AI helps artists express emotions better in comic storyboards
Drawing the Line: Where AI Guidance and Human Creativity Meet in Emotion-Driven Comic Storyboarding
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Generating pictures with AI often misses the feelings that humans show naturally. This is especially true in comic storyboards, which need both technical drawing skills and emotional insight. The authors created EmoToon, a tool that lets non-professional artists make and improve emotional sketches with AI help. Their study with 25 people showed that AI made storyboards feel more emotional and look better but made some users feel less in control of the creative process.
What this means in practice
- •For comic artists: Assist non-professional comic artists in generating emotionally expressive storyboard sketches with AI support to improve quality and creative exploration.
- •For game narrative designers: Use AI tools like EmoToon to prototype visually emotional storyboards that help shape interactive story experiences.
Authors
Jocelyn Shen, Isabella Pu, Alessandro Briseño, Hyun Kim, Fiona Lu, Sharifa Alghowinem, Cynthia Breazeal, Hae Won Park
Abstract
While generative AI models can produce visually faithful artwork, they often fall short in conveying emotional authenticity--a key driver of human expression. In visual storytelling, particularly comic storyboarding, this gap becomes pronounced: effective storyboards require both technical knowledge (e.g., anatomical accuracy or scenic composition) and emotional insight (from lived experience). We explore how human-AI collaboration can support emotion-driven creativity, where the user's feelings guide generation and emotional resonance is the goal. We present EmoToon, a technology probe that helps non-professional artists generate sketch-like storyboards and iterate on visual ideas. In a controlled study with N=25 participants, we find that AI assistance significantly improves emotional expression, aesthetic quality, and exploration, but reduces users' creative ownership. Our findings offer broader insights for human-AI co-creation in the domain of comic storytelling, emphasizing balance between output quality and user freedom, and raising new challenges for image generation models in this domain.