Help & FAQ

🚀 Quick start

Three steps from idea to a page on the fridge.

1. Make a free account. Tap Sign up free, enter an email and password, then click the verification link we email you. You need an account to create pages — it's what keeps your pages saved and your credits counted.
2. Type what you want in the box on the Create tab — “dinosaur astronaut”, “princess and her corgi” — pick how many pages and which age range, and press Create.
3. Print it. Every finished page has a 🖨️ print button and a ⬇️ save button. That's it.

🖍️ Make a coloring page from a prompt

The Create tab on the home page.

Writing a good prompt

Describe the subject in plain words. Short and concrete beats long and flowery — “race cars at a birthday party” works better than a paragraph. Prompts are capped at 300 characters. If you're stuck, tap one of the example chips under the box.

Pages

Choose 1 to 10 pages. Each page is a separate drawing of the same idea, so you get variations rather than duplicates.

Style

Same idea, new drawing

Every finished page has a ↻ button — “Same idea, new drawing.” It re-rolls that one page with the same prompt. It costs 1 credit, the same as making a new page.

What happens to the page you made

Pages made from a text prompt are public. They're saved to your account under My Pages and also added to the shared gallery, where anyone can print them for free. That's how the gallery keeps growing. Pages made from your photos are private — see the next section.

📷 Turn a photo into a coloring page

Two places to do it: the “📷 Turn a photo into a coloring page” button on the Create tab, or the same panel inside the designer.

How to use it

1. Choose a photo. JPEG, PNG, or WebP, up to 25 MB.
2. Pick a Subject — Person / portrait, Pet, Object, or Whole scene. This tells the drawing what to keep and what to throw away.
3. Pick a Style — Simple (ages 2–5), Medium (ages 6–9), or Detailed (older kids & adults).
4. Pick a Background — Remove it, Simplify it, or Keep it. Remove is usually the best choice for a portrait; Keep is for a scene where the setting matters.
5. Press Make my coloring page and confirm. It costs 1 credit.

Privacy — read this one

• Your photo is shrunk in your own browser before it ever leaves your device (longest edge 1024 px).
• The original photo is never saved to our storage. It's used once to make the drawing, then it's gone.
• The finished coloring page is stored in a private area locked to your account. It is not added to the public gallery, the sitemap, or search results, and no other signed-in user can reach it.
• You see it under My Pages through short-lived private links.
• Deleting your account permanently deletes these files and their records.

Getting a good result

• Good light and a clear subject beat a high megapixel count.
• One or two faces converts far better than a crowd.
• Busy backgrounds turn into visual noise — use Remove or Simplify.
• Blurry, very dark, or heavily filtered photos give mushy line art.

🧒 Kid Mode & the Studio

Hand a child the tablet without handing them your account.

What it is

Kid Mode gives each child their own sign-in on a shared tablet. They can make new pages and colour them in on screen. They cannot reach your billing, upload photos, make booklets, browse the public gallery, change your account, or leave Kid Mode — leaving needs your password, typed by you.

Setting it up (about two minutes)

1. Sign in on the tablet you want the kids to use, then open the Profile tab in the top bar (it may ask for your security PIN). Kid mode is a section on that page.
2. Add a child — a name, a username, a secret word they'll type, and an emoji they'll recognise. Up to three children.
3. Tap Set up this tablet for my kids. The tablet remembers your family so the sign-in screen shows your children's faces. It does not stay signed in as you.
4. Hand it over. Your child taps their face and types their own secret word.

Your controls

🎨 The Studio — colouring on the tablet

Tap Colour it on a finished page, or any page in the gallery, to open the Studio.

• Marker — a clean line. With an Apple Pencil it gets thicker the harder you press.
• Crayon — waxy and grainy, and it broadens when you tilt the pencil, like a real one on its side.
• 🪣 Fill — tap inside any shape to flood it with colour. It stops at the outlines, including the faint ones.
• 🧽 Erase — removes colour only. The drawing underneath can't be damaged.
• ↩️ Undo — steps back through the last few actions.

Colour always goes under the black lines, so going over an outline never smudges the picture. When they're done, 🖨️ prints the coloured version.

It saves itself. Nobody has to press anything — a moment after each stroke the colouring is stored, and the header says Saved ✓. Close the app, hand the tablet over, come back tomorrow: reopen the same page and the colouring is exactly where they left it. Each child gets their own copy of every page, so two siblings can colour the same unicorn completely differently and neither one overwrites the other.

🎨 Colouring on the grown-up side too

The Studio isn't only for Kid Mode. There's a 🎨 Studio tab in the menu at the top of the site — open it and pick what to colour from your pages, your favorites, the gallery, or whatever's saved on the device. Every page card also has a 🎨 Colour it in button if you're already looking at the one you want. Same tools, same autosave, and it works with a mouse, a finger or a pencil. Signed in, your colouring is kept and picks up where you left off; signed out you can still colour, but nothing is stored.

✈️ Colouring with no wifi

Cars, planes, waiting rooms. Pages kept on the device open and colour with no connection at all, and anything coloured offline uploads itself the moment there's wifi again — nobody has to press sync, or even open the app.

• It fills itself. Any page you open in the Studio is kept on that device automatically. Ordinary use is the preparation.
• Or fill it on purpose. In the Studio picker, ⬇️ Fill this device grabs a stack in one tap — your pages first, then your favorites, then the gallery. Do it the night before, not at the airport. You can also ⬇️ Save any single page.
• On the tablet, Kid Mode has ✈️ Pages on this tablet on the home screen, and a keep these for the road button on the gallery.
• Offline it says so. Anything that needs a connection is hidden rather than left there to fail, and the Studio says Saved here ✓ instead of Saved ✓ so you know it's on the device and not yet in your account.

About 40 pages are kept per device, oldest replaced first — except pages holding a colouring that hasn't uploaded yet, which are never dropped. Your own private photo pages are never put on a device that a child signs in to.

An iPad setting worth knowing

• Turn off Scribble if you're using an Apple Pencil: Settings → Apple Pencil → Scribble, off. Scribble tries to turn pen strokes into text and can swallow them mid-drawing.

Put it on the home screen

In Safari, tap the Share button, then Add to Home Screen. Crayon Wish then opens full screen like a real app, with no address bar for a child to type in. Chrome on iPhone and iPad can't do this — it has to be Safari. On Android, use your browser's menu and choose Install app.

👨‍👩‍👧 Profile, Kids' work & the security PIN

The grown-ups' page, the kids' gallery, and the one code that guards the house.

The Profile page

The Profile tab in the top bar is the grown-ups' page: your plan and billing, the email and password you sign in with, kid mode — adding children, their daily limits, their secret words — the security PIN itself, and deleting your account. It sits behind the security PIN, so a child holding the tablet can't wander into any of it.

Kids' work

The Kids' work tab collects everything your children have made — every page, every colouring, every free drawing — with a tab per child, newest first. Tap any card to see it big, then 🖨️ Print or ⬇️ Save the finished picture exactly as they coloured it. Select lets you print a stack or start pages over in bulk.

• What you see is the finished sheet. Each card is the coloured picture itself, ready to print — no missing colours, no waiting.
• 🧽 Start over wipes the colour off a page but keeps the page, ready to colour again. Deleting is only for free drawings.
• Asked for — if a child typed a request that was refused by safety screening, it shows up here so you know what was asked. Kids are never told more than "let's try a different idea."

The security PIN

One PIN per account — the same code everywhere: it opens the Profile page, it's what a grown-up types when a child wants to print, and in the app it's what lets anyone leave kid mode. Set it or change it on the Profile page (4–8 digits). Forgot it? The Profile lock accepts your account password instead, so a forgotten PIN is never a lock-out.

📚 Booklets

Ready-made printable booklets — pick one, print it, done.

The Booklets tab holds two shelves, and neither costs a credit:

• Holiday booklets — a 24-page colouring booklet for each of 29 holidays and celebrations: Hanukkah, Christmas, Ramadan, Diwali, Día de los Muertos, Lunar New Year and many more. Every page has been reviewed by a human before it reached the shelf.
• Learning booklets — alphabet and numbers-and-math practice booklets, available in English, Hebrew, Russian, and Spanish.

Tap a booklet, let the pages load, and hit print — you get one clean PDF-style print run, one page per sheet. The print button waits for every page to finish loading first, so you never pay printer ink for a blank sheet.

🖨️ Printing, PDF & print packs

Every page card carries the same row of buttons.

Print packs

Add pages from anywhere on the site and a bar appears at the bottom with a running count. A pack holds up to 24 pages; fill one, save or print it, then start another. From the bar you can:

• 📄 Save PDF — download the whole pack as one PDF, one page per sheet, US Letter with a quarter-inch margin. Good for printing later, printing at a copy shop, or emailing to grandma.
• 🖨️ Print pack — print the whole batch in one job, one page per sheet. Perfect for a party or a classroom set.
• Design banner — send the batch (up to 12 pages) into the designer to lay them out on one big sheet.
• Clear — empty the pack.

Want a single page as a PDF? Add just that one page to the pack and hit Save PDF. Like printing and saving, PDF export needs a free account.

Printing tips

• In your printer dialog choose Fit to page and turn background graphics off — you'll save ink and get truer white.
• Plain copy paper is fine for crayon; use 24 lb or cardstock for markers so they don't bleed through.
• Grayscale / black-and-white mode prints these faster and uses no color ink.

🎨 Print & Banner Designer

At crayonwish.com/editor.html, or via the ✏️ button on any page. Everything here is free except AI generative extension and photo conversion, which cost 1 credit each.

Quick template

One click sets the size, layout, and a headline for a common job: Birthday coloring table (30×72 in), Classroom mural (36×72 in), Restaurant kids' table (24×72 in), Wedding kids' activity (30×72 in). Change anything afterwards.

Finished size

• Presets: US Letter (8.5×11 in), A4 (210×297 mm), Tabloid (11×17 in), Posters (18×24, 24×36 in), Table banners (24×72, 30×72, 36×72 in).
• Custom size: type any width and height in inches, centimetres, or pixels, up to 240 units per side.
• ↻ Rotate swaps width and height — the fastest way to go landscape.

Layout

Artwork

• ＋ Add coloring page — add pages from your device. Up to 12 on one design; they're arranged in a grid automatically.
• Spacing — the white gutter between pages and around the edge.
• Line thickness — Original, Bold, or Extra bold. Bump it up for toddlers or for big banners viewed from across a room.
• Clear — remove all artwork and start over.

Personalize

• Add text — up to 100 characters per line, centred at the top with a white outline so it stays readable over line art. Add several lines and they stack.
• Upload logo — drops an image in the bottom-right corner at 20% of the canvas width. Built for restaurants, schools, and event planners. Remove takes it back off.

AI generative extension — 1 credit

Use this when Fit whole image leaves too much white space on a wide banner. The AI redraws the canvas to continue the scene outward instead of leaving blank margins. You can optionally type a hint — “flowers, clouds, party decorations” — up to 220 characters. You'll be asked to confirm before the credit is used.

Output

• Quality — 150 DPI (draft or huge banner), 200 DPI (good), 300 DPI (print quality, the default). Bigger banners can safely use a lower DPI because nobody views them from six inches away.
• Bleed — extra artwork past the trim edge, in inches. Only needed if a professional printer asks for it. Leave at 0 for home printing.
• Safe — the red dashed guide showing where a trimmer might cut. Keep text and faces inside it. It's preview-only and never prints.
• Download PNG — a full-resolution file with exact print dimensions.
• Print / PDF — prints at the true finished size, or use your system's “Save as PDF” to hand a print shop a file.
• Tile across home-printer pages — slices a giant banner into US Letter sheets you print, trim, and tape together. This is how you get a 6-foot banner out of a desk printer.
• Save design / Load saved — remembers your size, layout, spacing, and text on this device, in this browser. It isn't synced to your account and won't follow you to your phone.

🖼️ Gallery & categories

Thousands of pages other people made, free to browse. Printing or saving one needs a free account — no credits are spent and there is no limit.

• Gallery tab — search by keyword and filter by difficulty (All ages, Easy ages 2–5, Detailed ages 6+). Load more pulls the next batch.
• Categories — browse by theme and by holiday instead of searching.
• While you're typing a new prompt, matching gallery pages appear underneath — “Already in the gallery — print these free.” Check there first and save your credits.
• Everything in the gallery can be printed, saved, added to a print pack, favorited, or opened in the designer.

📁 My Pages & favorites

• My pages — every page you've created, newest first, including your private photo conversions. They stay there; you can reprint any of them forever, and reprinting is always free.
• ⭐ Favorites — anything you starred anywhere on the site, yours or someone else's. Favoriting is free and doesn't use a credit.

👤 Your account

Creating one

Tap Sign up free, enter an email and a password of at least 6 characters, then check your email and click the verification link before signing in. Accounts are for adults — you must be 18 or older (or the age of majority where you live).

Forgot your password

Open the sign-in box, type your email address in the email field first, then click Forgot password? underneath. We'll email you a link to set a new one.

The two buttons in the top bar

• Your plan chip (e.g. 3/10 free or ✨ Pro · 12/200) shows what you've used. Clicking it is a shortcut: on a paid plan it jumps straight to the Stripe billing portal, on the free plan it opens the plan picker.
• Your email address opens the full Your account panel.

Inside Your account

• Your plan and how many pages you've used.
• Manage billing — the Stripe billing portal: update your card, switch between Starter and Pro, or cancel.
• See plans if you're on the free plan.
• Change password and update your email address.
• Sign out.

Deleting your account

Delete my account is in the same panel. You'll be asked to type DELETE to confirm. It permanently deletes your account, cancels any subscription, and purges your private photo pages and their files. It can't be undone.

💳 Plans & credits

What uses a credit

• Each coloring page generated from a prompt — 1 credit per page.
• Regenerating a page (same idea, new drawing) — 1 credit.
• Turning a photo into a coloring page — 1 credit.
• AI generative extension in the designer — 1 credit.

What's always free

• Printing, saving, PDF export, and reprinting anything — yours or from the gallery.
• Browsing, searching, favoriting, and print packs.
• The entire designer: resizing, banners, tiling, text, logos, line thickness, PNG and PDF export, tiled printing.

Limits and renewals

• Paid allowances reset with your billing cycle, and unused pages don't roll over.
• There's also a 60-generation daily ceiling on every account. It's an anti-abuse guard, not a plan feature — normal use never reaches it.
• Plans renew automatically every month until you cancel. Cancel any time from Manage billing; you keep the plan through the period you already paid for, then drop back to free.
• If generation fails, your credit is returned automatically. You are never charged for a page you didn't get.

Full billing terms are in the Terms.

🛡️ Safety & reporting

• Every prompt is screened before anything is drawn. Prompts that aren't kid-friendly are refused.
• Every uploaded photo is screened before conversion, and screening fails closed — if it can't run, nothing is drawn.
• Any visitor can flag a public gallery image with the 🚩 button. Two reports automatically hide a page from the public gallery pending review.
• Photo conversions are private and never appear in the gallery, so they're never surfaced to strangers in the first place.

Automated screening isn't perfect. If something slips through, report it — that's what the flag is for. See our Privacy Policy for how data is handled.

🔧 Troubleshooting

❓ Frequently asked questions

✉️ Still stuck?

Email roman@ctfdesigns.com. A real person reads it. If it's about a specific page, mention what you typed and roughly when — it makes it much faster to find.

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