How Do I Know If a Colouring Book Uses AI or Real Art?
A reader message I keep seeing variations of: "I bought a colouring book online and something felt off about it, but I can't explain why." That feeling is usually worth trusting.
There's no single tell that proves a book is AI-generated. It's more a collection of small things that, once you notice one, you start noticing the rest.
Start with the windows
Genuinely, this is the fastest check. Any illustration with a row of windows - a terrace, a church, an old factory building - is a good test case. Look at window three and window seven. In hand-drawn work they'll be similar but not identical, because a person drew them both and didn't trace the first one perfectly. In AI-generated work they're often suspiciously close to identical, then occasionally one will have an extra pane, or a frame that doesn't quite join up at the corner. The inconsistency in the wrong places is the giveaway, not the consistency.
I've done this with maybe a dozen books now just out of curiosity and it works more often than not.
Look at where two lines meet
Hand-drawn illustration nearly always has clean junctions - where a roofline meets a wall, where a railing meets a gatepost. The artist drew it knowing those two lines needed to connect properly. AI-generated work sometimes has lines that almost meet but don't quite, or that overlap slightly in a way that looks like a rendering glitch rather than an artistic choice. Small thing, but once you've spotted it once you'll see it everywhere.
Check if it's actually the place it claims to be
This one's specific to books like ours that are based on real towns and landmarks, but it applies to a lot of what's out there now. Search a photo of the real building or street. Compare it side by side with the illustration.
A proper illustrator working from reference photos will get the layout broadly right - how many storeys, roughly where the door sits, the general proportions. AI tools still really struggle with this. You'll often get something that's vaguely castle-shaped, or vaguely cathedral-shaped, but doesn't actually match the real building in any specific way. If the seller is claiming it's a depiction of somewhere real and it doesn't resemble that place at all, that's about as close to a confirmed answer as you'll get without contacting them directly.
Read the listing, not just look at the pictures
This sounds obvious but it's worth doing properly. Does the seller mention an illustrator by name? Do they talk about the process at all - sketching, hand-inking, how long a page takes? Sellers working with real artists tend to want to talk about it, because it's a genuine point of difference and they know it.
Listings that only describe the finished product - "40 intricate designs," "hours of relaxation" - without ever mentioning who made it or how, are worth a slightly closer look. Not proof of anything on their own. Just a flag.
Zoom in properly, not just glance
Most marketplace listings let you zoom into sample images. Actually do it, rather than judging from the thumbnail. AI-generated detail tends to look genuinely impressive at a normal viewing size and starts falling apart the closer you look - texture that doesn't actually represent anything specific, foliage that's pattern rather than leaves, brickwork that repeats in an odd rhythm.
Hand-drawn work usually holds up the other way round. Sometimes a hand-drawn page looks a bit plain or sparse as a thumbnail and then reveals genuinely careful detail once you zoom in - because the artist was drawing for someone holding a pencil two inches from the page, not for someone scrolling past on a phone.
Reviews, if there are any
Worth a quick scan, particularly if anyone's mentioned printing quality, paper bleed, or specifically said something like "lovely illustrations, really detailed." People don't usually write that about AI-generated pages, mostly because there's nothing particularly memorable to say about them.
None of this is a perfect system
I want to be honest that none of these checks are foolproof on their own. A skilled illustrator might draw something slightly imperfect that you mistake for an AI quirk. An AI tool might, by chance, produce something reasonably coherent. Stack two or three of these checks together though and you'll usually land on a fairly confident answer.
And to be fair, not every AI-generated book is bad, and not every hand-drawn book is brilliant. This isn't really about quality in absolute terms. It's about knowing what you're actually buying, so you can make that decision with your eyes open rather than just trusting the marketing copy.
Every illustration in our Britain In Lines books is hand-drawn by a commissioned artist working from real photographs of the towns and landmarks featured - genuinely no AI tools anywhere in the process, start to finish. You're welcome to zoom right in on the sample pages in our colouring book collection and judge for yourself.
