Many people ask us: “Is this made by AI?” The answer is no. In the Merfs Art Poster Studio, you are the artist. Here is how it works, in plain words.
Is there an AI behind it?
No. There is no AI image generator in the studio. Nothing is learned from other people’s pictures, and no one else’s artwork goes into your poster. You do not type a wish and get a picture back. You make the picture yourself.
So how is the picture made?
Think of an old music box. Inside is a little drum with pins, and each pin plays a note. The music box does not invent a song; it follows what was put inside.
Our studio works the same way. Every style is a drawing recipe written by people: “draw a line here, make it thicker where the picture is dark, curve it a little to the right.” When you press a button, your own computer follows these instructions and draws your poster, line by line, right there in your browser.
What is p5.js?
The recipes are written with p5.js, a free toolkit for drawing with a computer. It was started by the artist Lauren Lee McCarthy and is looked after by the Processing Foundation, a non-profit organisation. Artists, designers, teachers and students all over the world use it to make pictures, animations and music.
You can think of p5.js as a box of brushes, rulers and compasses that a computer can hold. On its own it draws nothing. It needs someone to tell it what to draw.
Where do you come in?
Every recipe has knobs and switches, and they are all in your hands:
- What to show: pick a sun, mountains, water or stars, or use a photo of your own.
- How it looks: choose one of more than 100 styles, from fine lines to bold shapes.
- Colours: choose a palette, or keep the colours of your photo.
- The details: each slider changes how the lines are drawn: thicker or thinner, calmer or wilder.
- Your words: add a title, a place or a date.
- Your voice: you can even sing or hum a tune, and its notes shape some of the styles.
It is a bit like a piano. The piano makes the sound, but you play the music. The same settings always give the same poster. Change one thing, and you get a new one. That is why your poster looks the way it does: because you chose it.
Why this matters
Your poster was not picked from a catalogue, and it did not exist before you made it. There are millions of possible combinations, and yours is one of a kind. When you order a print, it is made just for you. You can also download your design for free.
An honest note
Like many small studios today, we used modern tools, including AI, to help write the program itself, the way a carpenter uses power tools to build a workbench. The pictures, however, are not generated by AI. They come from the drawing recipes and from the choices you make.