Colour Goes Over the Line
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.
Two runs of the same template. The same rules on a different scene, and here they started generating errors nobody asked for: the seagull has both of its eyes on the visible side of a side-on head. That is not in the template — it is what happens once drawing one thing at a time is the method rather than a mood. The needle and the bird came out enormous as the fields asked, and the outline weight wandered again, so that line of the template is the one neither run kept.
The fills miss, which is the whole test — red running past the cupboard door, green past the bottle, blue past the bowl, and bare wall left showing inside the stove. The reference run was told its fills may be uneven and came back with every colour stopping exactly on its outline, because a permission is not an instruction. The eyes differ in size and height and the pan hand is bigger than the face. One divergence: the template asks for one outline weight everywhere and this run used two or three, heavier on the stove than on the bottle.
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
Colour Goes Over the Line
Produce ONE image, 1:1: a flat drawing made by someone who cannot really draw, working slowly in a simple paint program. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.
First — do you have the fields?
If any field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put all the questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then draw. Never fill a brace yourself: a value you invented is a value nobody asked for, and it will look exactly as considered as the ones they did give you.
Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.
The examples are only examples. If someone answers a question, use their answer; never fall back to the example because you prefer it.
If the fields are already filled in, ignore this and carry on.
Fields — replace these five lines only
- The scene — who, and what they are doing: {a person, and an action}
- The place, and three or four things in it: {where, and what is there}
- The palette: {four or five flat colours}
- What the drawer cared about most, drawn far too large: {one or two things}
- The ground: {one flat colour behind everything}
Why this needs rules and not adjectives
"Naive", "awkward", "low completion", "unskilled" are descriptions of a result. Asked for directly they produce a competent drawing with a slight wobble on it, because competence is the default and a mood word does not disturb it.
A reference run of this style was told its fills may be uneven, may run outside the outline, may cover imprecisely. It came back with every colour region stopping exactly at its outline — a clean, correct, well-built cartoon. Not one of the permissions was taken, because a permission is not an instruction.
So below, each way of being bad is a thing to do, with a number on it.
The fill law
Fill first, outline after, and miss.
- At least three places where a colour crosses its outline and sits on the ground beyond it.
- At least three places where the fill stops short and leaves the ground showing inside the outline.
- These are in different objects, not all in one.
- Where two colours meet without an outline between them, they overlap or leave a gap.
Everything else is flat and even. This is not painting — there is no brush texture, no shading, no gradient, no highlight.
The pairs law
Nothing is mirrored. Every paired thing is drawn one at a time, so the second one comes out different:
- the two eyes at different heights, and one larger
- one shoe bigger than the other
- one hand with four fingers, one with five
- two cupboard doors of different widths
Never copy a shape and flip it.
The stroke law
One stroke per line, and it stands. Nothing is redrawn, cleaned up or closed afterwards.
- Contours wobble and change direction slightly.
- Corners overshoot — the two lines cross and stick out past each other.
- Straight things are not straight: a table edge sags, a box leans.
- The outline is one weight everywhere, thick and black, on every object equally.
The scale law
What the drawer cared about is drawn far too large. The field names it, and it comes out at a size the picture cannot really support — an egg nearly the size of a head, a hand bigger than a face.
Heads and hands are generally too big. Everything else is a little too small.
Depth
There is almost none. Objects sit side by side rather than in front of each other. Overlap is avoided, and where it cannot be, the nearer thing is simply drawn on top with no shadow and no contact.
Perspective is attempted and does not work: a room corner at the wrong angle, a floor line that does not meet the wall.
Never
- ✕ fills that stop exactly at their outlines
- ✕ any mirrored or duplicated shape
- ✕ shading, gradients, highlights, texture or shadow
- ✕ line weight varying to describe form
- ✕ a correctly drawn hand
- ✕ clean corners, closed shapes, tidied contours
- ✕ working perspective or a convincing sense of depth
- ✕ anything so distorted the scene stops being readable
The result
Something that looks like a real person sat down and tried hard: the scene entirely legible, the effort visible everywhere, and the colours not quite where the lines are.
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
- A Shape You Can NameA flat illustration held inside one big silhouette, with the scene breaking out through its edge — where the shape has to mean something and the crossings have to be real crossings. Six fields.
- Every Path ArrivesA full-bleed storybook world you can actually travel through — every route joining two named places, and three sizes of thing so the eye lands before it wanders. Five fields.
- Filled to the OutlineA book cover where a figure in profile is filled entirely with a landscape — governed by the one thing that keeps it a figure rather than a stain. Six fields.