Why I Built This Software

It's 2026 — so why are the tools illustrators use still the same as they were ten years ago?

— CreatorAris / ArisFusion Studio

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but among the mainstream painting apps illustrators rely on today, even the youngest is already 14 years old. Procreate launched in March 2011, Clip Studio Paint in May 2012, SAI in February 2008, Krita in June 2005, and Photoshop back in 1990 — 36 years ago. Among the mainstream companion tools, PureRef came in 2014 and Eagle in 2017, so even the youngest is barely 9 years old.

And what shape are the survivors in? SAI2 still has no official release, with its latest build from 2024. Procreate has all but frozen its updates since the AI explosion of 2022. CSP only squeezes out a little at a time each year. Krita's feature updates have gone from monthly releases every few months to one feature update every 29 months. Meanwhile? CSP no longer offers free updates and has moved entirely to a paid annual update model — and in China, Udongman is following suit. Adobe, Photoshop's parent company, has pivoted hard to generative AI and aggressively hiked prices along the way.

Wasn't AI supposed to empower production? So why is it illustrators who have eaten the worst of this era's downside?

Behind This Is a Vicious Cycle

The way I see it, this has to do with a particular trait of the illustrator community. Look next door at the explosion in the programming-tool AI ecosystem — why did tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex spring up like mushrooms after rain? Because programmers have a need and instinctively pay to solve it. Illustrators are a bit different: the moment people see paid software, someone shouts for it to be open-source and free, and many of the painting apps mentioned above are awash in cracked versions. That systematically built a high-demand, small-market tools industry. Here's a set of numbers: in 2025 the digital painting software market was roughly $2.1 billion, while the AI programming tools market was $7.37 billion — and that's just one subcategory of AI software development. From there it becomes a vicious cycle: demand and market drift further and further apart, and slowly we arrive at today's situation. Under these conditions, no rational large company will build tools for illustrators — they'll turn around and build tools to replace illustrators instead. Illustrators won't part with their money; the clients who hire illustrators spend freely.

But is this the illustrators' fault? In the AI wave, illustrators have been systematically excluded from the decisions, while one explosive productivity tool after another gets forced awkwardly into a workflow it doesn't fit — and few succeed. They either find they've wasted their effort, or they give up drawing altogether and turn to rolling the gacha. The middle-of-the-road camp gets it worst of all: the AI crowd derides them as inefficient, the traditionalists scorn them for polluting creation with AI, and consumers who spot any AI don't care whether you're a middle-grounder — they condemn you all the same. The notion that "illustrators are all secretly using AI to boost their output" has become the biggest elephant in the room; it looks more like a tech enthusiast's fantasy. The reality is that many illustrators haven't actually improved their productivity at all — otherwise why would a sizable share of them still be facing shrinking job opportunities, falling incomes, and even threats to their livelihood?

So I Built Nephele

So I decided to do something — for my fellow illustrators, and for myself as an illustrator who creates. I built a set of tools for illustrators that keeps creation systematically protected, to genuinely empower the illustrators who refuse to be replaced, in an era that keeps writing illustrators off. It's the Nephele series. It spans desktop, phone, and tablet, and offers agent orchestration, reference finding, asset organization, workflow automation, retrospective and evaluation tools, copyright and safety tools, and more. I want it to keep living, not to be finished and then thrown away — so it isn't free, but several of its parts are still MIT open-source. That's for your trust, for safety, and to make life easier for any developer who one day wants to build the same kind of tool.

Its stance comes down to one line:

Tools amplify the illustrator; they don't replace the illustrator.

— CreatorAris

Sources

A note on methodology: market-size figures come from third-party research firms and are not computed the same way as the illustrator-software market; they serve only as a directional comparison, with sources cited for each.

Tool release years: Procreate (2011), Clip Studio Paint (2012), SAI (2008), Krita (2005), Photoshop (1990), PureRef (2014), Eagle (2017) — from each product's official site plus Wikipedia and krita.org/release-history.

Update and pricing status:

• SAI Ver.2 has no official release; latest build 2024: systemax.jp/en/sai/devdept.html
• Krita 5.2 (2023-10) → 5.3 (2026-03), a 29-month gap: krita.org/en/release-history
• CSP revoked free updates under its perpetual license and switched to an Update Pass: consumerrights.wiki · clipstudio.net/en/updatepass; Udongman is the China edition of CSP and mirrors this model: udongman.cn
• Adobe's pivot to generative AI + 2025 price increases: Adobe official (Firefly) · AppleInsider

Market size:

• Digital painting software market 2025 ≈ $2.1 billion: Verified Market Reports · Future Market Insights
• AI code tools market 2025 ≈ $7.37 billion (a subcategory of "AI software development"): Mordor Intelligence

AI's impact on illustrators: roughly 32% have lost work because of AI (AOI 2025, 6,844 illustrators, worldillustrationawards.com); 26% lost jobs and 37% saw their income devalued (Society of Authors 2024). The claim that "illustrators broadly use AI to boost output" is overstated — the "86% of creators use AI" figure comes from a broadly framed, seller-side Adobe survey and should not be taken as representative of all illustrators.