Coloring World: Hand-Colored Drawings in a Living Projected Landscape

Client

Provo Art Stroll, self-initiated

Date

November 2025 · Provo, Utah

Role

Creative Technology · Interactive Development

Overview

For the November 2025 Provo Art Stroll, we created Coloring World: a hand-colored drawing station paired with a large-scale projected landscape, inspired by TeamLab’s collaborative Sketch installations. Visitors colored a billboard, flower, or butterfly however they wanted, scanned it at a button-press station, and immediately watched their artwork come to life in a shared, growing world. Over the course of the night, a few hundred drawings joined the scene.

Second wide angle of the clean rendered landscape, dense with flowers and butterflies and three billboards, from a different TouchDesigner movie-out render — The landscape late in the night, dense with hand-colored flowers, butterflies and billboards.

The Experience

Visitors started at a table with markers, crayons, and a choice of three coloring pages: a billboard, a flower, or a butterfly. There were no rules about how to color them: some drawings were carefully artistic, some carried messages, some went fully abstract.

The coloring table, early in the night.

When they finished, they placed the page under a camera at the scanning station and pressed a single button. Their drawing appeared in the projected landscape within moments, and the fun became finding it, then watching what it did.

Each object had its own life in the world. Butterflies took flight, drifting through the scene and sometimes wandering off the edge. Flowers took root and stayed, growing and swaying in the wind for the rest of the night. Billboards claimed the most prominent spots, but only three could stand at once. Each new submission pushed the oldest one off.

The landscape lived on a large inflatable rear-projection screen, so people could walk right up to find their artwork without casting shadows on the image.

Macro shot of hands coloring a car-shaped billboard page in orange and black marker, with a small square fiducial marker printed in the corner of the page — Left: a page being colored, with one of its four printed fiducial markers visible in the corner. Right: the scanning station, a camera, a light and one button.

Two people at a wooden table: one holds a finished pink 'Koala + Sloth' drawing flat under a small overhead light/camera rig while a hand presses a small black button device — Left: a page being colored, with one of its four printed fiducial markers visible in the corner. Right: the scanning station, a camera, a light and one button.

From Paper to Pixels in One Button Press

The scanning station had no operator and no software anyone had to learn: just a camera, a light, and one button. Each coloring page carried four printed fiducial markers: three marking the corners of the drawing, and a fourth that told the system which object type it was looking at. A custom Script TOP in TouchDesigner detected the markers’ position and orientation, corner-pinned the capture into perfect alignment, and mapped the artwork onto the UV coordinates of that object’s 3D model.

Three blank coloring pages laid out on the wooden table under a lamp: a butterfly, a billboard and a flower, each with four small printed fiducial markers near its corners — The three pages before anyone colored them. The small squares near the corners are the fiducial markers the scanner reads.

A successful scan played a confirmation chime. That small piece of feedback mattered: if a hand or a curled page corner hid one of the fiducials, the scan could fail silently. The chime told visitors instantly whether their drawing had made it into the world or needed a second press. That meant a page could be placed down crooked or off-center and still scan correctly, and a five-year-old could run the whole station themselves.

Scanned butterfly coloring page filled in solid black marker with white negative-space wing veins and dots, on white paper — Two scans as they entered the world. There were no rules about how to color the pages.

Scanned butterfly coloring page with wings filled in concentric rainbow bands (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) and a light-blue body — Two scans as they entered the world. There were no rules about how to color the pages.

A World With Rules

Every object type had its own lifecycle, which kept a few hundred submissions from becoming visual noise. Butterflies flew freely and eventually left the scene. Flowers were permanent residents, accumulating into a growing field that swayed in the wind. Billboards, the biggest canvas and the one people used to broadcast messages, were limited to three at a time, with each new submission pushing out the oldest. The world stayed legible all night while still making room for everyone.

Detail of the projected world: two hand-drawn billboards, one reading Are We There Yet, above a crowd of colored-in butterflies and flowers on the dark hillside — Billboards, butterflies and flowers stacking up as the night went on. Every object in frame is a scanned page.

Technical Specifications

Display: Large-scale rear-projected inflatable screen
Capture: Overhead camera scanning station with a single USB hardware button
Computer vision: Custom Script TOP in TouchDesigner: fiducial marker tracking and corner pinning
Markers: Four printed fiducials per page: three corners plus one object-type identifier
Render engine: TouchDesigner: 3D models with live UV texturing
Behavior: Per-object lifecycles: butterflies transient, flowers permanent, billboards capped at three
Feedback: Confirmation chime on successful scan
Run: November 2025 Provo Art Stroll · a few hundred drawings submitted

More From the Night

Silhouette of a small child pointing at a white flower on the projection screen, surrounded by other drawn flowers in the dark grass

Camera close-up of the projection screen showing a black-and-white polka-dot butterfly, a lavender butterfly, and hand-drawn flowers against the painted sky backdrop, with a billboard reading 'Wasatch...' at right

Adults seated around a table strewn with colored drawings and water bottles, mid-conversation, lit by small warm table lamps in a dark room

Scanned flower coloring page drawn as a smiling face with round glasses, pink petals, and green-and-yellow plaid leaves

TouchDesigner editor screen with a 3D viewport of scattered flower models, a node network, and a timer/parameter panel open on the right

What Else Is Possible

The mechanic, a drawing on paper joining a shared world within seconds, works for almost any brand or setting. The pages can be a product, a mascot, a jersey, an ornament. Each object type gets its own behavior, and the world can be themed, projected at building scale, or left running across a multi-day event so the scene keeps growing.

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