How this was made
Pictures are made with AI tools, and a person checks every page before it's printed.
Pictures made with AI tools in our Paper and Pencil style, checked by a person before printing.
The steps
- You upload a photo of your child and a photo of their favourite toy.
- AI tools draw your child and their toy. You check the drawings before we go on.
- While the drawings are made, you can write a dedication for the first page.
- We fit the story you chose to your child's age, with AI tools, and add your child and their toy.
- You read the whole story and see 4 sample pages before you pay.
- After you pay, a person checks every page before it's printed.
- Our print partner prints your hardcover and posts it to you.
Who does what
- Google draws every picture, and checks each one against your toy.
- OpenAI checks your photos, your words and every picture for safety, and checks the story's writing.
- Anthropic writes the story. It gets no photos.
What we built, and why it took a while
Anyone can ask an AI for a picture. Getting the same child, the same toy and the same gentle style on every page of a printed book is much harder. It took a great deal of testing, and most of the rules below came from a mistake we caught along the way.
Our own style
Paper and Pencil is ours: soft graphite lines, four watercolour washes and warm paper, worked out from picture books now in the public domain. Its colours are fixed, so nothing harsh or off-key gets onto a page.
A character sheet for your child
Before any page is drawn, we draw your child and their toy together on one sheet, the way animators do, and you approve it. Every page is drawn from that sheet, so your child looks like themselves all the way through.
The toy stays a real toy
We study your photo and write down exactly what the toy has, and what it doesn't, so it never grows arms or a face it never had. It never walks or talks: it's held, tucked in or peeking out, the way real toys are.
The same child on every page
Your child is drawn at their real age and the toy at its real size beside them. Glasses, freckles and hairstyle stay just as they are on the sheet.
Checked twice
A second AI checks every picture against your toy photo and looks for stray letters, and the picture is drawn again if something is wrong. Then a person checks every page before it's printed.
Why our colours are soft
We think stories for young children should be gentle to look at, not loud. So our pictures are soft and quiet, with no intense or neon colour.
Every picture uses four soft washes, a graphite line and warm off-white paper. We ask the AI tools for no neon or fluorescent colour.
A check measures the colour on every page, and shows the person checking your book any page with strong or neon colour.
Each page has one clear subject and only a few things around it. A 2014 study found that kindergarten children in a heavily decorated room were more distracted and learned less.
About 1 in 12 men and 1 in 100 women see some colours differently, so we never show a difference by red and green alone.
This is our view. There is little research on colour and children aged 2 to 7, and none we found shows that a colour calms a child.
Artists, and what we take from them
Many people worry that AI pictures copy artists' work without asking. That's a fair worry, so here is exactly what we do.
We worked out our Paper and Pencil style from picture books that are now in the public domain, free for anyone to use. Their artists died long ago: Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, Richard Doyle, Leslie Brooke and Carl Larsson among them.
When we make your book, the only pictures we give the AI are your photos and the drawings it has already made for your book. We describe our style in plain words: a soft pencil line, four watercolour washes, the paper. We never name an artist to the AI, and we tell it never to copy one, even if someone asks.
Every picture is drawn by one AI tool, made by Google, and a whole book is always drawn by the same one. Google trained it on very large collections of pictures, and some artists object to how that was done. We can't change that, and we won't pretend otherwise.
In short
- The pictures are made with AI tools.
- We write each story in advance, with help from AI tools. Then AI tools fit its words to your child's age and add your child and their toy.
- A person checks every book before it is printed.
- Our Paper and Pencil style comes from public-domain picture books, and we never ask the AI to copy a named artist.
- Each book stars your child and their toy, like Ada and Biscuit in our sample.
Your photos
We only use your photos to make your book. We never let anyone train AI tools on them.
Our promises
- A person checks every book before it's printed
- Your photos are deleted 7 days after we approve your book
- Your photos never train AI
- We say plainly where we use AI
- Read it before you pay
- If anything's wrong, we put it right
- Soft colours, and no neon