Our theme at the toddlers group today was tents and tabernacles. For a craft activity, I wanted to do some paper folding to create something like an A frame tent with scenes on the inside and outside reflecting relevant activities. That would give the children a chance to do some colouring but also to add some folding and construction skills for the older ones. The only problem is that this would mean four sets of images to draw (two for the outside top faces and two for the inside ones that could be exposed by opening it up or looking inside) which means quite a lot of time drawing.

That’s when my thought turned to some of the free AI image generation tools available online. Could I get suitable and unique images which I could make use of by asking a computer? It turns out I could. The image above is one of several I prompted stablediffusionweb.com to produce for me. Not every attempt was successful but a few minutes yielded four images that did the job. I still had to make some adjustments, like cropping this one and removing the colour from the fire, and it shows some typical “glitches” (eg. look at some of the hands and faces or how horizon lines don’t always sensibly continue past objects) but it was a quick solution for what will probably be a single use project.

It doesn’t mean that I’ll give up drawing by hand but I can certainly see the potential for applications like this.