I teach Sunday School and am wondering if there’s a way I could use AI to help create a coloring book I could share with the children? I don’t want to publish it, just have it on hand as a craft activity.
Coloring books are interesting because they’re often quite simple artistic creations, but the best of them still demonstrate a deft hand and remarkable artistic skill. Get into the “adult” oriented, far more complicated coloring pages and it can take days for a page to be created. If you’re an artist, it’s probably fairly easy to produce a few coloring pages for friends and family, but if you lack artistic skills, what are your options?
Shortcuts: Google Image Search | Microsoft Copilot/DALL-E / Ideogram / Midjourney / Firefly / Stable Diffusion / Legal Considerations
Tapping into the remarkable capabilities of the new AI-powered image creation tools is a smart approach, though we’ll have to experiment to see if they’re up for the job, rather than creating some photorealistic image! There remains a question of copyright but given that many people create coloring pages by simply finding something through Google Image Search, at least AI offers the chance to have something more unique…
THE LAZY APPROACH: GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH
As I said, one approach you can take is to simply use Google Image Search. I’ll explore bunnies, as they’re popular both with general coloring books for children and those with a religious theme. The search results offer some possibilities for a search on “bunny coloring page simple”:
To be fair, though, most of them are rather lacking and the lower right image is even somewhat disturbing!
Instead, let’s switch to Plan B: AI Tools. To start, I’ll just tap Microsoft Copilot…
BUNNY COLORING PAGE: COPILOT
Copilot has quickly become rather ubiquitous for Windows users, being incorporated both into Microsoft Edge, the browser of choice for Windows 11, and within Windows itself in the latest updates. A click on the double arrow and I can try my prompt. I’m going to use this prompt throughout: “create a picture of a bunny in the style of a simple children’s coloring page, no colors, thick, heavy lines”. Here’s what it created:
They’re not bad, though the top left image has some greyscale which makes it visually interesting, but not a traditional coloring page. Tweaking the prompt would probably address that. In fact, the secret to success with all AI tools is to spend the time both crafting a highly detailed prompt and then experimenting with variations as you see the results produced. As a starting point, this is my favorite of those four:
That could easily be printed at various sizes, ready for colored pencils or crayons.
Microsoft Copilot works with ChatGPT and its image utility DALL-E 3, so we’ll call this our “DALL-E Bunny”.
BUNNY COLORING PAGE: IDEOGRAM
Another AI tool that I really like is Ideogram. Awkward name, but it’s another tool you can use without needing an account or subscription. Same prompt, different results: “create a picture of a bunny in the style of a simple children’s coloring page, no colors, thick, heavy lines”:
A bit weird, though they’re all fun in different ways. The first looks the most realistic and almost like a sketch from Bambi or another Disney classic. A click and you can see my prompt and that image reproduced larger:
You can easily right-click or click-and-hold on the resultant image to pull up a menu where “Save as…” is one of the options to save it, or just click-and-drag it onto your Desktop.
Remember that these tools might be called “artificial intelligence” but they don’t know if you like the image or not, so again, tweaks and fiddling might yield far better results for you (for example, specifying the details of a religious background you might want to have included).
BUNNY COLORING PAGE: MIDJOURNEY
One of the hardest AI tools to work with, because it not only requires a subscription but has a horrible nerdy text interface, is nonetheless one of the most sophisticated: Midjourney. When I go to Midjourney and enter the same prompt, however, the results are a bit weirder. I have had to choose “realistic” from the possible styles, which undoubtedly influenced things
They’re not bad, but since it’s such a pain to work with Midjourney without an account, let’s just move on to another tool.
BUNNY COLORING PAGE: ADOBE FIREFLY
One of the most sophisticated tools is Firefly from Adobe and is part of the Creative Suite. Adobe makes Photoshop and Premiere, among many other image tools, so it’s no surprise it’s so powerful. It’s possibly too powerful, though, as is immediately obvious when I let it create some images with the same initial prompt of “create a picture of a bunny in the style of a simple children’s coloring page, no colors, thick, heavy lines”:
They’re beautiful and compelling, but… are they good coloring pages for the wee ones? Firefly lets you choose from art styles as “reference” works, so I refined it by choosing a “pencil sketch”, to which it became even more sophisticated…
Again, the results are gorgeous, looking like they’re out of some 1800s children’s book illustrations, but are they going to be good coloring pages? I don’t think so. Still, that image on the top right is just about ready to print on parchment, frame, and sell at an art fair!
BUNNY COLORING PAGE: STABLE DIFFUSION
One more tool before I call it a day: Stable Diffusion. This is another one where the interface isn’t great, but the results make the effort worthwhile. Same prompt as usual. This also requires that you pick a reference art style, so I’ll start with “comic book”:
That’s pretty darn ideal for a children’s coloring page, with lots of plants for those who enjoy detail and big, big ears for those who aren’t maybe so good at staying within the lines. But what if I choose a different reference art style? I’ll choose “line art” and try again…
That’s great! In fact, there’s your first image for your coloring book.
COPYRIGHT AND LEGALITIES
Before we wrap up, I do want to emphasize that for now the copyright office has stated that no image created by AI can be copyrighted, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t somehow infringing on the artwork of someone else who established the prior art it’s referencing and inadvertently mimicking. I would recommend that if you wanted to use these tools to produce a commercial product that you tread carefully to ensure you don’t have any issues down the road.
For local use at your own Sunday School, however, this seems like it would fall into the category of education and you can therefore claim fair use and be covered under a narrow but strong blanket of protection. I’m not a lawyer, however, so if a parishioner encourages you to sell your new coloring book on Amazon.com, you’ll still want to be careful.
Legal issues aside, you can see that these tools are quite remarkable and can produce beautiful and delightful works with the right prompts. Go forth, have fun, and good luck with your coloring book project!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about AI for a while now. Please check out my AI and ChatGPT Help Area for more tutorials and help articles while you’re visiting!
Dave,
Great tutorial, and fine comparison of different tools, with pros and cons.