I've noticed that my son spends way too much time on YouTube or playing Minecraft and one of the few offline activities he enjoys doing on his own is coloring. And since he comes to me every time he wants a new coloring book and we spend about 10 minutes together searching for each picture, I made a website with a collection of coloring books for him. The site is very simple, but to be honest, I haven't had so much fun with the process of creation for a long time.
At one pre-funding startup (in the days when 14400 was an excellent remote connection) we had a LAN set up in the basement of the founder with the largest house. Their daughter liked to "work" alongside us, so (partly to protect our unattended keyboards!) I bought a colouring-book program for her to use.
One evening, when her mother called down that it was her bedtime, she replied:
One of my 1000 unfinished projects was a e-reader app for android that generates coloring book pages, or illustrations for young kids who are in that weird age group where there are no more pictures in their books, but they still enjoy illustrations. I have a gifted niece who is way ahead for her age at reading but still enjoys pictures/coloring so I planned on making it for year. Don't know if I'll have the chance to finish, but I'm sure Kindle will integrate this into their new color kindles (and probably every other e-reader) at some point.
I also recommend printing out puzzles, mazes, riddles from https://krazydad.com/
You can download pdfs, staple them together and let your kids sink their time in.
Interesting, what AI are you using to generate these? Are these straight from the net or is there a post processing pipeline? If so, what are you doing?
Not the GP, but inspired by your question I tried asking ChatGPT to create similar coloring sheets. The results seem suitable for coloring. Here's one prompt: "A simplified line-drawing coloring sheet of a dog flying an airplane. The drawing is in clean black lines on a white background, with minimal details and clear, bold outlines."
Later: The prompt worked with Imagen 3 on Gemini Advanced, too:
damn I wish u did it 10 years ago! I really struggled with it, was so hard to find coloring images for my daughter. now shes 14 so I don't think she will care much :)
Is it possible to get all PDFs at once? Hopefully per section? That will really help to print all at once and get her a single book to go on for couple of weeks.
I thought I could do `curl | grep | xargs curl`, but the site returns 520.
My niece tends to finish a book start to end within a week or so, hence why I thought of asking. Another reason is I don't get to see her too often, and it is easier to hand over a book a visit, color a page together to get her started, and then she does the rest.
20 years ago I met a young woman in her mid 20's. She's setup coloring book pages with google ads by the thousands, in pretty much every language. Her income from that was around $8K a month, and this was late 90's?
Similar story, but for the mobile era: I knew an indie app developer who built a portfolio of early mobile apps. His top-earners were a coloring book app, bead animal patterns, and a no-essay college scholarship app. Those three allowed him to pay himself and a partner salary and drop contract/client work.
Amazing! My son also colored a lot but he'd pick only a few pages out of every coloring book so I got the idea to find some online; one-page things to print but the ones I found at the time claimed to be "coloring book pages" but were actually more black-lines-on-white-background actual artwork. Much too complex for simple coloring. Your site would have been the find of the decade!
The hands and feet on some of them are downright disturbing. I would not want my child coloring in AI generated slop, there's something fundamentally disconcerting about that.
https://colorango.com/