Human-Made, On Purpose - The Handmade Advantage: Positioning Your Art in an AI World

1. Welcome & The Real Problem: Welcome to human made on purpose, the handmade Advantage positioning your art in an AI world. If you felt frozen scrolling past AI generated images, unsure how to compete, or even a little hesitant to bring up the topic at all, I want you to know this comes down to a design problem. Your positioning hasn't caught up to the world you're now working in, and that's something we can fix together in this class. This class is for illustrators, artists, and creatives who make things by hand and want to understand clearly why that still matters and how to say so with confidence. By the end, you'll have a written, honest, specific answer to the question. Why should someone choose my handmade work? You'll also have a simple plan for where to use that answer so it actually gets seen. This class is practical. Pause and work along as we go. Your class project will be a short positioning statement, paired with one piece of your art, plus a plan for where you'll share it first. Let's start by looking at what handmade actually means to the people buying and following your work because it's not what most of us assume. 2. What "Handmade" Actually Means to Buyers: In this lesson, we're going to slow down and really look at something most artists assume they already understand, but rarely take the time to actually define. What does handmade mean to the people who follow you, who buy from you, or who might buy from you someday? If we don't get specific here, everything else in this class will stay a little too abstract to be useful, so it's worth spending real time on this before we move forward. Let's start with a distinction that changes things once you see it clearly. There's emotional value and there's technical value. When someone chooses your handmade work over an AI generated image, they're responding to one of these, the other, or a mix of both, even if they couldn't put it into words themselves if you ask them directly. Technical value is the easier one to describe. It's skill, precision, mastery of a medium, the visible evidence of years of practice built up stroke by stroke. When someone looks at an incredibly detailed drawing and thinks, I can't believe someone's hand did that. That's technical value at work. It's admiration for capability, for the sheer time and repetition behind the result. Emotional value is quieter, but it's often more powerful in the long run. It's the sense that a real person with a real life and real history made a decision that shaped this particular piece. It's the feeling of connection or recognition that comes from knowing there's a story, a memory, or an intention sitting underneath what you're looking at. AI images can imitate a visual style convincingly, but they can't carry emotional value in the same way because there's no lived experience behind any of the choices being made. Here's the important part to sit with. People pay for time, not just the time it took to make the piece itself, but the time it took to become the kind of artist who could make it at all. They pay for risk, the risk you took making specific choices an algorithm never had to take, choices that could have gone wrong, but that you committed to anyway. They pay for taste, your accumulated sense of what looks right, built through years of looking, failing, and adjusting, and they pay for imperfection that carries intention, the small human touches that make a piece feel alive rather than flawless. Let's walk through three quick examples, so this stays concrete. One artist sells because people feel a strong emotional connection to her work. She paints family memories, often reimagined from old photographs clients send her. Buyers frequently tell her it feels like looking at their own childhood, even though she painted a stranger's memory entirely. Another artist sells almost entirely through technical mastery. His linework is extraordinarily precise, built from over a decade of daily practice. People are in awe of the skill itself and they sense the discipline behind it even without knowing the details. A third artist sells because of cultural specificity. Her paintings reflect a particular place and tradition she grew up within. People trust that specificity because they know she genuinely lived it, something no model trained on scraped images could ever authentically replicate. Notice that these three artists are selling three very different things, but each one is specific. None of them are selling not AI. They're selling something their audience can actually name and point to. Pause here. We now. Think back to comments, messages or conversations people have had about your work. Not compliments about skill alone, but comments about feeling, about connection, about something that's stuck with them. Write down three of these as close to the original wording as you can remember. Then look for a pattern across them, emotional connection, technical admiration, cultural specificity, or some mix of these. There's no wrong answer here. We're simply gathering honest evidence about what your audience already values, so we can build clear language around it later in this class. H. 3. Your Signature Style, Named: You may have already done deep work on finding your signature style in a previous class. If so, this lesson is a quick touch point to bring that work into our conversation about positioning rather than a full deep dive into something you've already explored. Your style isn't just how your work looks on the surface. It's a fingerprint made up of dozens of small consistent choices repeated across your body of work, your palette, your line quality, the subjects you return to, the mood you tend to create. None of these choices happen by accident, even when they feel intuitive in the moment. They add up to something recognizable, something that feels distinctly yours, even when the subject matter changes from piece to piece. Here's why this matters specifically for positioning. AI models can mimic a visual style once they've seen enough examples of it, sometimes convincingly so. What's much harder to mimic is the specific combination of choices that only makes sense given your personal history, your training, your influences, and your taste. That combination is your real signature, and it's worth naming clearly, not just feeling vaguely proud of it. If you've already done style work before, pull out whatever language you developed then. Maybe it was a written description, a mood board, or a list of recurring elements you noticed across your work. Bring that with you into this lesson because we'll use it again later when we build your positioning statement in Lesson seven. If you haven't done that work yet, here's a simple way to start. Imagine explaining your style to a stranger at a market stall, someone who has never seen your work before and has about 10 seconds of attention. What would you say? Not a technical breakdown, just the plain, honest version. Something like I draw loose colorful characters with a lot of texture and a slightly melancholic mood, or I paint tight, realistic portraits with unusual color choices that make familiar faces feel strange. Notice how specific and simple these examples are. They're not trying to sound impressive. They're just trying to be accurate. One more thing worth mentioning. You style will likely keep evolving and that's completely normal. This exercise isn't about locking yourself into a permanent description. It's about having language ready right now, language you can update later as your work grows and changes. Pause here right now. In one sentence, describe your style the way you'd explain it to that stranger at the market stall. Keep it simple and direct. Avoid jargon, and don't worry about making it sound polished. We just need something honest to build on. 4. The Story Behind the Work, Briefly: You may have already taken a full class on storytelling, so we'll keep this lesson focused enough to connect it clearly to positioning, rather than repeating ground you've already covered in depth elsewhere. Your story isn't your entire biography. It's not a full account of your childhood, your training, every teacher who influenced you or every hardship you've overcome. It's something much smaller, much more specific, and far more useful than that. It's the one thread that explains why this piece, why you, why now. A single thread pulled clearly and honestly, does far more work than a tangle of everything that's ever mattered to you as a person. Here's why this matters so much for positioning. A story, even a very short one, gives people a reason to trust that a real decision was made by a real person at a real moment in time. It doesn't need to be dramatic, tragic, or deeply personal to work. In fact, the simpler and more grounded it is, the more believable it usually feels. It just needs to be true and specific enough that it couldn't reasonably apply to anyone else. Here's a quick example. I made this piece after moving to a new city and feeling like I didn't belong yet. The loneliness is in the color palette. That's two sentences, nothing more. Notice what it does, and just as importantly, what it doesn't do. It doesn't explain the artist's whole life story. It doesn't try to sound poetic for its own sake. It simply gives one honest reason behind one specific creative choice, the color palette, and ties that choice to a real lived moment. That's enough to add trust. It's enough to make a stranger pause a little longer on the piece than they otherwise would have, because suddenly there's a person behind it, not just an image. A common mistake here is assuming the story needs to be impressive, unusual, or emotionally heavy in order to count. It doesn't chasing that kind of drama often backfires. Some of the most effective artist stories are quite ordinary on the surface. I made this because I couldn't stop thinking about a conversation with my grandmother is just as valid as a far more dramatic story, as long as it's genuinely true and genuinely yours to tell. The goal here is never to perform vulnerability for the sake of engagement. The goal is simply to be honest about the small, real reason behind the work, whatever that quietly happens to be. It's also worth noting that not every single piece needs its own individual story attached to it. Sometimes the more useful story is about your practice as a whole, rather than one specific piece. Why did you start working in this particular material? Why does a certain theme, color or subject keep quietly returning across your body of work piece after piece, year after year. Either version works perfectly well. What actually matters is that the story feels specific enough to be real rather than vague enough to feel like marketing language dressed up to sound meaningful. Pause here, right now, write one sentence about why you made your most recent piece, the real reason, not a polished, rehearsed version of the truth. If the real reason feels too small, too plain, or almost embarrassingly simple, that's usually a good sign. The plain, honest version is almost always more effective than something that sounds performed or overly composed. Keep this sentence nearby. We'll bring it back later in Lesson seven when we assemble your full positioning statement from everything you've written so far. 5. Naming What AI Can't Do: This lesson is the heart of the class, so we're going to slow down here and get specific rather than staying vague or relying on general reassurance that human art is better. Vague reassurance doesn't actually help you when you're sitting down to write about your own work. Let's walk through five categories worth thinking through carefully, one at a time. Each one points to something genuinely different between handmade work and AI generated work, not just in theory, but in practice. The first category is physical process and materials. This is the paint under your nails, the specific paper you chose, and why, the tool marks that only a hand moving in real space could ever leave behind. A brush stroke that varies slightly in pressure, a pencil line that gets heavier when you lean in. These are physical traces of a body doing something in real time, and they simply don't exist in the same way in a generated image. The second category is decision making under constraint. Every piece you make involves 1,000 small choices made under real limitations, time, materials, skill level at that moment, mood, deadline. Each of those constraints shaped a decision, and each decision shaped the next one. That chain of decisions made by you under real pressure is part of what gives a piece its specific character. The third category is cultural and personal context. This is the specific place, memory, tradition, or experience that shaped how you see and how you make. It's not something that can be borrowed or generated convincingly because it comes from having actually lived something. A pattern learned from a grandmother, a color palette shaped by a specific landscape you grew up in. These carry weight precisely because they're rooted in a real life. The fourth category is your relationship with the viewer over time. People can follow your growth, your consistency, your voice across months and years. Not just one isolated output. That ongoing relationship builds trust in a way a single image never could. Someone who has watched your work evolve feels invested in a way that's fundamentally different from someone glancing at a single generated result. The fifth category is accountability. You stand behind your work. You can explain it, defend a choice, discuss why something didn't work, and grow from that in public over time. That kind of visible accountability is part of what makes handmade work feel trustworthy. Let me give you two or three quick examples for each, so this stays concrete rather than abstract. A ceramicist points to the fingerprints literally pressed into the clay, visible proof of a hand shaping the material. An illustrator points to the way her characters have visibly evolved across five years of sketchbooks, a record no single image could show. A painter points to the specific dialect and folklore only someone from his region would know to include accurately. Details a generated image would likely get wrong or leave out entirely. Notice that none of these examples rely on saying, AI can't do this. They simply describe something true and specific about the artist's own process, which naturally makes the distinction clear without needing to argue for it directly. Pause here right now. Pick the two categories that feel truest for your own work and write one clear line for each describing exactly how that category shows up in what you make. Try to be as concrete as possible. Name a material, a memory, a habit, a specific decision rather than staying general. The more specific this is now, the easier lesson seven will be later. 6. Making Your Process Visible: Trust is built by showing, not just claiming. You can write the most convincing positioning statement in the world, but if nobody ever actually sees evidence of your process, it will always feel a little abstract to people, a claim rather than a demonstrated truth they can point to. This lesson is about simple, low effort ways to document your process without turning documentation into a second full time job stacked on top of your actual art practice, which is the last thing any of us needs. A phone photo of a work in progress counts as documentation. It doesn't need good lighting, a tidy studio or careful staging in the background. A short video of your hands at work counts, too. Even 15 seconds of you mixing paint or sketching a rough outline is enough to show a real process happening. A photo of a messy sketchbook page, a crossed out idea or a first attempt that didn't work out. These all count as well, and often they resonate with people more than a polished final image ever could because they feel honest rather than curated. None of this needs to be polished. Momentum over perfection applies here just as much as it applies to writing your positioning statement in an earlier lesson. A rough, honest, behind the scenes photo posted consistently will do more for your positioning over time than one perfect reel you spend three weeks planning and never quite finish editing because consistency builds trust in a way that occasional perfection never quite manages to. Think carefully about what documentation is actually proving to the people who see it. It's proving that a real hand at a real point in time, made real decisions, some of which worked well, and some of which clearly didn't. That imperfection is the proof itself, not a flaw you need to hide or apologize for. A viewer who sees three attempts before the final version understands almost instantly and without needing it explained that no algorithm produced this result in a single click. They understand it without you ever needing to say a single word about AI directly, which is often far more persuasive than stating it outright. Here's a simple way to build this into your existing routine, rather than adding an entirely new task that competes with your actual art making time. Every time you sit down to work, take one photo before you start seriously questioning whether the piece is good enough to show anyone. That single small habit, repeated consistently over weeks and months will give you a steady stream of process content without requiring extra time, extra planning, or extra creative energy later on. It also helps to think about variety without overcomplicating things. You don't need five different types of process content. One or two formats, repeated consistently, will serve you far better than trying to do everything at once and burning out after a week. Maybe you choose photos of your workspace and short video clips, and that's it. Choose what feels sustainable, not what looks most impressive on paper. Pause here, right now, list three process moments from your current or most recent project that you could have shown or still can show even after the fact. These might be a rough sketch, a failed color test, a photo of your workspace mid project, or even a photo of materials before you started. Anything that shows a real decision happening in real time counts here. 7. Writing Your Positioning Statement: Now, we bring everything together into one piece of writing. This is the lesson every earlier lesson in this class has been quietly building toward. So take your time here rather than rushing to finish it in one pass. Here's a simple formula to work from. I make type of work using process or materials. What makes it human is specific detail from lesson five. When you choose my work, you're getting emotional or practical value from Lesson two. Notice this formula doesn't ask you to invent anything new. It pulls directly from work you've already done in earlier lessons, your materials, your specific human detail, and the value your audience already responds to. You're not starting from a blank page. You're assembling pieces you've already written and already know are true. Let's hear two filled in examples from different art styles, so you can hear how flexible this formula really is across very different kinds of practice. I make watercolor portraits using traditional pigments and hand mixed paper. What makes it human is that every colour choice reflects a specific memory I'm trying to hold onto. When you choose my work, you're getting a piece that carries real emotional weight, not just a likeness. Here's a second example from a very different kind of practice. I make digital illustrations built from years of hand drawn sketches. What makes it human is the thousands of small decisions behind every line shaped by my own visual history. When you choose my work, you're getting a style that's genuinely mine, built over time, not generated in seconds. Notice, both examples are short, plain and specific. Neither one uses hype language, exclamation points or tries to sound impressive for its own sake. They simply state something true clearly and calmly. That's the tone you're aiming for as well, calm, direct and honest, rather than persuasive in a way that feels like marketing copy someone else could have written about anyone. If your first draft feels a little clumsy, too long, or slightly awkward, that's completely normal and expected at this stage of the process. First drafts almost always need trimming, and that's fine. Editing comes later, not now. Right now, the goal is simply to get something honest down on the page using the material you've already gathered across lessons two, three, four and five. Resist the urge to make it sound clever or polished on the first attempt. One thing worth watching for as you write, if a sentence could apply to almost any artist, it's too vague and it needs one more specific detail added to it. For example, what makes it human is my personal touch says almost nothing on its own. But what makes it human is that I mix every color by eye based on a memory rather than a reference photo, says something real and specific that only applies to you and your particular process. It also helps to read your draft aloud once you've written it, rather than only reading it silently in your head. Spoken language tends to reveal awkward phrasing much faster than silent reading does, and you'll often catch a line that sounds fine on the page but feels stiff the moment you actually say it out loud. If a sentence feels hard to say naturally, that's usually a sign worth trusting, and it's worth adjusting the wording until it flows more easily when spoken. Pause here. Write now. Write your first draft using the formula above, filling in each bracket with material from your earlier lessons. Don't edit yet. Just get it down on the page. Once it's written, read it back to yourself once out loud, if possible and notice, honestly whether it sounds like you or whether it sounds like you're trying to sound like someone else entirely. 8. Where This Statement Actually Goes: A statement nobody sees doesn't help you no matter how carefully written it is. So let's talk about placement in real detail and how to use one statement in several different forms, depending on where it appears, who's reading it, and how much time and attention they're likely to give it. Use the full version in your portfolios about section where people expect a bit more depth and are already interested enough in your work to keep reading past the first sentence, having clicked through specifically to learn more about you. Use a shortened version in your Instagram bio or as a pinned post where attention is limited, scrolling is fast and every single word needs to earn its place before someone moves on to the next thing in their feed without a second thought. Use a fuller version as your artist's statement for shops, markets or gallery submissions, where a more complete explanation is often expected and sometimes explicitly requested as a required part of an application form. And keep a short spoken version ready for in person conversations at a market stall, a studio visit, or a client call, where you'll need to say this out loud naturally without reading from a script or sounding like you memorized it word for word the night before. Here's a quick example of the same statement adapted for two different platforms, so you can hear the difference clearly in practice, rather than just imagining it in the abstract. The full portfolio version might run three full sentences explaining process, humanity, and value in some detail, giving the reader time to absorb each part slowly, one idea at a time. The Instagram version might shrink to a single line, something like hand mixed watercolor portraits built from real memory, not generated in seconds. Same core idea compressed down to what matters most for a fast scrolling audience who won't read past the first few words if it doesn't immediately land. It helps to think of your positioning statement less like a fixed piece of text you write once and never touch again and more like a message you can resize, depending on the space you're given, much like a photograph that gets cropped differently depending on where it's displayed. A wide banner across the top of a website versus a small square thumbnail on a phone screen. The core idea stays exactly the same in every version, only the length and framing change to fit the platform and the amount of attention you can reasonably expect from someone encountering it there in that specific moment. It's also worth thinking carefully about tone shifts between platforms, not just length. Your portfolio version can afford to sound slightly more reflective and considered since someone reading it has already chosen to spend real time on your site rather than passing by quickly. Your spoken version, on the other hand, needs to sound like something you'd actually say out loud in a real conversation, not something that was clearly written first on paper and then read aloud stiffly. If it sounds awkward or overly formal when spoken, simplify it further until it feels natural coming out of your mouth in your own normal speaking voice. A practical tip worth remembering here, write your spoken version last after you've already written the longer versions and say it out loud several times in a row until it feels like something you genuinely say to a curious stranger at a market table rather than a rehearsed elevator pitch you're reciting from memory. The goal is for it to sound like you talking naturally, not like you performing a statement you wrote weeks earlier and haven't thought about since. If a friend or family member is nearby, try saying it to them once and notice how it feels leaving your mouth in real time. It's also worth building a small habit around this over time. Every few months, revisit your statement across each platform and check whether it still feels accurate to where you are now as an artist. Your work will keep evolving and your statement should be allowed to evolve alongside it rather than staying frozen exactly as it was the day you first wrote it in this class. Pause here right now, pick your top two platforms, the ones you actually use most often or expect to use soon and adapt your statement for each one specifically, adjusting both length and tone as needed for that particular audience. Read both versions aloud once you've written them and check honestly that they still sound like you, even at a shorter length or in a more casual spoken form, rather than sounding like a stranger wrote them for you. 9. Handling Pushback and Doubt: Let's prepare you for the moments when someone questions this or when your own inner critic quietly does the same thing, usually at a much less convenient time, often late at night or right before you post something new. Common worries sound like this. What if people don't care? Or what if AI images still get more engagement, no matter what I say about my process? These are honest, understandable worries, not signs that something is wrong with you or your work. You're not wrong that some audiences won't care about the distinction between handmade and generated work. Some people simply want an image quickly and cheaply, and that's not a battle worth fighting. But some audiences absolutely will care, and those are exactly the audiences you're speaking to with this statement. It helps to remember that positioning is a long game, not a one post fix. You're not trying to win an argument in a single caption or convince every skeptical commentator in one exchange. You're building a consistent signal repeated over time across many small moments that gradually shapes how people perceive your work as a whole. One post won't do this. 20 posts over several months quietly will. Readiness doesn't arrive before you start. It arrives because you started. The same is true here. Confidence in talking about your process builds through repetition, not through waiting until it feels completely natural and easy. The first few times you mention your process publicly, it may feel a little exposed or slightly uncomfortable. That discomfort tends to fade quickly once you've done it a handful of times, and it becomes just another normal part of how you talk about your work. If someone asks directly, isn't this AI, it helps enormously to have a calm, prepared response ready, rather than improvising something defensive in the moment, which often comes across as flustered, even when the underlying answer is simple and true. A calm response might sound like, No, this is entirely hand painted. Here's a photo of it partway through, paired naturally with one of the process images you gathered back in Lesson six, calm, factual and backed by visible proof, rather than an emotional or defensive reaction. Notice that this response doesn't argue, doesn't get upset, and doesn't try to convince anyone of anything. It simply states a fact and offers evidence. That combination is almost always more persuasive than an impassioned defense would be. It's also worth accepting clearly and without resentment that not everyone needs to be convinced. Some people simply don't value handmade work the way you do, and that's all right. It doesn't reflect badly on you or your work. Your positioning statement isn't meant to convert every single viewer who happens to scroll past. It's meant to clearly signal your value to the people who already care or who are genuinely open to caring once it's explained to them clearly and calmly. One more thing worth mentioning here, doubt tends to get quieter with practice, not louder. The more times you say your statement out loud, post a process photo or answer a skeptical question calmly, the less charged each individual moment feels. This is simply how confidence works for most people. It's built through small repeated actions, not through waiting for a feeling of certainty that arrives before you've done anything at all. Pause here right now. Write one calm confident response you could give if someone asks, Isn't this AI? Keep it short, factual and free of defensiveness, and pare it in your mind with a specific process image you could show alongside it. Practice saying it out loud once or twice right now, so it feels natural rather than rehearsed the next time you actually need it in a real conversation. 10. Assemble & Class Project: Et's put everything together now. Go back to your formula from Lesson seven and read your finished positioning statement aloud once, slowly, all the way through, giving each sentence its full weight rather than rushing to the end. Notice how it sounds now compared to when you first drafted it back in Lesson seven. It likely feels more settled, more specific, and more genuinely yours than it did in that first rough attempt because it's been shaped by everything you've written since then. That's the effect of building something piece by piece across several lessons, rather than trying to write it all at once from nothing in a single sitting. Each small pause and each written line has quietly added up to something more solid than it would have been otherwise. Here's the exact project upload for this class. Share your final positioning statement as text, one image of the piece of art it represents, and one sentence describing where you'll share it first, your portfolio, your bio, or an artist statement for an upcoming market or show. Keep this simple. You don't need a polished presentation, elaborate formatting, or a perfect photo. Just the honest pieces put together clearly exactly as you've written them across this class. If you're unsure which version to share, the portfolio version from Lesson eight is usually the safest choice, since it carries the fullest picture of your thinking, but any version you feel proud of is the right one to post. There's no single correct answer here, only the version that feels most honestly like you right now at this point in your practice. Thank you for doing this work with me throughout this class. You don't need to convince everyone who scrolls past your work in a feed full of competing images. You just need to be clear, honest, and consistent about what makes your work yours. That's enough. It's always been enough. Even on the days it doesn't quite feel that way, even when the numbers don't immediately reflect it. Come back to this class anytime you need to remember why your handmade art matters, whether that's next week, next month or next year, when the landscape around AI art has shifted yet again and you find yourself needing to explain your value in new terms. The work you've done here doesn't expire, and neither does the value of what you make with your own two hands, your own choices, and your own history behind every piece. 11. Thank you & Recommended Additional Courses: Before we wrap up completely, I want to take a moment to share where you can keep going if this class was useful to you and you'd like more support with your art practice beyond positioning alone. This class focused specifically on positioning on helping you name what makes your handmade work valuable and communicate that clearly. But positioning is just one piece of a much larger picture, and I have a few other classes that cover the pieces we only touched on briefly here. If you found Lesson three useful, the one on signature style, and you'd like to go much deeper into discovering and defining your own visual voice, I have a full class dedicated entirely to that process with more time, more prompts, and more space to really dig in. Similarly, if Lesson four on storytelling left you wanting more, I also have a full class focused specifically on artist storytelling, walking through how to find, shape, and share the stories behind your work in far greater depth than we had room for here. Both of these classes pair naturally with what you've just done in this course, since positioning, style, and storytelling all work together to build a complete, honest picture of who you are as an artist. You can find all of my classes together in one place on my Skillshare teacher profile. Just search for art By Ricarda on Skillshare or visit skillshare.com slash slash slash art Ricarda see the full list. Each class follows the same practical approach you've experienced in this one, clear prompts, real pause and work moments, and one useful deliverable by the end rather than hours of theory without anything to actually show for it. If you enjoyed this class, following my profile is the easiest way to hear about new classes as soon as they're released, since I'm adding new topics regularly based on what artists tell me they're struggling with most. And if you have a specific topic you'd like to see covered in a future class, I genuinely welcome that feedback. Many of my classes exist because someone asked for exactly that. Pause here right now, if you'd like. Take a moment to think about which part of your art practice feels the shakiest right now, style, story, marketing, pricing, or something else entirely. That answer might point you toward exactly which class to explore next, whether it's one of mine or simply the next thing you choose to work on in your own practice. Thank you again for spending this time with me. I'll see you in the next class.