ShadowDraw: From Any Object to Shadow-Drawing Compositional Art

Rundong Luo, Noah Snavely, Wei-Chiu Ma; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 24428-24437

We introduce ShadowDraw, a framework that transforms ordinary 3D objects into shadow-drawing compositional art. Given a 3D object, our system predicts scene parameters---including object pose and lighting---together with a partial line drawing, such that the cast shadow completes the drawing into a recognizable image. To this end, we optimize scene configurations to reveal meaningful shadows, employ shadow contour to guide line drawing generation, and adopt automatic evaluation to enforce shadow-drawing coherence and visual quality. Experiments show that ShadowDraw produces compelling results across diverse inputs, from real-world scans and curated datasets to generative assets, and naturally extends to multi-object scenes, animations, and physical deployments. Our work provides a practical pipeline for creating shadow-drawing art and broadens the design space of computational visual art, bridging the gap between algorithmic design and artistic storytelling.