Tuesday night, and a message come in about a character I already draw twice. It is a small commission, the anime-style kind people put on a badge or a keychain, and the client do not write that it is perfect. They write that the hair can be shorter, and that the head need to turn. I read it twice, because it is such an ordinary sentence and such a specific kind of work.
I spend the afternoon watching people type one line into an AI tool and receive a whole character before my pencil is even sharp. The pictures are smoother than mine. The eyes match. Nothing hesitate. They also look as if they belong to a crowd instead of a person, which is a strange kind of success: being so finished that nobody can point to a place and say “not like that.”
So I shorten the hair. Then I turn the face. The third version is the one they keep, and it is not the cleanest of the three. One ear is still a little large. They do not mention the ear, so I leave it. What they pay for is not the most polished file. They pay for the fact that I will sit at this desk and move a line until it match someone they can already see, someone the generator never meet.
In Business we call this customisation, as if it is a box you tick on a form. On my desk it is the whole product. An AI image arrive already sure of itself, and if the left hand is wrong you do not really correct it. You ask again, and you get a different stranger. A commission is slower. It is also a conversation with paper in the middle, which sound inefficient until you notice that the inefficiency is what people are buying.
I used to think this kind of work will vanish as soon as the pictures get prettier. Some of it will, I think: the part that only need a pretty picture, and do not need a reply. The messages I still get are not about pretty. They are about “a bit more like her,” which is an instruction a perfect image cannot hear. It do not know her. It do not know how to be slightly wrong on purpose, and then slightly less wrong, and then stop.
The files live in a folder called commissions, which is a more serious name than this desk deserve. Tomorrow I have Maths, which will not ask me to move a hand. I am keeping the large ear. It is the proof that a person was holding the pencil, and that someone, somewhere, still want that.