Blunge x Luci Everett: An Illustrator’s Journey with Blunge
Discover how Melbourne-based illustrator Luci Everett integrates Blunge's AI tools into her creative process, enhancing her workflow while maintaining artistic integrity. Learn about her journey from traditional illustration to embracing ethical AI in art.
Feb 18, 2025
Contents
Meet Luci Everett: Senior Illustrator and Graphic DesignerWhat’s your artistic process?How do you feel about AI in art and Blunge’s approach to ethical AI?What made you want to try Blunge?How was the experience of creating your own AI model?How do you use Blunge in your creative process?What features do you find most useful?How much time does Blunge save you?Want to see more of Luci’s illustrations and designs? Meet Luci Everett: Senior Illustrator and Graphic Designer
Luci Everett is a Melbourne-based Graphic Designer and Illustrator with a strong background in visual storytelling. She originally studied Graphic Design and immediately started freelancing, where illustration gradually became a bigger part of her work. Now, she balances both disciplines, with her work being roughly 80% graphic design and 20% illustration.
Check out: 🌐 Luci's Website and 📸 Luci's Instagram
What’s your artistic process?
I love creating art by hand. I aim for a textural, organic feel, even though my final work is digital.
My style shifts depending on the client, but my process is always the same—I start by gathering reference images and inspiration. I used to rely on tools like Pinterest for this, but now I use Blunge as well.
Once I have a direction, I sketch compositions by hand in black and white, then scan them in to create vector artwork. Before coming across Blunge, I hadn’t really used AI in my artistic process.
How do you feel about AI in art and Blunge’s approach to ethical AI?
AI is a bit of a concern for creatives. I see it as a tool rather than something that replaces artists. It’s similar to digital art—you still need experience and taste to make something good, so AI is just another paintbrush in an artist’s toolkit.
One of my biggest concerns is that AI could eventually get so good that someone could take a few pieces of my artwork online, train a model on them and remove me from the process entirely.
That’s why I appreciate how Blunge manually verifies ownership before allowing artists to train a model. It reassures me that my work is protected and aligns with my concerns as an illustrator.
“Knowing Blunge protects my work makes me feel more in control of how AI is creeping into the creative industry.”
What made you want to try Blunge?
I had tried other image-generation tools designed to work with an artist’s style, but they didn’t come close to producing results that matched my work. Some allowed users to upload an image for reference, but they still fell short.
The fact that Blunge was designed specifically to train on an artist’s own work was what made me interested in trying it.
How was the experience of creating your own AI model?
I was surprised at how accurately Blunge replicated my style, particularly in capturing the feel of my work and nailing the color palette.
Sometimes, I have a composition in mind but use Blunge to generate different perspectives. In this way Blunge is like a tool ‘inside my head’ which kickstarts the creative process. It also has the potential to inspire completely new ideas by generating unexpected outputs in my style. This has helped me view my art from a different perspective and given me fresh creative ideas.
“Blunge is like having a version of yourself as your own art assistant. It’s a bit like your own hands and brain, with a few surprises.”
How do you use Blunge in your creative process?
One of the most useful things about Blunge is that it helps me keep my portfolio fresh. I don’t always have time to create new pieces just for social media and honestly, updating Instagram can sometimes feel like a chore. With Blunge, I can generate images in my style, tweak them, and post them as part of my portfolio—it’s still my work, just faster.
It’s also a great tool for brainstorming. When I’m working on freelance gigs, I need to develop visual themes that match the story or concept. Before, I’d spend ages scrolling Pinterest for ideas—now I use a mix of Blunge and traditional tools, which speeds things up a lot.
Another key benefit is the element of surprise. I love the element of surprise with the output, where it gives me ideas or presents artwork in a way that I hadn’t thought of previously. I also occasionally struggle to create certain objects and scenes in my style and Blunge has pushed me to be more creative and push my style further.
“I definitely recommend Blunge to anyone who wants to experiment with new workflows, it’s a lot of fun and it’s really easy to keep your creative output flowing.”
What features do you find most useful?
The ability to train a personal model has been the most useful feature for me. I also appreciate the inpainting tool, which allows me to tweak specific regions of an image, as well as the option to generate variations of artwork I like.
Blunge’s built-in prompt optimization has also been helpful. Since prompting is its own skill, I found it interesting that Blunge automatically refines prompts to produce the best possible results, making prompting super simple.
How much time does Blunge save you?
For concepting, Blunge significantly speeds up the process of generating reference images in my style. Sometimes finding references manually is quick, but other times it takes hours—Blunge provides is consistent. On average, I save about an hour per creation.
When it comes to generating final images for my portfolio, Blunge saves me even more time—on average, around 3-4 hours per image. Having the ability to quickly create images in my style means I can keep my portfolio updated more consistently, something I struggled with before due to time.
“The best thing about Blunge is how quickly I can create something quite close to final output that would otherwise take me several hours.”
Want to see more of Luci’s illustrations and designs?
Check out her portfolio on her website or follow her on Instagram for her latest work. For enquiries about private commissions contact Luci at [email protected].
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