About Squiggle Studio
An independent app by Nidhi Mehta · Last updated 27 August 2026
Why it exists
Colouring books are fixed. Every page was decided months before it reached the child, so a four-year-old who wants to colour a mermaid astronaut, or a dinosaur riding a bike, or a robot dinosaur in red sneakers, simply cannot. They pick the closest thing on the shelf and settle.
Squiggle Studio removes the settling. A child says the thing they actually pictured, and a few seconds later it is on the screen as clean black-and-white line art, waiting to be coloured. The gap between imagining something and holding it closes almost entirely.
How a child uses it
- They say it out loud. The microphone is the main control, not a secondary one. A child who cannot read or type is not a second-class user here.
- They colour it in. Tap any part of the picture to fill it. Sixteen colours, plus a colour wheel for everything in between.
- They draw on top. Switching to the pencil adds their own lines anywhere — the generated picture is a starting point, not a finished thing.
- They change their mind. Undo steps back through every fill and stroke, one tap at a time.
- They keep it. Finished drawings save to the photo library or print out on paper, which is still where most colouring actually happens.
Where it gets used
- Quiet time at home, when a child wants something specific and the colouring book does not have it.
- Waiting — restaurants, airports, the back of a car, a doctor's waiting room. It works on a phone and prints at home later.
- Alongside a story. A child who has just heard about a dragon that reads books can have that exact dragon to colour.
- In classrooms and at homeschool, where a themed page for this week's topic usually means an adult searching for a printable and settling for a near miss.
- For pre-readers, who are locked out of most apps that expect typing. Every idea in the gallery is shown as a picture rather than a word.
What it deliberately does not do
Squiggle Studio is built for an audience under 13, and a lot of the design is about what is absent:
- No accounts and no sign-in. Nothing to set up, nothing to remember, no email address collected from anybody.
- No advertising of any kind, and no third-party advertising or analytics software.
- We never ask for a child's name, age, photo or location.
- Speech is transcribed on the device. Audio never leaves the phone.
- Drawings stay on your device. They are never uploaded, never shared with other users, and never visible to anyone else — there is no social feature at all.
The only thing that leaves the device is the short phrase describing what to draw, which goes to Google's AI so it can draw it. The full details are in the privacy policy.
Is it safe for children?
Pictures are generated by an AI model, which means safety cannot be left to chance. Two things constrain it. First, requests are checked before anything is drawn and refused with a child-friendly message if they should not be. Second, the instruction sent to the model asks for a single cartoon subject on a plain background — no text, no photorealistic people, no scenes — so it cannot be steered into arbitrary imagery.
No system is perfect. If your child is ever shown something you would rather they had not seen, please write to contact@squigglestudio.app so the filter can be tightened. A person reads it.
Who makes it
Squiggle Studio is made by Nidhi Mehta, an independent developer. It is not the product of a company, a studio, or a team — it is one person's app, built and maintained alone.
That shapes the product more than it might sound. There are no investors expecting engagement metrics, so there is nothing in the app designed to keep a child on it longer than they want to be. There is no advertising business, so there is no reason to collect data about anybody. And when something is wrong, the person who reads the email is the person who can fix it.
What it costs
Squiggle Studio is free to use. Every child gets new generated drawings each month at no cost, plus a gallery of ready-made pictures that can be coloured as often as they like and never run out. An optional subscription raises the monthly allowance for families who want more; nothing else is locked behind it, and every tool works identically either way. Full terms are on the Terms of Use page.
Try it
Squiggle Studio runs in a browser — there is nothing to install to try it.
Questions, problems or ideas: contact@squigglestudio.app, or see the support page.
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