Professional Illustrator Steve McDonald Builds a Bridge Between Traditional Illustration Craft and the Age of AI Art

Steve McDonald is an award-winning Canadian illustrator, a founding member of the artist collective Drawnonward, and an international bestselling author with Chronicle Books, now working at the intersection of traditional illustration and AI-assisted art.

McDonald graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design in 1992 and spent two decades with Drawnonward, a Canadian collective whose work was the subject of two CBC documentaries and the Genie-nominated film “Seven Painters, Seven Places.” Between 2015 and 2017 he created over 350 drawings for Chronicle Books’ “Fantastic” coloring book series (Fantastic Cities, Structures, Collections, Planet, and Machines), which became an international bestseller published in more than 30 countries — Fantastic Cities alone sold over half a million copies and is considered one of the first modern adult coloring books. His detailed, densely-lined architectural and landscape fantasy work has been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Architectural Digest, and CBS Sunday Morning, and he describes his influences as ranging from Moebius and Hayao Miyazaki to Norman Rockwell and Frank Frazetta.

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In recent years McDonald has openly embraced AI as part of his toolkit, blending custom diffusion models, Midjourney rendering, and hand-painted Photoshop work into what he calls “old-school art with new-school tools” — while positioning himself as “pro-artist” rather than simply pro-AI, emphasizing consent, credit, and compensation for creators as the technology spreads. He’s also a Pixar guest instructor and runs recurring illustration and AI-image-crafting courses, alongside a satirical illustration series critiquing wealth and celebrity culture.