AI assistants
Leonardo AI - the practical guide.
Leonardo AI is an AI image generation platform aimed at game artists, concept designers and marketers. It pairs a friendly UI with fine-grained controls including custom-trained models, ControlNet, image-to-image, in-painting, motion (short video) and prompt enhancements. A large community model gallery makes it easy to find and remix styles.
What Leonardo AI does
Leonardo AI is an AI image generation platform aimed at game artists, concept designers and marketers. It pairs a friendly UI with fine-grained controls including custom-trained models, ControlNet, image-to-image, in-painting, motion (short video) and prompt enhancements. A large community model gallery makes it easy to find and remix styles.
Who it's for
Game studios, concept artists, marketing creatives and indie developers who want stylised, on-brand imagery with more control than ChatGPT-DALL-E or Midjourney offer. Strong for character art, environments and consistent style sets. Less of a fit for casual users who want one-shot photo realism.
Pricing, in rough terms
Free tier with daily token allowance. Apprentice plan around $10/month, Artisan around $24/month and Maestro around $48/month, scaling tokens, fast generations, custom model training and commercial use. API plans available.
When Leonardo AI is the right fit
Right when you need stylised or game-art-style imagery, want to train a custom model on your own assets, or value features like ControlNet and in-painting. Wrong fit for typography-heavy designs (use Ideogram), or when Midjourney's specific aesthetic is the goal.
Watch-outs
Token costs scale fast with high-resolution and 'fast' generations. Custom model training is powerful but requires clean, copyright-safe training sets. Photo realism trails Midjourney v6/v7. Mobile UX is improving but still web-first.