There is a subtle but distinct difference between the work created to sell something and the work created as art (which may or may not lead to payment). Understanding this difference is critical in helping artists flourish and to provide clarity for those who create images to sell something in a world where generative AI exists.

The fundamental problem we have when thinking about the ‘threat of AI on artists’ is that we are confusing someone who creates images for payment with someone who creates images for themselves (which may lead to payment, but not necessarily and, in most cases, for true art, never leads to payment).

I believe that the underlying cause of this confusion is the evolutionary way that commerce has needed to source images for the purposes of selling something.

Commercial-image making is not art

Before the advent of photography, brands and businesses needed to hire a person who could draw or paint if they wanted an image of someone or something (to use in advertising). Those people often but not always went to ‘art school’. They used traditional art materials like pencils, gouache, acrylics and watercolour to render objects and people so that whoever was paying them could sell stuff.

These commercial images and artefacts may have looked like art – after all, they were physical objects, often aesthetically pleasing in their own right, and rendered using traditional art materials. But, they were never art because the origin for the creation of these artefacts was a need from a company to create a competitive advantage for themselves in order to sell something and make a profit.

Soon enough, photographic technology came along and it was suddenly possible to ‘speed up’ the image-making process. A business owner no longer needed to pay someone to hand paint an image of their product, they could pay a photographer to take a photo of it. It was likely quicker, more accurate, and cheaper, especially as photographic technology became more easily available.

Photography didn’t kill every commercial image maker, of course, it just offered more choice to businesses – the question was a matter of style as well as budget and time. If I used photography to market my product, my ‘brand’ might also appear new and innovative because its advertising was using ‘new’ technology. If I used ‘traditional’ methods of creation (a human to paint or draw a picture of my product) my brand might also leverage that ‘tradition’ and appear wholesome and hand-crafted.

Either way, commercial image makers – whether they used cameras or traditional materials, never made art. But in the industry, we continue to call it ‘art’ e.g. ‘Final art’ is a common term for any visual artefact that is ‘approved’ and paid for by the client. There are roles called ‘finished artist’, ‘commercial artist’, ‘art director’ and so on.

In the modern age, there are still groups of people that create or render images for use in commerce. For simplicity, lets call them illustrators (people who use digital or non-digital tools to create images) and photographers (who use photographic technology to create images). These roles still exist for the same reasons as those who made images with traditional media – brands want a certain ‘style’, sometimes that’s photographic, sometimes it’s a particular illustrator’s style because it carries a feeling that the company or brand want to leverage for the feeling of their own product or campaign.

The fees that are earned by these commercial image makers vary wildly for a bunch of reasons. But, the artefacts that are created for this end are not ‘art’. We may call them ‘final art’ still, they may feel and look like art because they are a photograph or a canvas, or they are aesthetically pleasing, or they are used to convey emotions, but their origin lies in helping brands (businesses selling products and services, including picture books) solve a problem, for a defined audience or audiences, with specific commercials goals. That process is a design process.

So, if someone went to ‘art’ school, and got really good at making stuff with traditional artist materials (gouache, acrylic, ink, brushes, pens) or got really good at image-making with a camera or digital image-making software, it may seem logical to think of one’s self as a ‘commercial artist’. But, this term is an oxymoron because art cannot come from commerce. They are different things.

So, what’s art then?

To pretend that there is a single answer is a fool’s errand, as all of human history has shown. But, as a commercial image maker (illustrator) and an artist I have a few thoughts on how to differentiate art from commercial image making – if only so I can be clear about the role I’m playing at any given time.

Art is driven by an internal need not an external one

Commercial images are born from a reaction to a brief. “I need an image of my product that will increase revenue by 20%”. That brief is often supplied by a ‘client’ who also provides constraints – time, money, perhaps ‘style’ or intended formats and outputs. “I need 3 paintings of the Australian landscape to hang on the walls of my new restaurant to evoke feelings of the Australian bush,” or, in my case, “I need 24 illustrations for a picture book about Mother’s day in 12 weeks time”.

The final output in response to a brief may be something that looks like art – it’s a painting on canvas and hanging on a wall or some watercolour paintings. The process of making it looks like art – a painter using brushes, paint and an easel in a studio. But the need for those paintings came from someone other than the image maker themselves. It originated in commerce.

Art, as I’ve come to understand it from personal experience, is driven out of pure curiosity or need by the originator of the work. It’s a physical/external manifestation of a response to a question or questions and/or feelings experienced by the human who has the originating experience. Anecdotally, artists I know often say things like, “I just had to write this book for me because I was struggling with X and it was a way for me to process stuff.” Or, “I saw the piece of wood and, for some reason, was moved to carve it i this way, it spoke to me.” Or, “I just wanted to see if I could make a yellow and green painting that brought me pleasure.”

Art is made for the creator, first. It’s often but not always a way to process some feelings or solve some need that lives within the artist. In my personal experience, the ‘feeling’ of making art is very different from the feeling of making an image that comes from a commercial need. I am both an artist and a commercial image maker. They are very clearly separate.

My illustrations for picture books, mostly in physical watercolour and pencil, are often referred to as ‘artwork’. But the feeling I get when making something for myself is decidedly different from the one when I’m ‘rolling out a series of illustrations for a book’.

With art making, there is no feeling of ‘rolling out’ because the constraints and motivation are self-imposed and so the difficulty in producing the work is far greater – there is no deadline, cost, or end goal in mind (all the things that drive commerce and provide helpful constraints) by which I can make decisions against like there is creating illustrations for a picture book or commerce in general.

Art begins with an audience of one: the artist

With almost every commercially-driven image making brief comes a ‘target audience’. In picture books it’s often ‘kids aged 3-6’. If it’s a mural for a brewery its ‘males and females 18-40’. Again, this comes back to solving a need for someone else.

Because the origin of true art making is a self-generated curiosity or question, the only audience is the artist. In other words, does what I’m making satisfy that curiosity, help me process a life event, or give me a feeling I can get in no other way.

But, in my own experience, just because the artist solves a problem primarily for themselves, it does not mean that the resulting artefact won’t solve a problem for someone else. It’s just that it starts with themselves.

In fact, in many cases, the work does end up solving a problem for someone else; a viewer looks upon a work of art and is moved in some way – perhaps in the same way that the artist was searching to be moved themselves (”I didn’t realise I was feeling anxious but your art calmed me down”). Other times, the resulting artefact of an artistic act can create different feelings in the viewer than it did for the artist themselves.

This diversity of interpretation and reaction to the artistic artefact is in fact what separates it from the commercial image where, most of the time, what one is seeking is to evoke a ‘consistent’ reaction in the viewer. “Create a mural for my brewery for males and females aged 18-40 that evokes a feeling of happiness.” The image-maker can use their visual literacy and knowledge to meet that goal and if, once completed, the artwork has some people feeling happy but others feeling sad, anxious, angry, or depressed, the image is clearly unsuccessful.

The ‘success’ of a work of art is whether or not the artist has solved their problem or satisfied their curiosity. And yes, not all ‘finished’ pieces achieve that for the artist (and, as such, often the artist may try again, which is often a source of frustration for an artist, and the source of more work from which ‘artist’s themes’ emerge).

But, if that artistic artefact is publicly viewed/experienced in some way by others, it is not more or less successful if the reaction by those others is varied or consistent. To the artist, that reaction does not matter. This is why art is always ‘in the eye of the beholder’.

But what if someone buys my art? Does that make it a commercial image?

Commercial image making almost always has a budget – either requested by the artist as a ‘quote’ – “You will pay me $2500 for your mural request.” Or constrained by the client, “My budget for this work is $1000.” Even if there is no budget discussed up front, there’s always an upper limit in the purchaser’s mind because it’s about a return on investment, “I believe that if I pay $2500 for a mural for my beer garden, more customers will come and buy more drinks so I will make that money back by increased drinks sales in approximately 1 month.”

In commercial image making, compensation for the work is often but not always equated to time. E.g. my rate is $100/hour, this work will take 3 days, so therefore my fee will be $2100. Some commercial image makers work on a ‘value-based’ model, ‘this work will improve the profitability of your beer garden by 3x so I will charge you $7500 for it, no matter how long it takes.”

In contrast, I don’t know an artist who has ever priced an artistic artefact before they created it. And, if they had, I can’t see this any other way than an act of design and commerce, not art.

Most artists begin the art process without a clear vision of what will emerge at the end because the act begins with a question – uncertainty is part of the motivating force to begin the act in the first place, so putting a price on an unknown artefact becomes impossible.

But, people do buy art and artists do price their art for sale.

I’m not here to discuss how artists go about pricing their art but suffice to say it’s often a particularly personal choice. Some use the cost of materials, the size, the ‘strength’ of their work in their own eyes, their sentimentality of the work, the ‘average price people paid for my work last time’ i.e ‘the market rate’.

The reasons behind giving an artistic artefact a financial value (both as a buyer or a seller) are varied. But, even though money regularly changes hands in the ‘art market’, it does not add confusion to the separation between commercial image-making and art; the commercial conditions of image-making for commerce are set before the work begins, with art, if it happens, it happens after the completion of the artefact.

Where does this leave generative AI?

Recently, I’ve been reading articles in various media outlets, that “AI will end artists”, “AI is coming for artists”, “AI will replace artists”. But this is where our language limits our world.

Those who engage in commercial-image making are not engaging in art creation. They may also be artists if they also spend time in their lives creating artistic artefacts that are helping them satisfy a curiosity or answer a question that they put to themselves, with no audience or price in mind in the beginning; but not all commercial image makers do that.

In a marketplace where some brands and companies prioritise speed, a certain style, or are driven by budget constraints or return-on-investment goals, generative AI image creation will be a satisfactory solution to their problem and, under these conditions, some human commercial image makers may not be preferred. In many ways, that’s just an expression of the fundamental mechanics of market competition.

But artists? That space is completely and utterly human because it does not originate in commerce so the things that commerce wants – lower cost, greater efficiency, better productivity – don’t exist there. The act of artistic artefact creation begins outside of the ‘market’. It may eventually end up there, but there is no competition in its origin and therefore, AI does not pose a ‘threat’ here. If anything, it may be advantageous to help an artist think.

So, for as long as humans have existed, we have manifested objects and images in our external environment to help us understand ourselves and our relationship to the world better. We have used those artefacts to connect with other humans who, through interacting with those artefacts, generate their own emotional responses – sometimes the same ones that drove the artist, sometimes different ones. Sometimes, those reactions are strong enough to move people in a market to give it a financial value and pay for it but that market interaction is a byproduct, not the point.

So, generative computer programs cannot touch art or artists because it does not have emotion or inherent curiosity. It may convincingly mimic emotion and curiosity, but the biology and physiology of the human is utterly unique to our flesh, blood and bones.

Commercial image makers on the other hand have new competition for their services. Yes, new, AI-led competition is already emerging in the market and, like with everything else commercial, what matters is what you’re selling and how much you’re selling it for. Buyers (individuals and companies) will, as they always have, continue to have different needs at different times. The question becomes, “are there enough buyers for what you’re selling so that you can live the lifestyle you want to live?”… But that’s an entirely different question to “Will AI destroy artists?” The answer to that is a clear, obvious, and resounding no.

So, go make art. And, if you’re a commercial image maker who feels threatened by additional competition that automated generative tools are bringing, you need find renewed clarity on who your own target market is, what you’re offering, and what people are willing to pay for it.

If what you’re offering isn’t unique, interesting, different, or cheap enough – if it doesn’t give a client decent ROI, improve their productivity or bring costs down, then it was just a matter of time before you close shop anyway.

There has been a big idea for a graphic novel living in my head for over a couple of years. It’s so big that I keep telling myself that I haven’t had the time to progress it. But the truth is, I’ve been afraid to.

I’m so excited by this big idea that I know if I keep it in my imagination, it can remain as good as I could possibly imagine. I know that as soon as I start drawing it, it will no longer match what I can see it my head, it probably won’t be as good. But no one benefits by my keeping it there. No one else will make this idea in my lifetime – it’s weird but it’s also, potentially, wonderful.

So, I started. And, that thing I put off for almost 2 years now has presence on the page. Is it as good as I imagined? Well, the thing about putting it on the page is that the answer to that question no longer matters because now it’s about responding to what I’ve drawn, not what I imagined I could’ve drawn.

Now that it’s on the page, I can make it better. Other people can help me make it better. And, through the act of drawing, new images and ways of thinking have emerged that I certainly didn’t imagine.

Drawing is progress and it ain’t gonna draw itself.

For professional athletes, to be ‘machine-like’ is a good thing, a compliment. To return a perfect serve. To hit every green in regulation. To score 100% of penalty attempts. Those at the top of their game are machines – an almost robotic consistency with incredible accuracy. Perfect.But, no one ever calls an artist a machine.

There’s probably a reason for that.

The motivation to sell something, anything, for validation of its value/worth is a strong force in our current culture. It’s easy to think that if people aren’t willing to trade money for the thing I made, maybe it’s not good? No matter how many times I finish a drawing or painting for me, with no original intention to sell it, there has always been a tiny voice in the back of my head that asks, “I wonder if people will buy it?”

But, there’s a difference between purchasing and appreciating, acquiring and connecting.

I’ve only just realised this but what I’m really looking for with anything I finish making is connection. To bring something to the world from nothing and then finding someone, anyone, in the world who says, “Thankyou, that helped me in some way.” A little like sending a space probe into deep space and waiting for a reply. Is there anyone out there?

I recently witnessed someone I hardly know cry over something I made. Literal, actual tears. They never bought it. Never offered to buy it. In that moment, money didn’t exist for me or for them. But, their reaction (and my reaction to them) was a gift that money was completely ill-equipped to substitute for. What happened in that moment is that I heard back from deep-space and what I heard was, ‘That was really nice. Do it again, please.’

And so, I’m leaving the gravity of commerce, and I hope that perhaps others may find this message out there and think, maybe I’ll do the same.

As a software designer, craft isn’t something I associate with digital mark-making. After all, all I’m really doing is changing the colour of very tiny lights, aren’t I? The reason I started watercolour painting was in direct response to spending too much time in front screens – I needed something more… crafty (and less backlit).

So, what is a craft?

Craft, to me, has been something grounded in the physical – time, angles of the canvas, water, pigment, gravity – understanding those in watercolour well enough to produce what I can see in my mind’s eye would take more than a lifetime. Mastering those real-world elements feels, intuitively, like a struggle worth having. Up until now, digital has not.

But, as it turns out, turning lights on and off isn’t actually the challenge with digital (although, it’s exceedingly difficult in its own right). No, digital poses a completely different set of questions that are beginning to feel like craft-led questions. Questions like:

• When I don’t have the tactile feedback of the weight of water in physical brushes, the heat in the room, the thickness of the paint, the angle of the page – how do I make a mark I’m aiming for?
• How do I choose which ‘brush’ to use, and for what purpose, amongst the infinite number that exist as tiny little programs online – all accessible with a quick Google search?
• How can I ensure the colours still feel human? How do I constrain my choices within a seemingly infinite gamut of Red Green and Blue combinations?
• How do make sure I look after my body in the process whilst using a medium that has no natural rest (like when I wait for watercolour paint to dry)? Whilst digital output may not be inherently ‘physical’, the act of mark-making certainly is – I feel it in my bones, my muscles, my eyes. Stuff hurts!

Like with most experiences I’ve had, the question of craft – one I had only reserved for the physical art practice – begins to emerge through play with the digital medium; and yes, it’s a medium. In the same way that clay is, or video is, or dance is. Dividing it on physical/digital lines, especially in a world where those daily lines are blurring more and more, seems like the wrong division to make.

Perhaps, instead of sticking to ‘stuff I used to do’, I should let the work be thy guide and see what happens if spend some time investing in the craft of digital – just like I did with watercolour all those years ago.

There are times when the priority is to execute – to finish the story, finish the painting, finish the work. These times are filled with the logic of ‘productivity’. There is a procedural mindset to completion, there is a timeline, there is no room for tangents and exploration.

But there are other times when what is needed is the opposite. Times where logic and timelines must be intentionally and actively put aside to make room for wandering, tangents, and unfiltered input. It sounds passive but it is indeed an active process. I need to extend my antenna up into the clouds and let the world pass over me and through me. I need to passively receive what may be swirling around up there – no editing, just acceptance. Eventually, over time, the signal is strong enough inside to provoke action and the time to execute re-emerges.

Both modes are work. It’s important to remember that.

Parmesan cheese is categorised by its age. 12 months matured, 24 months matured, 36 months matured and so on. Each age has a different flavour, texture, purpose, and monetary value. You can’t make a 36 month parmesan cheese in 12 months, or 24 months, or even 72 months. 36 months is the necessary time for 36-month parmesan.

Sometimes, making art is like making cheese. The work I make today, I couldn’t have made 5 years ago, 3 years ago, 1 year ago. Now is the right time for this work. Some ideas have been percolating for 10 years, and yet still remain unmade – perhaps I don’t have the technical skills, or the confidence, or I’m doing other things in my life that means that idea isn’t possible right now.

The important thing about parmesan, like art, is that we recognise the advantage in its maturation instead of feeling impatient, frustrated or deflated that our cheese isn’t ready yet – some things need the time and it could be no other way.

Ever since I was a child, I enjoyed comics. I have vague childhood memories of being engrossed in Garfield comics in my school library. I also have similarly vague memories of looking for comics like Fred Basset in the Sunday newspapers my parents bought. I’m not convinced I understood any of it, but I found the pictures completely engaging. I remember trying to draw Garfield – it was difficult.

But, I stopped drawing in high-school at about the time I was told (mostly by my parents) that I needed to ‘grow up and focus on getting a job’. On the surface, that may sound like a lost opportunity but it wasn’t bad advice. It worked out pretty well. It provided financial security (which, in turn, allowed me to pursue an art practise ‘on the side’). Then, 15 years or so into my career in software design, a colleague of mine introduced me to ‘comics’ again, but this time, in graphic novel form. He let me borrow his copy of Y The Last Man. I was hooked… I was almost 35 years old but that 7-year old boy swam up from the depths and re-introduced himself to me.

A tradition as old as time

Now, for the last few days I’ve been walking through through places like the Pinoteca Di Brera in Milan and Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. And, like many art galleries in Italy, it contains a wealth of very old art – but especially – comics. Perhaps not in the way my 7-year old self or even my 35-year old self would recognise, but they are sequential art, and it’s been happening for a very long time.

It’s easy to mistake ‘comics’ for a relatively modern phenomenon, especially after the proliferation of them in US culture during the 1950s and the influence of Frederic Wertham’s ‘research’ in his book “Seduction of the Innocent – the influence of comic books on today’s youth”. Of course, it’s also been very present in Japan through recent forms like manga. But, in reality, pictures have been telling us important stories, especially for those who struggle with reading, since, well, we’ve been able to make a mark on a cave wall.

This ‘old’ form of visual storytelling is easy to mistake for something else (often just called “religious art”), but in many cases, they are undoubtedly sequential art. My 7-year old self (or my parents) never thought of The Stations of The Cross in church on Sunday as “comics” – I was exposed to those sequential paintings every week for many of my early years. And, in the galleries of Italy, the stories are contained in elaborate alter pieces depicting important religious figures lives (saints, martyrs, mothers). Some even show the presence of speech!

Ever since those high-school days, I felt that my love of visual storytelling – both reading it and making it – put me on the fringe; made me an outsider because in today’s culture it’s still seen as something ‘lesser’ than, say, I don’t know, something more ‘professional’ (Doctor? Lawyer?). But now, if anything, my love of visual storytelling makes me feel like someone whose connected to a past tradition that has persisted since that first mark on the wall.

It also gives me a sense of responsibility – to normalise our acceptance of ‘comics’ as sequential art at to play, extend, and push what’s possible in how we tell visual stories to one another, to inspire a new generation of visual storytellers (and readers). Time to get to work.

I’m currently travelling around Nothern Italy and finding it difficult to remain unmoved by the grand, labour-intensive, multi-generational artworks that were made during the middle ages and renaissance period, almost 700 years ago. I’m not religious, but the work done in service of religion – the architecture, the sculpting, the painting, the music, is, I think, objectively extraordinary. Not just in quality, but in volume, too.

When I think of the big projects that are burning a hole in my brain, like that 300 page graphic novel I need to write, having something divine would indeed be quite useful. A church or god to please, or an eternal hellfire to avoid would no doubt provide the impetus to make the work.

Some of us wait for book contracts to be signed, to be noticed on social media, or we wait for those infrequent but intense ‘bursts of creativity’. In a secular world that worships money (or, at least, uses it as a measure of the success of a work), how does one find another reason to begin, make, and share projects that require extraordinary amounts of patience and labour?

It’s easy, in today’s hustle culture, to lose faith in art for art’s sake. If no one buys my work, is it worth anything? Is it any good? Am I any good? But perhaps all we need is to replace capitalism with humanism – a faith that great, good, and bad works of art help us all connect with one another, either in this life, or with those who follow us when we’re gone.

Now that’s something worth working for.

No, it’s not easy to admit, I have been a professional illustrator for almost 10 years and I haven’t thought much about the definition of it – to explain or make (something) clear. It is derived from the latin, illustrare – to shed light on.

On the contrary, one thing I have thought a lot about over those 10 years is how most people I’ve worked with struggle to see something in their mind’s eye – an inability to imagine. I’ve described ideas in words, talked about plots and structures over coffee, written down explanations of characters and sequences of events, but nothing works like drawing. Nothing.

Perhaps it’s because I need to be better with words? That’s probably true. But I’ve learned a more likely reason is because people need to see the idea… all of it… on the page… to experience an emotional reaction to it – and drawings evoke emotions fast (in some studies, just 13 milliseconds!).

Once someone experiences a feeling, they can do something with it – describe it, react to it, understand where it comes from, or how the stimulus (the image) could be changed to heighten or dampen that feeling. Once something is on the page, everyone has an opinion on it – what it could or should be. That can be difficult to hear and manage sometimes, but it’s more useful than “I can’t see what you see”.

As it turns out then, the definition of illustration still holds true – drawing, more than anything, helps to shed light on things that otherwise sit in the dark. I like that idea.