How to draw on your screen during a Zoom, Meet or Teams call on a Mac

22 September 2026 · 5 min read · video calls, screen sharing, mac

You share your screen, say “this one here”, and wave the mouse pointer around a spreadsheet. On your display the pointer is obvious. On a colleague’s laptop, squashed into a video tile and compressed on the way, it’s a few grey pixels they can’t find.

Drawing fixes that. A circle around the number, an arrow to the button, a line under the sentence: everyone is looking at the same thing in a second. On a Mac you have two broad ways to do it, and they behave quite differently.

Option one: the call app’s own annotation

Most of the big call apps have some form of annotation built in. The catch is that it isn’t one feature. It varies:

Between apps. Each one puts its tools in a different place, offers a different set of shapes and handles clearing differently.
By plan or account type. Some features depend on the licence your organisation pays for, or on settings an admin has switched on or off.
By role in the meeting. Whether you can annotate, and whether others can, may depend on whether you’re the host, the presenter or a guest.
By what you’re sharing. Annotation may behave differently when you share a whole screen, a single window or a file.

Because this changes as the apps are updated, the only reliable source is your app’s own help pages. Search for “annotate” or “annotation” alongside the app’s name, and check what your account can actually do before an important call, not during it.

If you spend your day in one call app and its annotation does what you need, use it. It’s already there and there’s nothing extra to install.

The trouble starts when you don’t live in one app. A client uses one service, your team uses another, and a supplier sends a link for a third. Each has its own tools, and you relearn them every time.

Option two: draw on the screen itself

The other approach is a tool that draws on your Mac’s screen rather than inside the call app. It puts a transparent layer over everything, and you draw on that layer. Whatever the call app captures from your screen includes the drawing, because as far as the call app is concerned, the ink is just part of what’s on the display.

That has a few useful consequences:

It works in every call app that shares your screen, and in screen recorders too.
The tools are the same everywhere, so the same keys and colours work on every call.
Nobody else needs anything. The people watching see pixels, not a feature they need to support.

It also has limits worth knowing. The drawing lives on your screen, so the other people on the call can’t draw on it. And because it sits above your windows, what you share matters (more on that below).

This is what PenLayer does. It sits in the menu bar, and ⌥⇧D starts and stops drawing from anywhere. Until you start drawing, clicks go straight through to your apps as normal.

This is the tip that saves the most confusion. Call apps usually let you share either your entire screen or a single window. A single-window share captures that window’s contents, and anything drawn on top of it, by a separate app, may not be included. Your audience sees the spreadsheet but not the circle you drew around it.

Share the whole screen and the problem goes away: the call app captures the display, and the display has the ink on it.

A couple of related points:

Draw on the screen you’re sharing. PenLayer draws on your primary display. If you have two monitors, share the primary one, or change which display is primary in System Settings.
Tidy up first. Sharing the whole screen shows everything, including notifications. Turn on a Focus mode and close anything you’d rather not broadcast.

Pick colours that survive the trip

Video calls compress your screen heavily, and thin, pale or low-contrast lines are the first things to smear. A few habits help:

Use strong colours. Red and yellow stand out against most interfaces. Blue can vanish against blue links and buttons. Black works on white documents and disappears on dark mode.
Go thicker than feels necessary. A line that looks bold on your screen may be half as clear on a small laptop at the other end. Pick one of the heavier weights for calls.
Draw big and simple. A loose circle around a whole row reads better than a neat underline under one word.
Use the highlighter for text. A translucent highlight over a line keeps the words readable, where a thick pen stroke would cover them.

PenLayer ships with six colours (red, yellow, green, blue, black and white), and you can change any of them to suit your screens. It has four stroke weights, and [ and ] step between them while you draw.

Stop drawing to click

A screen-wide drawing tool has one habit you need to learn: while drawing is on, your clicks go to the drawing, not to the app underneath. That’s what lets you draw on a web page without following links.

So the rhythm on a call becomes:

Press ⌥⇧D and draw your circle or arrow.
Talk about it.
Press ⌥⇧D again to get your clicks back, then do the thing you pointed at.

By default, stopping also clears the screen, which suits calls well: each point you make starts on a clean screen. If you’d rather keep your marks while you click around, set Preferences to “Keep the drawing”. Your ink and undo history come back when you start again, and ⌥⇧C clears everything when you’re done.

If you forget to stop, PenLayer stops by itself after two minutes without drawing, so you’re never stuck with a screen that won’t take clicks. You can change that time in Preferences.

Small habits that make it work

Point, then pause. Draw the mark, then give people a beat to find it before you start talking about the next thing.
Undo instead of clearing. ⌘Z takes back the last stroke while you’re drawing, so a wobbly arrow doesn’t mean losing the rest.
Say what you drew. “I’ve circled the total at the bottom” helps anyone whose connection lagged or who’s listening rather than watching.
Practise once. Open a call with just yourself, share your screen and draw. Two minutes of rehearsal beats fumbling in front of a client.

Trying it

If you move between call apps, or the built-in tools don’t reach far enough, a tool that draws on the screen itself is the simpler answer. PenLayer has a 14-day free trial with no account or card. The video calls page shows how it fits into a call, and the docs cover every key and setting.