Books made for the artists who are still in the room.

What we believe

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.

Three commitments

1. We will never use AI to generate the artwork on our covers or in our marketing. The work you see from Leda is made by people — our founders, our photographers, and the artists in our community.
2. We will never pass AI-generated work off as a human artist's. When we feature a Brand Ambassador or a customer's sketchbook, that work was made by a human hand. We verify it.
3. We will never train a model on our community's artwork without explicit, opt-in permission. The drawings people share with us belong to them.

What this isn't

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