Using Generative AI for Coloring Pages
During the early days of the pandemic, I was stuck inside with my kids desperately trying to get work done. However, every few minutes, after I had distracted them with some activity or another, they would reappear, asking to do something else.
I had the bright idea of bringing home a printer and starting to print out colouring pages. I thought I was so smart. I found images and whole books I could print out. Now, my kids interest in the colouring pages that I could find online easily lasted about an hour.
After that time, they would come to me asking for specific images and then instead of this activity distracting them, it ended up distracting me. They would spend five or more minutes looking through Google Images to find the perfect colouring page that they would end up scribbling on for about two minutes. An similar metaphor was that the chairlift ride took much longer than the ride down the mountain.
After a few days, this morphed into me taking real images and turning them into black and white outlines, all while trying to get some actual work done.
Eventually, we all lost interest in.
Recently, my kids rekindled their interest in colouring pages but instead of spending half an hour searching or editing an existing image, I just use Midjourney and add “coloring page, black line drawing” to the prompt and voila… a colouring page.
There are all sorts of variations that one can add but this satisfies the occasional pang for a colouring page.
