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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I made a web app to bring children's drawings to life

Hey HN! I used to spend hours drawing all kind of things as a kid. Sadly though, those drawings are long gone. Inspired by this, I created DoodleDreams. A webapp that brings drawings to life using AI and stores them as memories. You can always look back at the drawings, see who made them, and even know the age they were drawn at. I thought it was a fun way to preserve those memories. What do you think? Viktor

DoodleDreams is a web app that transforms children's drawings into animated or enhanced images using AI while storing them as preserved memories. The app lets families revisit drawings along with metadata about who… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I made a web app to bring children's drawings to life launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

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    See animations created by me using Trangram: https://www.trangram.com/showcase I started working on Trangram 7 years ago with a simple idea: a free browser-based vector editor that combines illustration and animation in one place. The goal is to make creating vector graphics and animations as simple as opening a browser. There's nothing to install, no account required, and projects are saved automatically in your browser, so nothing is uploaded to a server. I use Trangram every day for my own illustrations (and occasionally animations). One of the most rewarding parts of…

    2024 · trangram.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2IW

    Two of my friends recently welcomed their first child and I "wrote" a kid's book for them using ChatGPT for the story and Midjourney for illustrations. The plot was sourced from a group of friends.

    2023 · adventure-of-penelope.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    AI feedback meets art - anyone can learn to draw

    2024 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    700+ handcrafted vector doodles and scribbles

    2023 · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Turn your sketches into art with AI magic

    2023 · sketchtoimage.com · its alternatives →

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    Hey HN, I want to share a personal project: I made a tiny pen-plotted book for my wife. I did everything myself—drawings (with some help from Midjourney), plotting, cutting, and binding. I even used a 3D printer to make a helper tool. It's absolutely over-engineered, but I enjoyed it a lot. Multi-disciplinary projects, especially those with a physical output, are a lot of fun for me. The post covers the process in detail, but if you're interested in anything specific, let me know. Cheers!

    2025 · muffinman.io · its alternatives →

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    Bring your kid's drawings to life with AI

    2024 · drawingsalive.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Around 3 weeks ago, I came across a reddit post from someone who was looking to see if anyone was interested in taking over a 12-14 year old objective c app which hadn't been on the app store for many years. I responded and decided to do it. The app is called Painteresque. It lets you turn photos to charcoal drawings, paintings etc while doing all the processing locally on device: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/painteresque-photo-to-sketch/i... The app is entirely free to use, has no ads, third party analytics, trackers, subscriptions or other junk. It does offer…

    2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

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    I'm enthralled with using pen plotters to make generative art. Last August at SIGGRAPH, I built an interactive experience for others to see how code can be used to make visual art. The linked blog post is my trials and tribulations of linking a MIDI controller to one of these algorithms and sending its output to a plotter, so that people may witness the end-to-end experience.

    2024 · lostpixels.io · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hi HN! The children in my family love to draw and are beginning to explore digital drawing tools, but they've been somewhat discouraged by the complexity of popular software like GIMP, Photoshop, etc. I was motivated to create a tool that encouraged their artistic creativity and also piqued their technical curiosity. With the release of SDXL-Turbo in late Nov 2023, it became feasible to perform text-guided image to image generation in real-time on a consumer grade GPU. Inspired by this progress and my little cousins' artwork, I put together a web app that integrates an interactive canvas &…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Transform drawings into photo-realistic art with AI

    2023 · doodlemorphai.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    Dibulo▲83

    Hi HN community! Proud to have recently become a founder myself and now to submit a "Show HN". We are Dibulo, a young startup which is on a mission to redefine coloring sessions for kids! We have built our first worlds, sold our first coloring books and now we want to let the world know about us :) So far we have been praised by parents, and also got pretty good feedback from institutions like daycares and elementary school teachers. What sets our coloring experience apart? Not only do we bring vibrant templates on paper to life on screens, but we also introduce a captivating group activity.…

    2023 · dibulo.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    I'm excited to share my indie product, https://drawing.pics In this post, I'll share all the technical details behind it. So, what exactly is DrawingPics? It's an image-to-image and sketch-to-image generator that runs in a whiteboard, allowing you to draw your draft directly on the canvas and easily generate the desired image. How does it work from a technical perspective? TLDR: Miniconda + Diffusers + Electron + Excalidraw One of the most important aspects of creating this tool was finding a stable diffusion locally inference solution. There are many solutions available, such as…

    2024 · drawing.pics · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    crAion▲144

    AI powered kid's drawings analysis, create a Cloud gallery

    2023 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Turn your sketch into a refined image using AI

    2023 · ubiworkshop.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Drawing,AI,3D games

    2023 · play.google.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    A free browser-based vector creator

    2014 · editor.method.ac · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    A growing resource of vector illustrations for designers

    2023 · figma.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    A simple drawing app using AI

    2022 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    A mesmerising spirograph-like web app

    2015 · wheelof.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Bring Children's Drawings to Life

    2024 · doodledreams.cc · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Turn your ideas into stunning pictures

    2023 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23
    RoundOf▲64

    If Doodle and Stripe had a child

    2020 · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hi HN! I made an app that takes a photo of a paper drawing and, in a handful of seconds, creates a fully rigged character that can be used in an animation or little story. It doesn’t use any image-to-video generative AI models. Instead, I built it using the years of insights I’ve picked up studying children’s drawings and character animation. Today we’re releasing a community beta. I respect this community and would value any feedback you offer. It’s easy to try- you don’t need to create an account to check it out. We’ve got several free stories to drop your character into, and a Mother’s…

    May 2026 · doodlemate.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →