Artificial intelligence applied in the design of drop caps for the 21st century

The research is conducted within the programmed activities of the course "Fundamentals of Art Education" offered in the third year of the university degrees for Primary Education Teacher and Early Childhood Education Teacher, both part of the University Degrees at the Complutense University of Madrid, as well as the second year of the Double Degree in Pedagogy and Early Childhood Education and the second year of the Double Degree in Pedagogy and Primary Education.The exercise, carried out in previous years without the use of AI, involves a theoretical approach to the miniatures found in drop caps and other medieval documents, primarily from their value as a graphic/visual interpretation of a written document, a text, or a more or less imaginary story. Using these as a reference, students are invited to research the meaning of their own names and represent them through a drawing they must color, which would be a drop cap of the 21st century. Initially, the work is carried out in an "artist's notebook" in A5 format (in which students work throughout the class period to improve their expressive abilities through art), with pencil, colored markers, and water-based techniques, preferably watercolor or tempera. The activity takes place over four class hours.Subsequently, some AI tools aimed at creating visual messages are introduced and explained in the classroom, where, in addition to certain text instructions, images can be implemented for transformation, i.e., allowing the incorporation of the letter created by the students for further transformation based on those previous drawings and also altered by textual instructions suggested by each student.