Since 2011, Google Arts & Culture has digitized art collections from museums all around the world to make art more accessible to everyone.

Google Arts & Culture asked us to create a way to help people discover the 1M+ pieces in the collection in a relevant and personal way.

Our objective was to create a scalable installation that can be installed and used easily in cultural locations & during events.

Draw to Art uses machine learning to make it possible for anyone to discover art in a whole new way: by matching people’s doodles to drawings, paintings and sculptures from the collections of more than a thousand museums.

We created a series of interactive easels that can easily be installed in any event or cultural space,

they have already been featured in public exhibitions in The Grand Palais in Paris and the Long Museum in Shanghai amongst many others.

We trained a deep neural network to recognize visual features in doodles, like shapes, lines and perspectives. We also trained it to recognize the same features in paintings, sketches and sculptures from the Google Arts & Culture collection so Draw to Art can associate doodles to similar works of art.

With Draw to Art, everyone can now use their own creativity to discover artworks from museums around the world.

We started by gathering and curating more than 1 million artworks from the Google Arts & Culture collection - we then gathered thousands of sketch-photo/artworks pair, creating custom training data sets and using open source libraries such as “Sketchy” from Georgia Tech.

We then trained a deep neural network to recognize visual features in doodles, like shapes, lines and perspectives. We also trained it to recognize the same features in paintings, sketches and sculptures from the Google Arts & Culture collection so Draw to Art can associate doodles to similar works of art

We spent the first month of the project testing out different machine learning models and prototyping different user interfaces - we then finalised the digital design and worked with a product designer to create the interactive easels.

Since 2011, Google Arts & Culture has digitized art collections from museums all around the world to make art more accessible to everyone.

Google Arts & Culture asked us to create a way to help people discover the millions of pieces in the collection in a relevant and personal way.

Our objective was to create a scalable installation that can be installed and used easily in cultural locations & during events.

Draw to Art was designed to be very easily usable by everyone with little explanations - Draw something on the left of the canvas and visually similar artworks are presented on the right. The technological complexity is totally invisible to the users and it can easily used by children and adults.

We spent the first month of the project testing out different machine learning models and prototyping different user interfaces - we then finalised the digital design and worked with a product designer to create the interactive easels.

Draw to Art was unveiled to museum partners & influencers on the 5th of March 2018 in the Google Arts & Culture space in Paris where it’s now permanently installed and is used daily by visitors who ranges from international politicians to school children. Visitors spend 10 min+ on average using the easels.

Since then, we created 5 easels, for a total of £40K (incl. software). The easels have been touring the world through 2018 and 2019 and have been installed in exhibitions in places like the Grand Palais in Paris, the Long museum in Shanghai, and events like MWC in Barcelona and Google I/O in SF.

With Draw to Art, everyone can now use their own creativity to discover artworks from museums around the world.

Draw to Art was unveiled to museum partners & influencers on the 5th of March 2018 in the Google Arts & Culture space in Paris where it’s now permanently installed and is used daily by visitors who ranges from international politicians to school children. Visitors spend 10 min+ on average using the easels, connecting and discovering around 50 artworks on average.

Since then, we created 5 easels, for a total of £40K (incl. software). The easels have been touring the world through 2018 and 2019 and have been installed in exhibitions in places like the Grand Palais in Paris, the Long museum in Shanghai, and events like MWC in Barcelona and Google I/O in SF.

Google Arts & Culture now has an easily scalable installation that everyone can use to discover artworks in a whole new way using machine learning.

Draw to Art makes it intuitive, fun and magical to explore a gigantic (1M+) artwork database - everyone can now use their own creativity to discover artworks from museums around the world.