The team behind the close-friends photo-sharing app Retro, has built a side project called Splat that turns your photos into AI coloring pages for kids. Start with a new shot or something from your Camera Roll, pick a visual style, then generate a clean line-art page your child can color on-screen or print.
Parents can already find endless printable pages online, but the hunt is often the annoying part. Many sites are ad-heavy, cluttered, or push small fees when you just want a quick sheet for a bored kid.
Splat’s workflow is built around quick choices. Pick a photo, choose a style such as anime, manga, cartoon, comic, or a 3D movie look, and the app converts it into a coloring-sheet outline.
If you don’t have the right image handy, Splat also offers its own kid-friendly categories, including animals, space, flowers, fairy tales, robots, and cars. In brief tests, generation was fast, which keeps the idea-to-print gap short.
Splat keeps onboarding light. The first time you create, the app asks you to choose an icon and select categories your child likes. You can generate one page for free, then it costs $4.99 per week for up to 25 pages or $49.99 per year for up to 500 pages. Settings and purchases sit behind a birth-year gate meant to stop kids from tapping through. If you’re worried your kid is creative enough to go around these security gates, check out the best parental control apps out now.
It’s part of a kid-friendly AI wave
Splat fits into a growing category of tools that use AI to kick off physical, low-stakes creativity. The goal is something that ends up off-screen, as paper your kid can color, cut out, or turn into a craft project. But if you prefer to keep it green, the best tablets can do the job perfectly.
That same direction is showing up in other kid-facing AI products. Miko 3 packages an AI companion into a friendly robot. Curio’s Springer puts conversational AI into a plush toy. Poe the AI Story Bear leans into storytelling, turning prompts into personalized tales. Different formats, a similar bet on AI as a spark for play.
What to watch next
Splat is competing with free printables that are a click away, even if the click path is messy, and subscriptions raise the bar for parents who only print occasionally.
Splat is available on iOS and Android. If you’re curious, the practical move is to use the free generation with a photo your kid already loves, then decide whether the weekly cap or annual cap matches how often you will actually make new pages.
