You might be interested in the work of David Chalmers. His website has a lot of terrific resources about philosophy of mind, consciousness, cognitive science, etc. from a wide variety of philosophers with every perspective and theory you could imagine. Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory is quite technical, but fascinating. The basic idea is that conscious perception is an intrinsic property of patterns, not just an emergent property.

There is an online comic called Sinfest that occasionally has "cartoon-to-calligraphy" transformations that are interesting.

If you go to the archive and search for "calligraphy", you can pull up all the relevant strips. They will make more sense if you're a regular reader. Also, I probably wouldn't suggest using these for kids, but if you were creative, you could probably come up with similar types of drawings on your own.