Clumsy Paint Program Drawing
A deliberately unskilled drawing — the kind someone makes slowly in a paint program — with the clumsiness given as construction and counts instead of adjectives. Five fields.
We made two examples: a kitchen and a harbour scene, drawn with the same rules of deliberate clumsiness. The harbour picks up errors nobody asked for, like a side-on seagull with both eyes on the visible side, and the needle and the bird come out enormous, as the fields asked. In both, the outline weight wanders.
The colours spill over the lines, which is exactly what you want: red past the cupboard door, green past the bottle, and bare wall left showing inside the stove. The eyes differ in size and height, and the hand holding the pan is bigger than the face. Expect the outline weight to vary from one area to another, even though the skill asks for a single one.
Generated for this library
Input
Scene a person standing at a cooker, frying one egg in
a pan
Place a small kitchen - a wall cupboard, a jar of
utensils, a green bottle, a blue bowl
Palette pale butter yellow, cornflower blue, brick red,
grey, black outlines
Too big the egg in the pan, and the hand holding the
handle
Ground a flat pale yellow wall
Returned 1 drawing · 1:1 · flat colour, black outline
fills colour over the line at the sleeve, the cupboard
and the pan; bare ground left inside the trouser
leg and the bowl
pairs eyes at different heights and sizes, one shoe
bigger than the other, four fingers on one hand
and five on the other
strokes contours wobbling, corners overshooting, the
cupboard drawn as a lopsided box
scale the egg nearly the size of the head, the hand
bigger than the face
depth everything side by side - the bottle and the bowl
sit next to each other rather than one in frontYou fill in 5 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1The scene — who, and what they are doing
- 2The place, and three or four things in it
- 3The palette
- 4What the drawer cared about most, drawn far too large
- 5The ground
Clumsy Paint Program Drawing
What this makes
A deliberately unskilled drawing — the kind someone makes slowly in a paint program — with the clumsiness given as construction and counts instead of adjectives. Five fields.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Replace the five FIELDS lines. Be plain in the scene field — the flatter the description, the better this works.
- Paste it into any image-capable agent or model, in one message. One run returns the drawing.
- Check the fills before shipping. If every colour stops exactly at its outline, you have a competent drawing wearing a costume.
What you swap
- The scene — who, and what they are doing
- a person standing at a cooker, frying one egg in a pan
- The place, and three or four things in it
- a small kitchen — a wall cupboard, a jar of utensils, a green bottle, a blue bowl
- The palette
- pale butter yellow, cornflower blue, brick red, grey, black outlines
- What the drawer cared about most, drawn far too large
- the egg in the pan, and the hand holding the handle
- The ground
- a flat pale yellow wall behind everything
Before it runs
- A scene with one clear action. Naive drawing has no way to explain itself, so whatever is happening has to be legible from the shapes alone.
- Something worth enlarging. The 'drawn too large' field is what gives the picture its point of view — without it you get a small wrong drawing rather than a felt one.
- Tolerance for it looking bad. It is supposed to. If you find yourself wanting to fix the eyes, the template is working.
When to reach for it
When something needs to feel made by a person rather than produced: a joke, a zine, a personal card, a slide that should not look like a stock asset. Templates in this style ask for naive and awkward and low-completion, and get a competent cartoon with immaculate bucket fills, because those words are permissions and a permission builds nothing.
What changes
- One flat drawing with the look of a paint program worked slowly by someone who cannot really draw.
- Fills laid before outlines and missing them — colour over the line in some places, bare ground inside it in others, at a stated count.
- Paired things drawn one at a time, so no two eyes, hands or shoes match.
- Single uncorrected strokes: wobbling contours, overshoots at the corners, nothing redrawn or cleaned up.
- Whatever the drawer cared about drawn far too large, which is what makes a naive picture readable rather than merely wrong.
Pairs with
- Black & White Biomech StickerA dense black-and-white sticker illustration — a creature fused with machinery — with solid black treated as a material you place, not a colour you run out of. Five fields.
- Black Ink Event PosterA black-ink event poster on white — a scribbled scene, a fat brush headline, asides in the margins — with the tool count fixed so it reads as one hand. Six fields.
- Double-Framed Pencil IllustrationA coloured-pencil illustration held in two nested frames — a border, then an inner panel — where both are measured even on all four sides, because that is what the eye reads before anything inside them. Six fields.