Transparency: How I Use AI and How I Don't

Short version: I paint my artwork one hundred percent by hand, with no AI involved. I use AI for everything around it: shop code, admin, and tasks that transform my own finished originals.

I think art and AI need to be separated pretty clearly. So here is the long version, in detail, because I would rather say too much than too little.

My art is not made with AI

I paint my originals entirely by hand. The ideas, compositions, colors, details, and all the tiny decisions that make a painting mine come from me. For prints, my finished original paintings are professionally photographed and reproduced. No prompt was involved, and there never was one. If you want to see how the paintings actually come together, that is all laid out in How Candy Decay Art Is Made and in My Candy Decay Art Process.

That said, I do use AI. And I don't want to hide it.

What I use AI for

Mainly for everything that happens around the art. I'm an artist. I'm not a programmer or a web developer, and I honestly don't want to spend half my working time debugging Shopify code.

I build parts of my shop and some of its custom features together with Claude, for example. I can explain what I want, test things, spot problems, change things, and build something step by step that I simply could not create on my own technically.

The same goes for some of my free downloads. My coloring pages are based on my own hand-painted originals. AI helps me turn those into clean line art you can actually color in. My phone wallpapers are also based on my own original artworks, and AI is sometimes used to adapt them to a phone screen format. The starting point is always my own art.

Why: one artist is about a thousand jobs

People looking in from outside underestimate this part. Anyone trying to make a living from their own art, alone, is also:

photographer, image editor, print prep, quality control, packer, shipping logistics, customer service, returns department, inventory, purchasing, pricing, bookkeeping, tax admin, legal from privacy policy to refund terms, copyright enforcement for stolen artwork, web development, shop admin, SEO, copywriting, newsletter, social media manager, content production, video editing, community management, exhibition applications and scheduling.

And somewhere in between, painting is supposed to happen.

As one person, that is barely manageable. If you can do all of it without anything falling over, honestly, that is impressive. I can't. As a neurodivergent person I have a limited amount of energy and focus per day, and I would rather spend it on paintings than on figuring out why a piece of code has decided to stop working today. I wrote about how that works for me in Being a Neurodivergent Artist.

AI doesn't make the art for me. It takes away the things that would otherwise keep me from making art.

Why I don't see this in black and white

The debate right now is mostly either completely against or completely for. I find both useless.

What I do have a problem with is AI-generated imagery being presented as hand-painted or hand-drawn art. To me, prompting an image is not the same thing as painting one. At the same time, I see no reason to reject a tool completely when it saves me an enormous amount of work on technical, organizational and transformative tasks.

The interesting question isn't whether somebody uses AI. It is what for, and whether they say so.

Where my line is

Simple: the painting is mine. Everything else is allowed to be a tool.

Made without AI: originals, ideas, compositions, colors, every decision inside the picture, hand-signed prints, wall art, anything my shop calls hand-painted.

Made with AI assistance: shop code and custom features, line art for the coloring pages derived from my own originals, format adjustments for phone wallpapers, and background admin.

If AI played a role in a product, I say so. And if something in my shop says the artwork was handmade by me, then it was handmade by me. For me, that distinction matters.

I don't use AI because I want to be less of an artist. I use it so I can spend more time being one. More painting. More ideas. Fewer hours arguing with Shopify.

And trust me, running an art business is still complicated enough even with AI. :D

Frequently asked questions

Is your art AI-generated?
No. All originals are painted by hand, without AI.

Are the prints made with AI?
No. Prints are reproductions of my finished originals, professionally photographed and printed.

Are the free coloring pages AI art?
They are always based on my own hand-painted artwork. AI only helps turn a finished original into line art you can color.

What about the phone wallpapers?
Also based on my originals. AI is sometimes used to fit them to a phone screen format.

Why use AI at all?
Because I am a one person art business and I would rather spend my time painting than debugging.

See the hand-painted part

Every piece in the hand-signed print collection started as a painting on my table, and every print is signed by hand for 35 euro. More about me and how I got here is on About Me.