Looking for fun ways to work with AI and illustration that was friendly for children.

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Day 3, I revisited the illustration theme and worked from the simple idea: of letting my daughter scribble a character on my phone, hand it to AI, and get back something they can actually use and potentially animate with. The result is a three-step tool; draw, vectorise and animate.

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The drawing canvas ended up more capable than originally planned. Alongside freehand pen drawing there are six shape tools (rect, circle, triangle, line, plus erase) with filled and outline modes, a colour picker, three brush sizes, and undo. When you hit Vectorize, the canvas snapshot gets posted to a Make.com webhook as a base64 PNG, Make then calls Gemini 2.5 Flash, and the SVG comes back to the browser as plain text. No API keys on the frontend.

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Getting the Make scenario working took a few iterations and a lot of working out with Claude. The Gemini REST API is strict about snake_case field names — inline_data and mime_type, not camelCase, which took a trip to the execution logs to spot. The model itself needed swapping from gemini-2.0-flash (deprecated) to gemini-2.5-flash, and maxOutputTokens had to go up to 8192 to stop the SVG being cut off mid-tag. The webhook response ended up returning raw plain text rather than JSON, which sidesteps the escaping nightmare that comes with embedding SVG inside a JSON string.

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Back to the fun stuff. Once the SVG is back, you can edit the source directly, regenerate, or push it straight through to the animation stage. Eight CSS animations — bounce, walk, float, shake, pulse, spin, tada, jello. With a speed slider and a forced reflow fix to stop animations sticking when you switch between them. The export generates self-contained embed code you can drop anywhere.

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If I was to revisit this I would probably remove the quick ideas part on the sketch section as this isn't used that much from what i can see and possibly even remove the animation part also. The real joy is seeing how Gemini interprets the random abstract shapes and scribbles.

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Have a scribble here and see how Gemini interprets your idea.

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