Life · Art

We PaintedEach Other WithEight Crayonsand Two AIs

Two museum coloring sheets, one style swap, three iterations. A love letter disguised as a children's coloring sheet.

Final crayon artwork: the couple with swapped painting styles inside a dense colorful forest, framed by a giraffe and a fox whose neck and tail nearly form a heart — The final artwork. Tap any image on this page to enlarge it.

It started with two coloring sheets from a museum, the kind clearly designed for children, which is exactly why two adults did it anyway. You pick an animal from the Forests of Vietnam, color it, and scan it into a giant projected forest where it walks around with everyone else's creations.

I colored a giraffe. Shreya colored a fox. Mine had a cobalt blue face, a yellow mane, a fuchsia body, and a green and blue tail that made no ecological sense. Hers had a lime green face, careful purple stripes, and a tail filled entirely with pink swirls. She also wrote her name as SUREYA on the sheet, which I have chosen to preserve in family lore forever.

A museum coloring sheet of a giraffe colored with a blue face, yellow mane and pink body, with KANISHK handwritten in pink — Exhibit A: the giraffe. Blue face, yellow mane, fuchsia body, a tail in green and blue. Signed KANISHK.

A museum coloring sheet of a fox colored with a green face, purple striped body and pink swirled tail, with SUREYA handwritten in pink — Exhibit B: the fox. Lime face, purple stripes, a tail of pink swirls. Signed SUREYA, a misspelling now preserved in family lore.

A few days later I sent photos of both sheets to Claude with a question that was mostly a joke: can you document our styles as if we were proficient painters? The answer was not a joke, and that is where this project actually began.

Step one: taking crayons seriously

What made this work was refusing to treat the source material as childish. Claude wrote us proper artist statements, and two people coloring the same sheet turn out to have completely different instincts.

My giraffe was diagnosed as chromatic maximalism with a Fauvist streak. Nothing was the color it should be, but the strokes obeyed the anatomy and the printed patches breathed through the pigment. Color as a wash over form.

Shreya's fox was the opposite intelligence. She does not color, she encodes. Vertical stripes at regular intervals, then a full texture switch for the tail, from lines to dense swirls that actually read as fur. Hard boundaries, full saturation, zero hesitation.

Written down like that, the two sheets stop being cute and start being a design brief. What happens if you force these two languages into one painting?

Step two: decide what the painting means before deciding anything else

Here is where my product brain took over. Instead of jumping to "generate a cute image," we built a decision tree ordered by how much each choice constrains everything downstream. The root decision was the thesis. Not the composition, not the medium, the thesis.

We picked a painting that says: we see each other through each other's eyes. That resolved half the remaining decisions. I get her language: lime green face in flat committed zones, my curls as her pink swirl loops, my jacket striped in her purple. She gets mine: translucent cobalt wash on her face, cadmium yellow tracking her hair the way my yellow tracked the giraffe's mane.

The animals stay untouched, exactly as we made them, because they are the evidence. The swapped portraits are the interpretation. Each style appears exactly twice: once on our own creature, once on the other person.

The rest cascaded. A facing pair, because a thesis about gaze should encode gaze. The giraffe's neck arcing in from the left, the fox's tail from the right, reaching toward each other without touching. Full crayon fidelity, an eight crayon palette from the originals.

That is the process lesson: deciding what the thing means before deciding what it looks like is the difference between an image and a piece.

Step three: likeness is signifiers, not pixels

We wanted our actual faces in this, recognizably. So we fed in reference photos and extracted likeness signifiers, the few features that make a low resolution medium still read as a specific person. For me: thick dark curls, straight brows, deep smile lines, the bandhgala collar. For Shreya: one curl across her cheek, a bindi, her necklace, and the fact that she wears florals in real life, always.

That produced my favorite discovery of the project. In real life she wears patterns and I wear solids. Under the swap, my solid jacket gains her stripes and her floral dress gets washed over in my translucent strokes, flowers ghosting through. The source material was secretly built for this exchange. We just had not noticed.

Step four: a vector study, then a handoff prompt

Claude first built a v1 as an SVG study, which verified the composition but could not fake crayon warmth, and we wanted photographic likeness under the crayon surface.

The next step was a transfer document, a long structured prompt for Gemini. Two choices mattered. First, rules before scene: the swap logic and locked palette went at the top, because image models weight early tokens heavily. Second, we resolved the contradiction in "photorealistic crayon drawing" explicitly: facial structure faithful to the reference photos, crayon as a surface layer over anatomically accurate faces. Without that split, models abandon likeness for style or style for likeness.

First AI-generated crayon artwork of the couple with swapped color styles, giraffe on the left, small fox with a detached swirl tail on the right — Iteration one. The faces landed immediately. The fox's tail, however, detached and floated as a beautiful orphaned arc.

Step five: iterate composition first, texture second, and lock what works

Iteration one came back genuinely good. The faces landed on the first try, green face, blue face and all. But the fox's tail had detached and floated as a beautiful orphaned arc. The biggest element in the frame belonged to nobody.

Iteration two fixed the geometry with the single best idea of the project: the giraffe's neck and the fox's tail almost forming a heart around us, with a small gap of pure white paper at the apex, directly above us. The instruction said the gap is the emotional center of the image. It is.

Second iteration: the giraffe's neck and fox's tail arc toward each other almost forming a heart around the couple — Iteration two. The tail reattached, the neck and tail now almost forming a heart, the forest beginning to color itself in around us.

Iteration three was about completeness: a forest floor with wildflowers and a couple of crayons left in the grass, canopies closing over the corners, butterflies in the middle air, and a wobbly hand drawn border with two QR style markers, a callback to the scanner that started all this. One hard rule held it together: fill everything, except the heart shaped gap.

The critical instruction later was declaring the faces final. Image models drift features when they redraw surroundings, so you protect what works loudly and explicitly. We kept a compositing fallback and never needed it.

What we ended up with

A crayon painting of the two of us in a Vietnamese forest that is being colored in around us. I have a green face and her swirls in my hair. She has a blue face and my yellow strokes in hers. My giraffe watches her. Her fox watches me. Above our heads, their arcs almost close into a heart, and the only clean white left on the whole sheet sits inside that gap.

Squint at it from across the room and you see a white heart floating in a saturated jungle with two faces at its center.

Total tools: two coloring sheets, four photos, eight imaginary crayons, one language model, one image model, three iterations. The whole thing took an afternoon.

The part I keep coming back to is not the output, it is the ordering. Thesis, then structure, then surface. Fix geometry before texture, and lock what works. I have shipped software with worse process than this painting.

And somewhere in a museum database, a blue faced giraffe and a green faced fox are still wandering around a projected forest together. This is just what happened when they came home.

The Evolution

Three iterations, one afternoon

The Prompts

Reproduce the process

For anyone who wants to reproduce the process: the three prompts, exactly as given to the image model. Reference photos were attached with each; from the second prompt onward, the previous output was attached as the base image.

Prompt 1 — The transfer documentThe initial generation prompt. Rules before scene, likeness split from style explicitly.

Create a single landscape-format artwork (16:9) of two people and two animals, drawn in the style of wax crayon on white paper — but with the facial structure, proportions, and features of both people rendered with photographic accuracy to the attached reference photos. The faces must be instantly recognizable as the real people. Likeness is the highest priority; apply the crayon medium and color treatments described below as a surface layer over anatomically faithful faces.

MEDIUM: Hand-drawn wax crayon aesthetic throughout — visible waxy stroke texture, pressure variation, white paper breathing through translucent layers, slightly imperfect fills, occasional stray marks outside the lines. Warm off-white paper background. No digital gradients, no airbrush smoothness, no vector flatness.

PALETTE — exactly eight crayon colors, nothing else: cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, fuchsia/magenta, deep rose pink, lime green, purple, peach-orange, brown.

THE CONCEPT: A couple painted each other, exchanging artistic styles. Style A (his) = expressive Fauvist color, loose gestural strokes that follow anatomical form, translucent layered washes, unrealistic colors. Style B (hers) = systematic pattern-fill, hard-edged flat color zones, vertical stripes, dense swirl textures.

COMPOSITION (left to right):
1. FAR LEFT: A child-like crayon giraffe standing full-body — cobalt blue face, cadmium yellow mane strokes down the neck, light pink neck with outlined patches left uncolored, fuchsia scribbled body, deep magenta-pink legs, a small green and blue scribbled tail. Its neck arcs rightward across the upper left, head gazing down toward the woman.

2. CENTER LEFT: The man (use reference photos for exact facial likeness — round full face, thick dark curly hair with volume on top, strong straight eyebrows, closed-mouth smile with pronounced smile lines). Rendered in Style B: his curly hair filled with dense pink and magenta swirl-loop textures following his real curl pattern; his face filled in flat committed LIME GREEN with hard edges but photographically accurate features and shading translated into the green; wearing a bandhgala jacket with mandarin collar rendered as purple vertical stripes over a peach ground, a center line of brown buttons. Three-quarter turn, facing right.

3. CENTER RIGHT: The woman (use reference photos for exact facial likeness — soft round features, long voluminous dark wavy hair side-parted with one curl falling across her cheek, bindi on forehead, warm smile). Rendered in Style A: her face in translucent COBALT BLUE wash, gestural strokes following her cheek and jaw curves, white paper showing through, features photographically accurate beneath the blue; long cadmium yellow directional strokes tracking her hair waves over dark hair; deep pink bindi; pink lips; delicate necklace with a small green-blue pendant; floral dress washed over in translucent fuchsia strokes with the white floral print ghosting through. Three-quarter turn, facing left. THE TWO ARE GAZING DIRECTLY INTO EACH OTHER'S EYES.

4. BOTTOM RIGHT: A child-like crayon fox — lime green face pointing up-left gazing toward the man, pink inner ears, brown nose, body of purple vertical stripes over peach, brown paws, and a huge fluffy tail filled entirely with deep pink circular swirl scribbles, sweeping up the right edge toward the giraffe's neck. The giraffe's neck-arc and fox's tail-arc reach toward each other across the top WITHOUT touching — leave a gap of white paper between them, directly above the couple's gaze line.

BACKGROUND: Mostly white paper with faint, uncolored line-art outlines of forest trees (like a blank coloring sheet), with small strokes of color bleeding into only the trees nearest the figures. Handwritten crayon text in pink capitals: "KANISHK" floating above the man, "SHREYA" above the woman, in a child-like hand.

MOOD: Joyful, intimate, naive-art sincerity. A love letter disguised as a children's coloring sheet. Gallery-quality composition, crayon-honest execution.

Prompt 2 — Geometry fixesThe second pass: reattach the fox's tail, form the almost-heart, dramatize the world being colored in.

Using the attached artwork as the base composition, regenerate it with the changes below. Keep the two faces EXACTLY as achieved — same likeness, same features, same expressions, same gaze meeting between them. The facial likeness to the attached reference photos remains the highest priority.

CHANGES FOR THIS VERSION:

1. REATTACH THE TAIL: The large pink swirl crescent on the right must be the FOX'S TAIL — physically connected to the fox's body, growing from it, sweeping up and over the right side of the image. Make the fox 2x larger, sitting proudly at bottom right, gazing up admiringly at the man. Its enormous swirl-textured tail is its glory — filled with dense deep-pink circular scribbles.

2. HEART GEOMETRY: The giraffe's neck arcs from the left, the fox's tail arcs from the right — together they almost form a heart shape framing the couple, their tips reaching toward each other at top center but NOT touching. Leave a small gap of pure white paper between the two tips, directly above the space between the couple's faces. This gap is the emotional center of the image.

3. THE WORLD BEING COLORED IN: The background forest transitions dramatically — trees nearest the couple are FULLY colored in rich crayon (fuchsia canopies, lime and cobalt foliage, yellow highlights), mid-distance trees are half-colored with strokes trailing off mid-fill, and trees at the far edges remain bare uncolored pencil outlines. Color radiates outward from the couple, as if their presence is coloring the world in. A few loose crayon strokes escape the tree outlines deliberately.

4. ROUGHER, RICHER MEDIUM: Push the wax crayon texture much harder — heavy waxy grain, visible pressure variation within single strokes, layered overlapping colors, paper tooth showing through, imperfect fills, stray marks left proudly. Less smooth colored-pencil polish, more honest crayon energy. Warm cream paper.

5. FACE TREATMENTS: Keep his face flat committed lime green with hard edges — add his two smile-line brackets around his closed-mouth smile (important likeness feature). Her cobalt blue should be a TRANSLUCENT wash with visible directional strokes following her cheek and jaw, white paper breathing through — less uniform tint, more gestural. One dark curl falls across her cheek, echoed by a single yellow stroke.

6. SMALL ADDITIONS: Two small QR-style scan marker squares hand-drawn in dark crayon in the top-left and bottom-right corners, like museum coloring-sheet fiducials. The handwritten names KANISHK and SHREYA stay as they are.

Keep everything else from the base image: the eight-crayon palette (cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, fuchsia, deep rose pink, lime green, purple, peach, brown), the striped bandhgala with brown buttons, the floral dress with white flowers ghosting through fuchsia, the bindi, the necklace with green-blue pendant, the blue-faced giraffe with yellow mane and patch outlines. Landscape 16:9.

Prompt 3 — Completeness pass, faces lockedThe final pass: fill the world, protect the faces, protect the heart-shaped gap.

Using the attached artwork as the base, regenerate with the changes below. CRITICAL: The two faces are FINAL — do not alter the likeness, features, expressions, face colors, or gaze in any way. Treat both faces as locked. All changes are to the environment and surrounding elements.

CHANGES FOR THIS VERSION — FILL THE WORLD, KEEP THE FACES:

1. GROUND PLANE: Add a forest floor across the entire bottom — layered crayon grass strokes in lime green and cobalt, small wildflowers in fuchsia, yellow and purple, scribbled soft ground shadows beneath the couple, the giraffe and the fox so every figure stands firmly on the earth. The giraffe's and fox's feet must touch the ground. A few fallen leaves and one or two stray crayon sticks lying in the grass (as if the artists left them behind).

2. CLOSING CANOPY: Extend the colored trees upward and inward so their crowns arch over the top corners of the image — fuchsia, lime, yellow and cobalt foliage in heavy crayon scribbles framing the composition from above. The canopy leans toward the top center but STOPS around the heart-shaped gap of white paper between the giraffe's neck and the fox's tail tip. That white gap must remain pure and untouched — it is the only large white space allowed in the entire image.

3. FILL ALL EDGES: No empty white corners or borders anywhere. Dense forest at the left and right edges, layered depth — fully saturated crayon trees in front, half-colored trees behind them, faint pencil-outline trees furthest back. Banana leaves and bamboo stalks tucked between trees (a Vietnamese forest). Every area of paper carries either color or intentional line work.

4. LIFE IN THE AIR: Scatter 5-7 small hand-drawn crayon butterflies and drifting flower petals through the middle air of the scene — around the couple, near the heart gap, one landing on the giraffe's neck, one near the fox's nose. Colors strictly from the palette: cobalt, yellow, fuchsia, purple. Add a few tiny yellow firefly dots glowing in the deeper forest shadows.

5. FOX TAIL CONNECTION: The huge pink swirl tail must visibly GROW from the fox's body — thick at the base where it meets the fox's rear, then sweeping up. Strengthen this joint so tail and fox are unmistakably one creature.

6. RICHER LAYERING EVERYWHERE: Deepen the crayon work across all clothing and animals — second and third layers of overlapping color, burnished waxy buildup, pressure variation, edges of strokes escaping outlines proudly. The whole image should feel densely, lovingly worked, like a child spent hours refusing to leave any spot untouched — except that one heart-shaped gap.

7. HAND-DRAWN BORDER: Frame the entire image with a slightly wobbly rounded-rectangle border drawn in dark crayon, like the border of a museum coloring sheet, with the two QR-style fiducial squares sitting just inside the top-left and bottom-right corners.

Palette remains strictly the eight crayons: cobalt blue, cadmium yellow, fuchsia, deep rose pink, lime green, purple, peach, brown — plus warm cream paper. Landscape 16:9. The names KANISHK and SHREYA stay exactly as placed.