Color a bus, then watch it save the day

Outreach to kids usually means a coloring sheet and a sticker. I wanted the coloring sheet to go somewhere.

Step one is paper

It starts with a printable page, regular letter size. It shows a bus from the side and from the front, with blanks for the artist's name, the bus's name and its route. Kids color it however they like.

Step two is the story

We scan the page and load it into a small web app, which is a single file like most of what I build. The kid's bus, exactly as they colored it, becomes the hero of a story. It travels five routes, and each route has a problem that the bus solves once the kid answers a trivia question.

The kid can also take a selfie, and the app turns it into a comic-book version of their face so they appear in the story next to their bus.

At the end it prints a certificate naming them an Honorary Transit Hero.

The filter took the longest

The comic filter was the stubborn part. My first try found the outlines and flattened the colors in a single pass, and real photos came out blotchy. The fix was to split the work in two. The outlines come from the sharp original photo, which keeps eyes and glasses crisp. The colors come from a gently blurred copy, which calms down skin tones before they're flattened to a few shades.

One rule I never bent: the kid's bus artwork is never filtered. It's cropped and nothing else. Their art appears exactly as they made it.

Why it's worth doing

A kid who has named a bus and watched it save the day looks at the real ones differently. So do their parents.