — Stone (Q), Rock (W), Moss (E) or Lantern (R). The difference between a click and a drag is deliberate: move less than a few pixels and release quickly and you place an object, move further and you rake instead, so you can never drop a stone by accident mid-stroke. Ctrl+Z undoes, C clears with a soft palm-wipe, and S saves your garden as a PNG.
Can I get the ripples to flow around a stone rather than under it?
Yes — place the object first, then rake. Grooves are bent by whatever is already on the sand at the moment you draw them, so a stone dropped before the stroke gets a clean contour curving around it, while a stone dropped afterwards simply sits on top of lines that were carved straight. If a stone is in the wrong place, Ctrl+Z takes it back and you can re-rake the area.
Is there any way to lose, or anything to unlock?
No. There is no score, no timer, no lives, no levels and no leaderboard — the only thing that happens when you use it is that the sand changes. Nothing is tracked between visits either, so reloading the page always gives you a fresh, untouched bed of sand.
Does it work on my phone, and is anything uploaded?
Yes to phones — raking works with your finger and the buttons are touch-sized. And nothing is uploaded: the whole garden is drawn locally on an HTML canvas inside your browser, so it even works with the internet disconnected. Your saved PNG never leaves your device.