What are the best AI platforms for creating digital paintings? Here is an easy-to-follow guide to the best AI platforms for digital paintings in 2025-2026
Digital painting used to mean hours with a stylus and patience. Today, AI art platforms let creators jump from blank canvas to a finished painting in minutes — while still keeping control over style, brushwork, and mood.
Why choose an AI platform for digital painting?
AI tools speed up idea exploration, help non-artists visualize concepts, and provide pro-level results for illustrators, concept artists, and marketers. They’re especially useful for:
- Experimenting with styles (oil, watercolor, anime, impressionist) quickly.
- Generating reference images or base layers to paint over.
- Producing high-resolution assets for web and print.
Below I list the top platforms, what makes each one strong for digital painting, and practical tips to get the best outputs. The best AI platforms for creating digital paintings in 2025 include Neta, Midjourney, Stability AI, Adobe Firefly, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 3.
1) Midjourney — best for artistic, painterly outputs
Why it stands out: Midjourney is widely praised for producing rich, painterly, and stylized images that often look like genuine digital paintings straight out of an artist’s studio. It’s ideal if your goal is expressive, mood-heavy artwork rather than strict photorealism. Midjourney
Best for: concept artists, illustrators, social-media-ready artwork, mood boards.
Pros: very strong artistic aesthetic, active community on Discord, flexible prompt modifiers for painterly textures.
Cons: subscription-based, Discord-based workflow can feel odd if you prefer a web app.
Tips: add modifiers like “oil paint texture, visible brush strokes, warm cinematic lighting, 4k” to steer it toward classic digital-painting looks.
2) DALL·E 3 (OpenAI) — best for precise composition & idea iteration
Why it stands out: DALL·E 3 offers excellent prompt comprehension and tight control over composition and details — useful when you need a clear scene or character in a specific pose. It also integrates with prompt refinement.
Best for: illustrators who want accurate layouts, publishers, and creators needing quick iterations.
Pros: strong text-to-image alignment, easy editing workflows (in some apps), increasingly available across platforms.
Cons: outputs can be more clinical than painterly out of the box — add style descriptors to get a painterly result.
Tips: ask for “painted with broad brushstrokes” or “oil painting style, canvas grain” in the prompt; use AI tools to expand your prompt into a more creative, painterly description.
3) Stable Diffusion (SDXL / DreamStudio) — best for control & local workflows
Why it stands out: Stable Diffusion offers flexible deployment options (cloud or local) and model variants like SDXL that deliver high-quality images with editable parameters. Tools built on Stable Diffusion (DreamStudio, AUTOMATIC1111) are popular for fine-tuning and iterative, layered workflows.
Best for: power users who want fine control, people who want to run models locally, and teams worried about custom models or privacy.
Pros: highly customizable, strong community-made plugins (inpainting, upscalers), many style models available.
Cons: steeper learning curve if you self-host; results vary by model and checkpoint.
Tips: use image-to-image + high cfg scale for painterly refinement; experiment with fine tuned “brushstroke” checkpoints or LoRAs that emphasize canvas texture and paint flow.
4) Adobe Firefly — best for commercial projects & integration with creative apps
Why it stands out: Firefly is built for creators who need commercial rights and integration with Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator. Adobe’s platform focuses on safe, licensable outputs and now also includes third-party model access via Adobe’s interface. That makes Firefly a strong choice for designers making client work and assets for publication.
Best for: professional designers, marketing teams, and anyone who needs commercial licensing and easy handoff to Photoshop.
Pros: commercial-friendly licensing, integrates with Adobe Creative Cloud, supports generative edits in familiar apps.
Cons: credit model for generation and some features behind subscription tiers.
Tips: generate base paintings in Firefly, then refine brushes and layers inside Photoshop for a true hand-painted finish.
5) Leonardo.ai — best for speed and style customization
Why it stands out: Leonardo.ai combines user-friendly UIs with style-focused model options (anime, fantasy, realistic). It’s growing fast among illustrators who want quick style experiments and templates for character art or concept scenes. Leonardo AI+1
Best for: character designers, indie game artists, people who want style blueprints they can reuse.
Pros: templates, upscalers, canvas-like editors and team features; API for automation.
Cons: newer than some competitors — features change rapidly.
Tips: use “blueprints” and style-presets to lock a consistent look across multiple images (great for a series of paintings).
How to get painterly results (practical prompt & workflow tips)
- Start with the style: include descriptors like “oil painting,” “visible brush strokes,” “impasto,” “watercolor bleed,” or artist-reference styles (use sparingly to avoid copyright issues).
- Specify materials & canvas: “on linen canvas, warm underpainting, soft glazing” nudges the model to simulate traditional painting techniques.
- Lighting & composition: “Rembrandt lighting,” “soft side light,” or “golden hour” helps set mood. Add “rule of thirds composition” or “foreground-middle-ground-background” for clarity.
- Iterate with image-to-image: generate a base, then refine using inpainting tools to increase detail or change brushwork.
- Post-process in an editor: use Photoshop, Procreate, or Affinity to add real brush textures, layer blending, and hand-painted details.
Additional notable platforms often mentioned are Pixci for realistic images, Starry AI for vibrant customizable artwork, and OpenArt for a broad range of advanced artistic tools and model fine-tuning.
Each of these platforms caters to different needs, from concept artists and illustrators seeking artistic depth to professionals requiring integration with existing design software and advanced customization features.
Quick comparison table (short)
- Artistic / Painterly: Midjourney > Leonardo.ai > NightCafe
- Precise composition / iterations: DALL·E 3 > Adobe Firefly
- Custom & local control: Stable Diffusion (DreamStudio / self-hosted)
- Commercial workflows / Adobe integration: Adobe Firefly
Final thoughts
There isn’t a single “best” platform for every painter — the choice depends on whether you want painterly flair, exact composition control, local model runs, or tight commercial licensing. For expressive, gallery-ready digital paintings, Midjourney and Leonardo.ai are top picks. For tight control and iteration, DALL·E 3 and Stable Diffusion (SDXL) are excellent. If you need seamless professional workflows and licensing, Adobe Firefly ties into a trusted creative stack. Use the tips above to guide prompts and post-processing, and always check licensing before selling or distributing AI-generated art. Leonardo AI+4Midjourney+4OpenAI+4
These are just a few examples of the many ways that you can create art with AI. The field of AI-generated art is constantly evolving, so there are sure to be many new and exciting tools and techniques in the years to come
