Splat, a kid-oriented creativity app that applies generative AI to turn photos of yours into coloring pages you can either print or color onscreen, aims to make at-home time with art more personal, less cluttered and more efficient for diving in.
The idea is simple: Families snap a photo of a pet, a beloved toy or a weekend outing and Splat turns it into clean line art for kids to color. It’s a new take on an old favorite at a time when parents want more hands-on options for passive screen time.
- How Splat turns family photos into coloring pages
- Pricing, subscriptions, and parental access controls
- What makes custom coloring pages engaging for kids
- Privacy and safety questions for a kid-focused photo app
- Where Splat fits within today’s kids’ creative AI landscape
- Availability on iOS and Android, and getting started
How Splat turns family photos into coloring pages
Starting is meant to be a no-brainer. You’re able to take a new photo or select one from the Camera Roll, then pick a visual style — anime, manga, cartoon, comic book or 3D movie — for it. Within moments, you have a high-contrast outline to color with crayons, felt-tip pens or your finger.
Under the hood, these experiences rely on methods employed by contemporary generative imaging approaches, including edge detection, segmentation and style-guided diffusion. In practice, that’s the software finding the subject and maintaining recognizable details (a dog’s ears, a child’s bike), while removing visual noise that would muddy the grounds of a coloring page. The result is a clean edge that has enough structure to direct budding artists while not stifling them.
Parents can also avoid browsing their personal photos and opt for kid-friendly categories such as animals, space, flowers, fairy tales, robots and cars. For families on the move, Splat offers the option to draw right on the screen. Pages are sized for fast printing, and they’re smudge-free!
Pricing, subscriptions, and parental access controls
Splat includes one AI project for free to try before subscribing. Afterward, it’s $4.99 a week for up to 25 pages or $49.99 per year for unlimited usage of up to 500 pages. A basic parent gate (just type in a birth year) guards against curious kids’ probing little fingers in any settings and purchase options.
Instead of a drawn-out account setup process, Splat guides adults through a brief, one-time customization flow for first-timers: select an app icon, choose your child’s favorite interests and decide where coloring takes place — on screen (and in-app) or on printouts. The goal is to reach the first page as quickly as possible.
What makes custom coloring pages engaging for kids
Personal relevance is a huge lever of engagement. According to research summarized by the American Psychological Association, self-referential content can boost attention and memory — something parents may casually understand (kids perk up at coloring their own cat instead of an average drawing), but that is also backed by lots of scientific heft.
There’s a balance story here as well. Tweens and teens in the United States are now spending even more time using entertainment media, according to a 2023 census released by Common Sense Media. Tools that take children’s screen time and make it tactile, creative play could help families prioritize active, open-ended activities over passive consumption.
Privacy and safety questions for a kid-focused photo app
A kid-targeted app that deals with photos does raise fair questions about how it handles data. Best practices identified by both the Future of Privacy Forum and the children’s online privacy law, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, include a ‘do not collect more data than necessary’ mandate, giving users a clear way to pull that data back out of the service’s hands, and not sharing if sharing can be avoided. Families might look for clear policies on whether image processing takes place on-device or in the cloud, and how long images are retained.
The American Academy of Pediatrics urges parents to co-play and talk their way through digital content with kids, transforming tech into a tool for discussion and imagination. With Splat, that might include telling a story to accompany the photo, deciding on a style together and organizing time to color it as an activity you both do.
Where Splat fits within today’s kids’ creative AI landscape
Splat adds to a small but growing number of AI tools created for the purpose of inspiring creativity in younger users. Stickerbox has been exploring AI-generated stickers intended for coloring, while Casio’s Moflin robot shows off cuddly adaptive behavior. Beyond the hardware, AI-assisted drawing tools like Google’s AutoDraw reveal how machine learning can scaffold creative expression without removing the joy of making.
What the efforts have in common is agency: using AI to expand, rather than replace, what kids can make. Splat’s emphasis on simple inputs and physical outputs fits right in with that ethos, providing a way to literally pull a child’s world — pets, playgrounds, birthday cakes — onto the page.
Availability on iOS and Android, and getting started
Splat is accessible on iOS and Android. For families that already depend on their phone’s camera as a memory log, turning those moments into coloring pages might be the smoothest bridge yet between generative AI and real-world creativity.
