Generative AI imagery has its place. The thing that happens between a person, a pen, and a piece of paper does not. We make books for the people doing the second one.
Leda exists because two people couldn't find a sketchbook good enough for the work they wanted to do by hand. Drawing by hand — observing the world and rendering it through your own eye, your own mistakes, your own slow attention — is the entire reason this company is here. We are not neutral about it.
We think generative AI is a real tool with real uses. We also think the flood of machine-generated imagery makes the case for the handmade stronger, not weaker. A sketchbook is a record that a person was somewhere, looked hard, and made something only they could make. That is worth defending.
This isn't a purity test for our customers. Use whatever tools serve your practice — reference, ideation, admin, whatever. Plenty of working artists we admire use AI somewhere in their process. Our commitment is about how we represent human art, not about policing yours.
If that matters to you the way it matters to us, you're who we make these for.
— GJ & Teresa Gillespie
Every Leda sketchbook is reviewed by a working artist before it ships.
Shop sketchbooks