Digital Art Created with AI Tools: My Creative Process

I Am Not an Artist (Or Am I?)

Before I discovered AI image generation, I couldn't draw a straight line. My artistic output was limited to stick figures and the occasional doodle in the margins of a notebook.

Today, the covers of my books, the visuals on this website, and the illustrations in my digital content are all images I created — with AI assistance.

This isn't cheating. It's a new kind of creative skill.

How AI Image Generation Works (Simply)

AI image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion work by learning from millions of existing images and developing the ability to generate new ones based on text descriptions.

You type a prompt — a description of what you want to see — and the AI generates an image. The quality of the output depends heavily on the quality of the prompt.

This is where the creative skill comes in. Writing effective prompts is an art form. It requires you to think visually, to understand how the AI interprets language, and to iterate and refine until you get what you're looking for.

My Creative Process

Step 1: Concept development. Before I open any AI tool, I think about what I want to communicate. What feeling should the image evoke? What story should it tell? What will the viewer's eye be drawn to?

This conceptual work happens in my head, on paper, or in conversation with an AI text tool. I'll often describe my vision in words before I try to translate it into an image prompt.

Step 2: Prompt crafting. A good image prompt includes:

- The subject (what's in the image)

- The style (realistic, illustrated, painterly, etc.)

- The mood (warm, dramatic, peaceful, etc.)

- Technical details (lighting, perspective, color palette)

- Reference artists or styles when helpful

For example, instead of "a child reading a book," I might write: "A young girl with natural hair sitting in a sunlit library, reading a glowing book, warm golden light, soft watercolor illustration style, peaceful and curious mood."

Step 3: Generation and iteration. I generate multiple versions and evaluate them. What's working? What's not? I adjust the prompt and regenerate. This might happen five times or fifty times before I get something I'm happy with.

Step 4: Refinement. AI-generated images often need some refinement — cropping, color adjustment, or combining elements from multiple generations. I use basic photo editing tools for this.

What I've Learned About AI Creativity

The most important thing I've learned is that AI doesn't replace creative vision — it amplifies it. The AI can generate technically impressive images, but it can't tell you what story you want to tell or what feeling you want to evoke. That's still entirely human.

I've also learned that constraints are generative. When I give the AI very specific parameters, I often get more interesting results than when I give it complete freedom. The creative tension between my specific vision and the AI's interpretation produces surprises I wouldn't have thought of on my own.

The Ethical Dimension

AI art raises real questions about authorship, attribution, and the impact on human artists. These are questions I take seriously.

I believe AI-generated art should be clearly labeled as such. I believe the artists whose work trained these models deserve recognition and compensation. And I believe the most interesting creative work happens when AI is used as a tool in service of a human creative vision, not as a replacement for human creativity.

The images I create with AI are expressions of my creative vision. The AI is the brush. I'm still the artist.