Turn Your Drawings Into Detailed Monsters With the Google Chimera Painter Web App
I spend a lot of my free time drawing and many of my drawings involve monsters. It’s a fun hobby and comes in handy when it’s my DM’s turn to play a board RPG . However, I know that there are many people who would like to bring the creatures lurking in their imagination to life, but they do not like to draw. If that sounds like you, check out the Google Chimera Painter web app , which uses AI to “paint” detailed monsters from simple color drawings.
Compared to any other painting tool, it’s very simple: it offers five brush sizes, an eraser tool, and a Clear button that erases the entire selected drawing. You can temporarily save up to four drawings while the app is open, but you can save your creations at any time. You can also download images for use as reference materials.
As for drawing your monsters, you’ll start by assigning a color to each body part using the menu on the left. For example, light red for the monster’s head, green for its neck, beige for its tail, and so on. When you’re ready to render your drawing, click Transform. The app uses machine learning to apply textures, colors and lighting to a color drawing based on the hues you choose.
Chimera Painter works in almost all browsers and all you need to use it is a mouse or finger, although it also supports external drawing devices such as Wacom tablets. This is good news for me because as you can see from the screenshots in this post, I am not used to drawing with anything other than a pen or pencil.
Unfortunately I had no luck using it on an iPad. The page loaded on my iPad Pro and I could draw with the connected Apple Pencil, but the monster didn’t show up in Chrome or Safari, and the Convert button was always greyed out. Conversely, everything loaded fine on the desktop and on my Android phone.
I admit that it took me a while to get used to letting artificial intelligence draw for me – especially since I’m used to displaying all these inconvenient details myself – but the end results were still interesting to observe. They look a little odd, but convincing enough that people not so confident in their artistic skills can create formidable monsters.
However, I would be doing my fine arts a disservice if I didn’t say it’s not a shortcut to truly learning to draw. It’s nice when the AI does some of the hard part for you , but you’ll get better results (and find more satisfaction) if you do the work of rendering them yourself. The good news is that there are many free resources out there to help you develop your artistic skills quickly.