There’s something kind of wild about watching your own design process happen through a machine. That’s exactly what I experienced with my Local AI Art Generation Project. I talk a lot about AI Generative Art here, but what have I accomplished? In 45 workdays, I created 900 AI-generated art pieces and 270 AI-assisted print separations—just me, one artist. That breaks down to about 20 designs a day ready to show a client, and 6 seps to print.

Process

The process? It was a mix of batch generation and regional storytelling. I plugged in 1,000 town names and asked AI to create four different versions of each. Within six minutes, I had 4,000 design concepts. Towns like Sturgis, Flint, Bay City, and Marietta—each with its own vibe and flavor. The AI didn’t just make things faster. It became a tool, a new digital brush. Most of what it spit out wasn’t ready-to-go artwork. Think of it more like custom clip art—it got me about 75% there.

Iterations

But the real magic wasn’t in the automation. It’s in the iteration. I kept feeding results back into the process, training and tweaking things. It was a back-and-forth between me and the machine.

The core of this project was local identity. I built every design using elements specific to the town or region—real lighthouses, native fish, local festivals, slogans people actually use. This wasn’t just “Any National Park” slapped on a shirt. It became a way to tell a visual story, rooted in a place.

Lighthouses and Fish

The lighthouse series—no more generic silhouettes. Each one is drawn to match its actual structure—Montauk, Acadia, Rockland. The shape of those lighthouses matters in the real world. Same with the fish series. I leaned into accurate shapes and species—not just “generic fish,” but ones fishermen would recognize.

AI is here to expand what I can do. I can build flexible, specific design system that adapt across hundreds of places with a human guiding the output.

One artist. 20 designs a day ready to show a client with 6 seps to print = 900 designs. 270 separations. 45 days. And the local voice got a whole lot louder.