How we make these

One drawing, and no words inside it

Each sheet carries one drawing and nothing else. There is no shading, no grey, no filled area and no texture: the whole page is a black outline on white paper, because that is what a home printer reproduces faithfully and what a crayon can be dragged across without the line vanishing underneath it. And the artwork contains no letter, number or word anywhere. The title at the top of the sheet and the caption below it are set as real type at the moment the PDF is written, over the drawing rather than inside it.

Why that constraint is the whole method

A drawing with no words in it belongs to no language. That is what lets the same outline appear on an American sheet and on a British, German or French one without a single line being redrawn, and it is why a page here can never accidentally show a word in the wrong language to the wrong reader. It also makes one check absolute rather than approximate: if the rule is that the artwork carries no glyphs at all, then any run of letter-shaped marks is either a defect or something a person has to look at and explain.

The two spellings are two builds, not one page relabelled

The American and British pages on this site share every drawing and no PDF. The web images are the same files — measured, not asserted: all 294 of them come out byte for byte identical across the two, which is exactly what you would expect of a picture with no words in it. The print files do not: an American sheet is US Letter and a British one is A4, so each subject is laid out twice, at two page sizes, with its own title and caption set into it. Six subjects are also called something different in each market, and the address of the page follows the word.

What is checked before a sheet is published

• The drawing is black outline on white, with no shading, no grey and no filled areas.
• The shapes are closed, so every area can actually be coloured in — and there are at least six of them, so the sheet is worth the paper.
• Every line is thick enough to survive being printed at A4 size.
• The paper is clean at the edges and the corners, so the sheet does not print a grey frame around itself.
• The artwork carries no words, letters or numbers anywhere. Every word you see on a sheet is set as real type over the drawing, not baked into it.
• Where a row of small repeated shapes looks like a word to that check — a fawn’s spots, a row of sesame seeds on a bun, the cabin windows along an aircraft — a person opens the file, magnifies that exact spot, reads the whole picture as well, and writes down what the marks actually are. 20 sheets on this site carry such a note.
• The PDF is opened and re-read by a second, independent program to confirm the page really is A4 and the paper really is unmarked where nothing was drawn.
• Every drawing is looked at by a person before it goes up, and the description you can hear on a screen reader is written from that look rather than from what the drawing was supposed to be.

What those checks cannot see

A measurement can tell you a drawing has closed shapes and thick lines. It cannot tell you the drawing is any good, that it is charming, or that it is even the right animal — a cat where a dog was asked for passes every one of the checks above. Nothing on the machine that builds these sheets can look at a picture. That is why the last item on the list is a person, and why the descriptions on this site sometimes mention things the brief never asked for: the summer sheet turned out to have an ice cream cone in it, and the plate of food turned out to include an apple that also has a sheet of its own. Both are now written down, because a description of a picture has to come from the picture.

What we got wrong on these pages, and how

These pages were written by taking the American ones and putting them into British English under a written list of the words that differ, and then reading every one. The list was wrong four times, and each time in the same shape: it knew a word and not the word next to it. It knew one phrase for the paper and not another. It knew the American page size and it knew the word “size”, but not the two together, which put a phrase no country uses onto twenty-one pages. It knew a machine’s name in the singular and not in the plural, so one sentence in the vehicles section kept three American words after every automatic check had reported the page clean. And it knew a word without knowing that a hyphen is not a letter, so a two-storey house stayed American on three pages.

None of those was found by a check. All four were found by reading the pages afterwards, and the checks were then rewritten to fail on the kind of mistake rather than on the instance — which is the only part of this worth repeating. A list of words is blind to the word beside it; a person reading is not.

Printing

Each sheet is one A4 page (210 by 297 millimetres). The paper is never painted — where nothing is drawn, nothing is printed, so the sheets do not empty an ink cartridge. Print at actual size rather than fit-to-page, on ordinary paper. There is nothing on any sheet that needs photo paper, and nothing that needs colour to print correctly.

Licence — what you may do with these files

The 98 sheets on this site are free to download, print and photocopy for personal use, for a family, and for a classroom or a club, including printing a set for every child in a group. You do not need to ask and there is nothing to pay.

What is not permitted is redistributing the files as your own, selling them or anything made by printing them, or republishing them on another site or in an app. If you want to use a sheet somewhere that is not covered here, the contact page has an address and the answer is usually yes.

Whatever a child draws by copying one of these sheets is theirs, entirely and without condition. That should not need saying, but it is the question people actually ask.