GenFODrawing: Supporting Creative Found Object Drawing With Generative AI

Found object drawing is a creative art form incorporating everyday objects into imaginative images, offering a refreshing and unique way to express ideas. However, for many people, creating this type of work can be challenging due to difficulties in generating creative ideas and finding suitable reference images to help translate their ideas onto paper. Based on the findings of a formative study, we propose GenFODrawing, a creativity support tool to help users create diverse found object drawings. Our system provides AI-driven textual and visual inspirations, and enhances controllability through sketch-based and box-conditioned image generation, enabling users to create personalized outputs. We conducted a user study with twelve participants to compare GenFODrawing to a baseline condition where the participants completed the creative tasks using their own desired approaches without access to our system. The study demonstrated that GenFODrawing enabled easier exploration of diverse ideas, greater agency and control through the creative process, and higher creativity support compared to the baseline. A further open-ended study demonstrated the system's usability and expressiveness, and all participants found the creative process engaging.