Short answer: macOS has no built-in way to draw over your live screen. Lovely Screenshots adds a Draw on Screen mode — a transparent whiteboard layer with pen, arrows and shapes that everyone in your screen share can see. It never takes a screenshot; drawings vanish when you're done.
When you need this
Explaining a design over a call. Pointing at a line of code during a review. Teaching from a slide deck. Anywhere you'd tap the screen with a finger if it were an iPad — on a Mac you need an overlay to sketch on, and the built-in tools don't have one.
Draw on Screen in Lovely Screenshots
- Turn on Draw on Screen. Click the Lovely menu-bar icon and choose Draw on Screen (or bind a shortcut in Settings → Shortcuts). A floating toolbar appears and your cursor becomes a crosshair.
- Draw over anything. Pick pen, highlighter, arrow, line, rectangle or oval — each has a single-key shortcut (P, H, A, L, R, O). Hold Shift for straight lines and perfect circles. Highlighter is yellow, everything else defaults to red.
- Keep using the app underneath. Switch to the cursor tool (V, or one press of esc) to click and scroll the app under your drawings. Scrolling fades stale drawings out automatically, since they'd be pointing at moved content.
- Clear and exit. Undo with ⌘Z, clear everything with the trash button, and press esc twice to leave. Nothing is saved — the drawings are ephemeral by design.
Frequently asked questions
Do people on my Zoom/Meet call see the drawings?
Yes — that's the point. The overlay is a normal window as far as screen sharing is concerned, so everyone watching your shared screen sees your annotations live. (Lovely's own capture overlays are excluded from sharing; the drawing overlay deliberately is not.)
Does it take a screenshot or record anything?
No. Draw on Screen never captures, saves or uploads anything. The strokes exist only on the overlay and vanish when you exit — it's a whiteboard layer, not a capture mode.
How is this better than Zoom's built-in annotation?
It works everywhere — any app, any meeting software, or no meeting at all (lecture rooms, screen demos, pair programming). You also get proper tools: shift-constrained shapes, a dim-screen mode to make marks pop, and automatic fade-out when the content scrolls.
Is it free?
Yes, Draw on Screen is part of the free tier of Lovely Screenshots.