How I Turned My Grandson's Fridge Art into a DIY Book

Meet the Rainbow Ducks, who love to dance and sing, according to Google Veo.

Sep 01, 2025

I'm making my granddaughter a book based on a picture her big brother drew back in 2015.

His mom put it on the fridge, I took a photo, and now—ten years later—it popped up in my notes: The Rainbow Ducks. And before anyone gets worked up about rainbows or hidden agendas, let’s just agree that sometimes a five-year-old draws a duck and calls it a Rainbow Duck. End of story.

Anyway, I used Google Gemini’s Storybook Gem to turn the Rainbow Ducks into a story for his three-year-old sister, and it was actually a lot of fun. But let's back up—I wasn’t actually planning to make a book when I started. I was just joking around with my grandson. He's 15 now.

The Ducks Learn to Sing and Dance

I sent him one of the original pictures, jazzed up with Google Veo. Google Veo is Google's text to video tool. It can also turn an image into a video. This was made with version 3, which now includes sound, and it made the ducks dance and sing a little ditty.

Me: "Kinda lame, huh? With the weird song?"
Him: "Actually that is peak."

What do you think. Is this peak? What does that even mean? Peak.

(I had to look it up—turns out peak is alpha slang for top-tier awesome, the absolute best. Maybe. I think.)

That got me wondering what his little sister would think, because one of the things I've learned from the parade of kids and grandkids coming through my life is this: before you hit them up with tales about life on the homestead or civil war or ancestors who sailed across the sea, the stories they want to hear first are more like "When Mommy was a Little Girl" or "When Big Brother was My Age." So...

Playing with Google's Latest AI Toys

Google seems to be putting out fun tools left and right these days. One of these is Gemini’s new Storybook Gem. It's a free tool you can find by logging into gemini.google.com and clicking on “Explore Gems” on the left side menu. From there, you just click on the Storybook Gem to get started.

Gems selection, left panel at gemini.google.com

What I like about it is the flexibility. It can write a story for you from scratch if you want—just give it a subject and let it go. I'm not sure how that would turn out. It probably depends on your prompt. The more details you give it, the better the story. But you can also write the story yourself and tell it to use your exact words, which is what I did.

I also uploaded the photos of the ducks that I saved from the refrigerator. And here's what I pasted into the prompt area:

Create an illustrated children's storybook for a little girl. Use my pre-written story text exactly as I've written it. The story should be about two mischievous rainbow ducks that come to life from a drawing. Use the uploaded pictures of the ducks as inspiration for the illustrations. The story text is, "One sunny afternoon, a little girl named Chloe was playing in the living room. Upstairs, big brother Luke was on his computer. Mommy was folding the clothes. Daddy was in his office. The house was very, very quiet..."

And it goes on from there to have the Rainbow ducks sneak into the house when Mommy lets the dogs in, and then they just cause all sorts of trouble: Sneak snacks, play in the bathtub, go in big brother's room and throw his clothes all over. (Well, his clothes are already thrown all over, but we won't tell.)

I pasted that, clicked the button, and it generated the illustrations.

Here's the link: https://g.co/gemini/share/7b36aa379d8c (I'm not sure how long this link will keep working. I assume it's now shareable for the foreseeable future.)

This is not bad at all—there's even a voiceover to read it to you. You can choose a higher pitched voice or a lower pitched voice. It's definitely an AI voice. We all love those, of course.

From Digital Fun to a Real "Book Book”

Screen time is not great for small children. So I got to pondering how I could turn this into a printed book. Fortunately, there is an option to download as a PDF, so this was a great opportunity to pull it into Canva, which makes it easy to modify and resize.

First off, why not add a page with photos of the original Rainbow Duck? Next, I had Canva resize to 8x6, printed it on card stock, got out my scissors, and cut it to fit a little 4x6 photo album.

Add a few extra touches in Canva. Cut around the outside and down the middle to make 4x6 pages. Slide the pages into a small photo album.

Voilà... a tiny book—perfect for carrying in go-bags for long car rides. A treasured keepsake for years to come.

Ha!

This is a test run to determine exactly how sturdy something like this would need to be. I figure it doesn't replace a real book. It's more like a fancy greeting card from Grandma.

It might last a few weeks, though?

What family art, story, or word-twist mishap have you turned into a project lately? Anything super peak? Share in the comments—I'd love to hear your ideas.

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