Turn any photo into a free coloring page in 20 seconds

July 11, 2026

By Kim Komando

Here’s the thing about summer with kids. You run out of ideas. Everybody’s bored out of their minds. I’ve been there.

So I tried something. I snapped a photo of our golden retrievers, fed it to AI, and 20 seconds later, I had a clean black-and-white coloring page. Printed it. Handed it over with a box of crayons. Total silence for an hour. (The good kind.)

🎨 This beats a store book

A $4 coloring book has some cartoon puppy nobody knows. This one has your dog. Your house. Grandma’s face. The birthday cake from last weekend. Kids color things they actually recognize, and that hits different. Try their own bedroom, the family car or a photo of them from the last vacation. 

That’s not a coloring book. It’s a keepsake with crayon marks.

It costs nothing, it takes two minutes and you’ll never run out of pages again. Snap a new photo, get a new page. Easy.

And adult coloring is a real thing now. Turning your own vacation photos into line art beats anything sitting on the store shelf.

🖍️ How to do it

Open ChatGPT or Gemini. Both have free versions, and both work fine for this.

1. Tap the image or paper clip icon, and upload any photo. A pet, a person, the house, a flower from the yard.
2. Paste this: 

Turn this photo into a clean black-and-white coloring book page. Simple bold outlines, no shading, no gray, easy for a child to color.

3. Wait about 20 seconds, then download the result.
4. Print it on regular paper. Grab the crayons.

That’s it. No app to buy, no sign-up trap, no watermark nonsense. Portraits, pets, cars, flowers from the garden, they all work great. That’s a win.

Look, I’m all for coloring books. But connect-the-dots? That’s where I draw the line.

📩 Send this to someone who is watching kids and desperate for ideas how to keep them busy.