Turn your child's story into a picture book

The pictures are painted by an AI image model. It paints beautifully, and it has four habits no children's book can live with.

• It cannot be trusted with words. Asked in testing to write a story into its picture, it wrote nething for nothing and harboer for harbour. A child sounding out a word that does not exist is learning nonsense.
• It forgets. Every picture is painted fresh. In early tests a girl's tunic changed colour on every page, and a brass lamp changed shape each time it appeared.
• It takes words literally. “Blue with cold” gave us blue children. A seedling that uncurled “like a small hand waving hello” grew a hand.
• It cannot count legs. One of our test books had a calf with five hooves. This is a known weakness: when researchers showed five leading AI models pictures of animals with one leg added, the models counted the legs correctly about twice in a hundred tries (Vo and colleagues, 2025).

Children count. A picture that disagrees with its words is the first thing they notice.

We took the habits one at a time, and kept a fix only once it had worked on real books.

• The story comes first. Every picture is planned from your child's words, retold plainly for the painter, so a figure of speech stays a figure of speech. Your child still reads the real words.
• The words are never painted. The painter leaves room, and the story is set in real type, as big as the page allows. Real type cannot misspell itself.
• The cast is drawn once. Before any page is painted, each book draws its characters from every side, the way animation studios do, and every page is painted from that drawing. The girl keeps her tunic.
• Every page is checked, hand by hand and hoof by hoof. The checker is an AI too, with the same blind spot, so we counted hands and hooves on our own test pages and measured the checks against our counts until we trusted them. A wrong page is mended or painted again.

Our short film shows it page by page: how a picture book is checked.

Books we are happy to hand a child. The words come out far bigger than on a story's single picture, and biggest at A1, the beginners' level on the CEFR scale teachers use, where size matters most. The characters on the last page look like the ones on the first. Whether pictures help a child learning English at all is a fair question; our guide looks at the evidence.

Our own books are in the picture-book gallery, at every level from A1 to B2, each read page by page before it went up. The calf is there too, mended, in The Sky-Calf in the Socks.

• Your first picture book is free, for life, and subscribers can make more.
• We email you when it is ready, so there is no need to wait on the page.
• Print it at home on A4 or US Letter; we don't print or post books. Screens are for practice, so at bedtime, read it printed.
• It is yours to share with family, friends or a class, but not to sell. We never publish the stories you make.

Already made a story? Open it in Stories I Made and the button is under it. To see one being made first, watch the short film.

Happy reading,
The StorySparkle team