Illustra

The word illustration comes from the Latin illustrāre — to light up, to make bright, to illuminate understanding. It once meant to bring clarity, before it meant to draw. This project follows that earlier sense: to shed light on how images are made, and on what it means to make them now. They appear simple at first — clear, delicate drawings of familiar ingredients: a lemon, a loaf of bread, butter, eggs, potatoes. Each is described in pencil and watercolour, as though taken from a cookbook or a trusted grocer’s label. They speak softly, with modest precision — neither nostalgic nor ironic, simply observant. Their stillness recalls a time when illustration was the language of publishing and packaging, and drawing was a labour measured in hours. 

Yet, these illustrations were not drawn by hand, nor do they pretend to be. Some resemble pencil and watercolour; others reveal their digital anatomy — gradients too smooth, edges too clean. The work consciously straddles the border between tradition and technology. The results feel almost self-aware, as though the images are quietly confessing their origins. Each is a collaboration between artist and AI, produced in seconds from simple text prompts — no more than two sentences each. They ask whether the beauty we associate with time and skill can persist when time and skill are removed from the equation.

However, the skill here lies not in the absence of labour but in its redefinition: the choice of words, the orchestration of process, the dialogue that makes the machine see. These are not counterfeits but illustrations of the idea of illustration — evidence that image-making itself is shifting. The question extends beyond the image. As industries accelerate towards automation, entire creative traditions tremble at the edge of obsolescence. Illustration, design, even authorship — all face the same paradox: the tool that empowers also threatens. Yet perhaps the point is not to retreat but to understand. The danger isn’t in the tool, but in how it is perceived. These images are not warnings but reflections — glimpses of a future where the act of making remains human precisely because we continue to ask what it means to be so.

Perhaps that is the real subject here — not garlic, eggs, or bread and butter, but the uneasy, evolving partnership between human creativity and artificial intelligence. Generative tools save time, but they also alter what we mean by craft. An image is an image, however it’s made — but what becomes of the illustrator when the drawing draws itself? Will AI replace the illustrator, or will the illustrator embrace the technology and find a new way of making pictures?