How the Work Is Made

A note on the tools, the people whose work made them possible, and the questions I don't have clean answers to.

The Monnaco Collection is made by one artist with the tools that exist in 2026, and some of those tools are AI. This page is for anyone who wants to know what that means in practice: how the work is made, what I think about the larger questions, and where I am still working things out.

It is here because the question deserves a real answer, and a real answer takes more than one line under a print.

The Eye, Then the Tools

The work begins with an eye trained over twenty years: Carnegie Mellon, fifty international architectural projects, the Hugh Ferriss Memorial Prize. That training is the part no tool can supply, and it shows in everything. The composition. The proportions. The way light is read. The decision about what stays and what goes.

The rendering uses AI image generation. The models change; the tools that give the best results this month are not the ones that did six months ago, and I expect that to keep being true. What does not change is how the work is directed. I write the light, the palette, the subject and the texture of the medium in words, run them many times, and reject most of what comes back. About six in ten never leave the studio. The ones that do get a slower pair of hands at the end. The Lens, the way of seeing that holds the collections together, is what is being applied at every step.

I say watercolor-inspired, never watercolor, about everything I publish. The work draws on the look of watercolor painting, but it is not made with paint and water, and the people who do make work with paint and water deserve language that keeps the difference clear.

What a Clean Process Means Here

The training data behind image models is contested, and I will come to that. What a working artist can do in the meantime is run her own process with care. Four standing commitments:

Clean prompts. Every prompt describes the picture: light, palette, subject, mood, composition, the texture of the medium. No prompt names a living artist, a brand, a recognizable person or a known work as a reference. The work is built from visual language, not from pointing at someone else's work and asking a tool to copy it.

Many versions, most rejected. Every published plate comes from a batch where most of the outputs were set aside. The choosing is where the standard lives. Anything that looks too polished, or oddly familiar, does not go out.

Reverse image search before publication. Hero images and a sample of every collection are checked against the web before they go live. It catches accidental likeness to existing work, and the rare case of a tool converging on something close to an image it was trained on.

A record of every plate. Prompts, versions and layered files are kept for every published piece. If a plate is ever questioned, the record is there.

These four do not answer every concern about AI image generation. They answer the ones I can, through my own process, which is the part I can take responsibility for.

What I Believe About the Larger Question

The training of large image models on artists' work, scraped without consent and without payment, is a real and unresolved problem. I do not think it is settled, and I do not think it is nothing. The artists who have raised it are right that something happened to their work that they did not agree to, and being visible on the open web is not the same as agreeing to be fed into a commercial system.

I would support better infrastructure: opt-in training sets, opt-out registries that hold, attribution standards, plain disclosure of what a model was trained on. Some of this is being built now, late and imperfectly. I hope it gets better, and I will move to tools built on better foundations as they become good enough to use.

I am not in a position to wait for that to be perfect before working. Like every artist using these tools today, I am working inside a situation the technology, the law and the industry have not sorted out. I am trying to do it with my eyes open.

What I Don't Have a Clean Answer For

There is one question I cannot fully resolve, and I would rather name it than pretend it isn't there.

When a café or a small hotel takes a set of illustrations from the Collection under a use agreement, that is a job an illustrator might otherwise have been hired for. Some of those businesses would never have hired one at any price; they would have used free stock, or nothing. For some real share of them that is true. Not for all. Some of what I do sits in a market where illustrators also work, and my being there changes it.

I do not think I am displacing anyone by being cheaper. The work has a particular sensibility and a standard that are mine, and a business that wants them is not shopping for the lowest number. But the markets overlap, and the overlap matters.

What I can offer is not a tidy answer. It is a way of working: clear about what this is, careful about how it is made, open about the questions I have not answered. I would rather be a studio that names the difficulty than one that pretends it away.

A Note on This Page

This page exists because the question is reasonable, and because anyone thinking about the work seriously, a buyer, a business, a fellow artist, deserves more than a marketing answer. If you have a question this page doesn't cover, or you think I have something wrong, write to me at ana@themonnacocollection.com. The conversation is part of how a position like this gets sharper over time.

Ana Carolina Mönnaco
Artist and Architectural Illustrator