Art director and illustrator Anna Xenz on her game-changing relationship with generative ai

Anna Xenz started out as a graphic designer, but her work now spans a range of disciplines: she’s an art director and illustrator for commercial and print clients, as well as creating her own projects as a digital artist. Here, she explains the invaluable background role generative AI tools like exactly.ai are playing in her process.

I still can’t divide myself into different parts. I love what I do as an art director – working in marketing and with high-tech companies in different fields – but I’m also an illustrator, working with editorial houses and magazines. And now I’m a digital artist as well. I use AI in all three parts of my creative practice, so it’s a huge zone of excitement for me.

I started my creative journey as a graphic designer. I know it sounds weird, but I’ve known I wanted to be a graphic designer since I was 13 – nobody wants to be a graphic designer at that age! But I remember sitting in the library and reading books about typography. I was a huge fan. I got my first degree in graphic design at the Academy of Applied Art, and for several years after that worked for a marketing agency. While working there I understood that while marketing could give me a lot, there was no freedom. You spend your time swimming between different people you have to please, from the client to the creative director. You are creative, but I wanted more.

So I left and started work as a freelancer, which gave me more of the freedom I wanted. Because I had a lot of interest in culture, I started looking for projects in the culture and entertainment industry, so for several years after that I worked on projects like books, magazines, and film festivals for example. But the more I worked in the culture industry, I realised I wanted even more freedom than I had, so I decided to become an illustrator. It’s interesting because in the nineties, and before, graphic design used to be seen as a form of art, until gradually technological advances meant it began to apply more to technology. I think a lot of people who saw themselves as creatives, not developers, moved from graphic design to illustration.

Until a few years ago I was working principally as an illustrator and art director. Then in 2021, two gallerists from 1 Dutch Projects in New York approached me and asked if I wanted to collaborate on a project as a digital artist. It was the beginning of the NFT era – an exciting moment. I created my first series of digital artworks, inspired by a Ray Bradbury story. After that I started seeing myself as a digital artist as well.

As an illustrator, there was a specific use I wanted AI for. I can draw everything on my own, but usually there are elements which I need a model for, such as figures in certain poses. Sometimes I ask people to be my models, or I search on Google and then use my imagination – either way it involves a lot of research. I had an example of this recently. A few years ago I was thinking about the role of money in my life and how to balance earning with creativity, which is a challenge for every creator. The idea of an image came to me, of an eagle flying from a coin. To create it, I had to draw an eagle flying from the back. I spent so long Googling what eagles look like from the back, but it was tough. In the end I had an illustration with a very detailed coin and a very undetailed eagle.

This spring a company came to me saying they’d seen this picture on my website and wanted to buy it as an artwork. I agreed, and decided to do some more work on it. This time I used AI, and asked it to generate me an eagle flying from the ground, from the back, and in a minute I got exactly what I wanted. This was the moment when I understood how to use it – you don’t have to spend forever searching for something, or struggling with something you don’t like to draw. With exactly.ai it’s even better, because you can model these elements in your own style, meaning you can use them directly or redraw them.

This is exactly what I did recently. I was commissioned to draw two illustrations for a magazine. The topic was interior design and how people live in big cities. I proposed an illustration of a building by day and by night, showing through each window different people, different styles and different ways of living. As an illustrator, I love to draw people but I don’t actually like to draw buildings and architectural environments. And because this was for two pages of print, I had to produce eight illustrations of eight living rooms, with a variety of people in different poses. Normally that would take days to model, but instead I opened exactly.ai, wrote a prompt and generated some images, which I then redrew. It was easy and fast. I was happy with the results, and so was the editor-in-chief of the magazine.

I think of it a bit like the invention of the washing machine – it’s removing a time-consuming job, so we can concentrate on other things. We don’t want AI to take our place in art. We want it to take our place in things that we don’t want to do so that we can create more. And because exactly.ai learns from you, not from other people, it’s even more efficient.

In my capacity as an art director, I believe that you need to be very clever and only use AI in the fields that are good for it. What exactly.ai does – the opportunity to create a model based on your own artwork – is useful because I often have to work with many artists, illustrators and designers on projects where we have created a very specific style for a brand. This is where exactly.ai can be used. You need an illustrator to create the style in the first place, then you can create a model and use this to help generate further illustrations.

For me, it’s really interesting to see models generate new images because the results push me forward. We all have boundaries, because we think we know ourselves – what we can and cannot do. But sometimes, you see something that looks like your work, but different somehow, and you realise: I can do this. Something fascinating happened when I created my first model using exactly.ai. When I was 20, I was a huge fan of Polish poster art – it’s a very specific aesthetic and I was incredibly inspired by it. Years later, I generated these images using exactly.ai and the results are basically Polish posters – down to the red, black and white colour palette. How did the AI find that influence in my work? It’s something that makes you think about how you create your art, and how to create something new.