With Dan Macnish’s “Draw This” you can create an instant print ‘camera’ that generates cartoons of the world around you. The sketches are created using a TensorFlow detection model trained on the Google Quick Draw data set.

One of the fun things about this re-imagined camera is that you never get to see the original image. You point, and shoot – and out pops a cartoon; the camera’s best interpretation of what it saw. The result is always a surprise. A food selfie of a healthy salad might turn into a enormous hotdog, or a photo with friends might be photobombed by a goat.

“Draw This” was originally posted in 2018 with a for web version popping up on Kapwing soon after. The web version creates sketches out of images uploaded to Kapwing’s website. Cartoonify seems to do fairly well with people but definitely takes some artistic license with buildings and landscapes. In the example below, you can see a ruin depicted as a cartoon truck! If you’d like to create your own “Draw This” camera, take a look at Dan Macnish’s blog post or Cartoonify on GitHub.