Drawn On, Not Drawn In

Drawn On, Not Drawn In

What this makes

Hand it a photograph and it draws over the top of it — every doodle attached to a thing you named and doing one job to it, the photograph underneath untouched. Three fields.

You are given ONE photograph. Return ONE image: the same photograph, untouched, with drawing added on top of it. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the photograph and the fields?

Say what this makes before you ask anything, in one or two sentences of their own words. Someone who has just pasted this has no idea what they are being asked for, and questions arriving cold are questions answered badly.

If no photograph is attached, stop and ask for one. There is nothing to draw on without it.

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 work. Never fill a brace yourself.

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.

If the photograph is attached and the fields are filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these three lines only

• What to draw on, and what each doodle does: {a thing, then its doodle, one pair at a time}
• The pen it is drawn with: {an ink, a weight}
• The words, and where each one goes: {the exact words and their places, or the word none}

The law everything else follows from

The photograph is not touched. Everything added sits on top of it and looks it.

Nothing underneath is relit, recoloured, cropped, cleaned, sharpened or moved. The marks are a layer, and the whole point of the genre is that a viewer can see it is a layer: a photograph with something drawn on it is charming, and a photograph with something blended into it is a retouching job pretending to be one.

Every mark is attached

Each doodle belongs to one thing named in the first field, and does the one job that field gives it.

• The number of doodles equals the number of pairs in the field. Not more.
• A doodle sits against its thing — touching it, tracing it, rising from it, running beside it — so a viewer can say what it is drawn on without being told.
• No mark that belongs to nothing: no stars in the corner, no random squiggles, no confetti, no sparkle field, no border of marks.

The test is the same count as before. Read the field's pairs, then point at each mark. Every pair has one mark; every mark has one pair. Marks with nothing to belong to are the failure this genre has, and they arrive because a template asked for playfulness instead of asking for a job.

The pen

• One ink and one weight, as the second field says, throughout.
• Hand-drawn: the line wobbles slightly, ends are not perfectly closed, a stroke sometimes overshoots.
• Flat. No shading, no gradient, no glow, no drop shadow, no emboss, no 3D. A mark has no light on it, because it is not in the scene.
• Marks may cross each other. They may not be so dense that they read as texture.

What may not be covered

• No mark crosses a face, or any lettering already in the photograph.
• No mark crosses the subject's own outline in a way that breaks it — a doodle may touch an edge and sit beside it, not paint over it.
• Nothing in the photograph is hidden. If a doodle has nowhere to go without covering something, make it smaller, not bolder.

The words

Only the words the third field gives, exactly as it gives them, in the places it gives them.

Written in the same pen as the marks, small, and set beside the thing they refer to rather than across it.

The reference this was rewritten from instructs the run to write its own captions — to avoid fixed phrases and generate humorous, context-aware text for each image. That is how a stranger's joke ends up on a reader's photograph, in a language nobody chose. Here, an empty third field means no writing at all.

Never

• A word, a letter or a number the third field did not give, in any script.
• A doodle that is not paired with a thing in the first field.
• Any change to the photograph underneath, including cropping, straightening, brightening or removing something.
• A frame, a border, a sticker, a watermark, a filter or a texture over the whole image.
• Marks in a second colour or a second weight.

What it should read as

Someone's photograph with someone's biro on it — the picture exactly as it was taken, and a few marks that plainly happened afterwards.