Many of my first maps were drawn with crayon. And perusing the Children’s Map Exhibit at the International Cartographic Conference every two years, others continue to follow suit.

So I thought for Crayon Day, I would skip the interactive map trend and just ask Google Gemini Image Creator to create a crayon map as might be drawn by an 11 or 12 year-old, Generation Alpha kid today, highlighting all the chaos and conflict in the world. A pre-teen angst map, of sorts.

I guided it a bit in my prompt for sure, but what it came up with seemed alright. Though, I might put a grumpy face in the US too.

Happy Crayon Day!

P.S. It will be interesting to see which kids figure out how to use AI to produce amazing maps of the world for the next ICC Children’s Map Contest (Poland 2027).

I suspect we’ll see some truly amazing children’s maps… and if they prompted them into creation… I say it’s still art. But I doubt everyone will agree with me. 😉 We certainly live in interesting times!

Prompt Used in Google Gemini Image Creator

Tomorrow is Crayon Day. Please draw a map of the world in Crayola-style crayon texture and colors that looks like it was drawn by a precocious and semi-talented sixth-grader. The crayon map of the world must be drawn entirely in crayon and should highlight major countries (no names included) as well as have added pictographs (again, drawn in crayon) of tense and stressful world events and conflicts, including everything from melting icecaps, to global warming, to overfishing, to arms buildups between NATO and Russia, war in Ukraine, Iran, West Bank, Israel, Venezuela, conflicts and tensions in the South China Sea, Taiwan, between the Koreas, authoritarian leaders, an oil ship trying to reach Cuba, US aircraft carriers in the Indians Ocean, an American flag unsuccessfully trying to be planted in Greenland, and any other things you can think of around the world to fill in simple pictographs about stressful, tense situations where there are blank spaces.