Painted Crayon

Their Lines, Then Ours

Printed as they drew it

Photograph a drawing from the fridge door. Your phone lifts the paper away, finds each colour on the page and traces every line, then sets the drawing on a wide white sheet with their name beneath. The wobble stays. The sun keeps all nine rays.

The photograph stays on this device; only the lines leave.

The photograph

The sample: a drawing in a child's manner on white paper, photographed in daylight. A sun with nine rays, a red house with a purple roof and blue windows, a stick figure, green grass, and two pencil birds rubbed out.
The sample, drawn for this page by us in a child's manner. No real child's drawing is shown here.

The plate, as it prints

The sample plate: the drawing traced in six colours on a wide white sheet.
The red marks are strokes the lift left out.

The sample: 1,582 × 1,148 px, 6 colours, traced.

The sample is ready to lift.

The Colours
6

At most this many, each sampled from the paper. Raise it if two colours print as one.

The Lift
Even

Gentler keeps faint pencil; firmer drops smudges and shadow. The red pencil shows the difference.

Lines or Pixels

Traced lines print sharp at every size. Soft drawings print as pixels, at the size they hold.

The Sheet
The Ground
Their Name

Set small under the drawing. Leave both empty for none.

The Lift

  1. Lifting the paper

    The photograph is read for its paper colour, block by block, and the paper is divided out, so cream paper and the shadow of your phone both print as the sheet's own white. Painted Letters' Sauvola lift decides, pixel by pixel, what is a mark and what is paper.

  2. Finding the colours

    Every marked pixel is measured in CIELAB and grouped into at most the number of colours you set, from 2 to 12. Each colour that prints is the average of the pixels it stands for. None comes from a crayon box or a palette of ours.

  3. Tracing the lines

    Each colour's outline is followed around the pixel grid and straightened only where the photograph's staircase is under 1.5 px, then drawn as curves, so its edges are made at the print's own resolution. Tested on drawings with known answers: a circle, a square and a star each trace within 2% of their true area, and the worst came in at 0.3%.

  4. What it won't do

    No model of any kind touches the drawing. Nothing is redrawn, filled in or made larger than the photograph holds. A soft drawing, watercolour or light pencil, traces poorly, so when the traced area and the lifted area differ by more than 4% the studio prints the lifted pixels instead and tells you the largest size they hold at 150 dpi.