Single lines
9 samplesOne straight stroke per crayon color. Every later stage builds on this mark.
- Paper texture shows through the stroke as white speckle.
- The edges are ragged, not smooth.
- A little extra wax collects where the stroke starts and stops.
Same-color buildup
4 samplesThe same crayon drawn back over its own stroke. Each pass adds wax, so the overlap gets darker and more solid.
- Two passes read clearly darker than one.
- Heavy pressure fills the paper grain; light pressure leaves it open.
- The change is gradual, not a hard step.
Color mixing
4 samplesOne color drawn across another. Where the strokes cross, the two waxes mix. Away from the crossing, each color stays itself.
- Red over blue turns purplish, blue over yellow turns green, red over yellow turns orange-red.
- The top color does not fully hide the color underneath.
- Mixing is confined to the overlap.
Scribbles
8 samplesThe marks a two-year-old actually makes: back-and-forth fills, round-and-round scribbles, zigzags, hatching, loops, spirals, dots, and tangles.
- Fast changes of direction keep the same grainy edge.
- Where a scribble crosses itself, the buildup rules from stage 2 apply.
- Short stabs leave small dense blobs, not thin lines.
Fills and swatches
4 samplesWhole areas colored in at light and heavy pressure, plus blended gradients.
- A heavy fill is still grainy, never a flat solid color.
- A light fill is mostly paper, with color caught on the high points.
- Pressure and color change smoothly across a gradient.
Close-ups
2 samplesExtreme close-ups of the wax on the paper grain, to show how the texture is made.
- Thick wax sits on the raised bumps of the paper; the pits between them stay bare.
- Faint streaks run along the direction of the stroke.
- Where the wax is thin it turns translucent instead of disappearing.
How the images were made
Every sample came from the gemini-3.1-flash-image model. One shared prompt describes the paper, the wax texture, and the framing; each sample adds a single sentence describing its mark. Open a sample to read that sentence. The raw output was downsized to 1024 px wide WebP files, which are the images on this page.
Shared prompt
Top-down flat scan of a real children's wax crayon mark on off-white lightly textured drawing paper. Authentic waxy crayon look: grainy broken coverage, the paper tooth showing through as tiny white speckles, slightly uneven pressure so the mark is darker in some spots and lighter at the edges, small waxy buildup at the ends of strokes. Only the crayon mark is visible — no crayon, no hand, no shadow, plain paper background, soft even lighting, no photographic vignette. Centered with generous white margin around the mark.