Franki Domino is an AI art professional with a parallel career most AI artists don’t have. He’s spent twenty years as an illustrator specializing in collage, working under his own name, Julien Pacaud. That dual background shows.

His AI work spans a wide range, from elegant surrealism to timeless portraiture. He brings a rare sensitivity to composition and detail — easy to spot, harder to name. His output is prolific, yet never repetitive.

The result: refined, editorial-ready AI art images. Art buyers in advertising, publishing and press tend to notice them immediately.

In the interview that follows, Franki Domino shares where his inspiration actually comes from. It’s not where you’d expect. He also offers advice for anyone starting out in AI art. Advice that runs against most of what gets said on the subject.

He’s an artist worth following. His AI art portfolio, in particular, stands as a model of what a coherent, gallery-ready body of work can look like.

Introduction

Could you introduce yourself? Tell us about your profession and artistic background. How long have you been using generative AI, and do you use it professionally?

I’m Franki Domino, aka Julien Pacaud, or perhaps the other way around. I live in Paris and I’ve been working as an artist and illustrator for a little over twenty years. Under my real name, I’ve mainly developed a practice based around digital collage, following two parallel paths: commissioned illustration for magazines, advertising, publishing and other fields, and a more personal body of work.

I started exploring generative AI art about four or five years ago. At first, it simply became another element in my collage practice. Rather than working exclusively with old photographs, scans or images found online, I began generating some of the elements myself, then cutting them out and incorporating them into my compositions.

Then, around 2023, I started developing series made entirely with AI. It allowed me to explore a much broader range of visual territories and styles.

That’s when Franki Domino came into being, initially for a very practical reason: I wanted to avoid creating confusion with my work as Julien Pacaud, a name my clients have long associated with a fairly recognizable collage style.

Today, the two practices coexist.

AI art tools

Which AI art tools do you use most? Do you have a particular method, settings, workflows or habits that people might not necessarily expect?

I mainly use Midjourney because it’s still the tool that gives me the most freedom to explore very different stylistic directions, photography, drawing, painting, but above all all kinds of hybrids between those visual languages.

Midjourney don’t always offer the same final quality as tools like ChatGPT or Nano Banana, but I find those tools less interesting for pure exploration. So increasingly, my process involves moving from one tool to another.

The initial ideas and generations usually come from Midjourney, and then I might take an image into ChatGPT to refine it, improve its quality, correct specific elements, or combine several images into a more complex composition.

Midjourney is very good at producing surprises, but much less so when you’re trying to achieve something extremely precise. And that element of surprise is actually very important to me. I rarely use long, descriptive prompts. My text prompts are often very short and deliberately vague. I prefer not to define the image too precisely in advance.

What I do spend a great deal of time on is researching styles and combining them. I’ve even developed a small tool that allows me to archive SREF codes I find interesting and then mix them, sometimes deliberately, sometimes randomly.

This allows me to bring together aesthetics that seemingly have very little in common and see what emerges from the collision.

It’s a fairly long process and it generates a huge number of images. Most of them don’t interest me. But every now and then, something appears that I couldn’t have anticipated, and that’s usually where the real work begins.

On inspiration

Where do you draw your inspiration from? Artists, art movements, images, emotions? What feeds your visual universe?

It would be very difficult for me to make a precise list of my influences, and I think it would probably be quite reductive anyway. Like any artist, I’ve accumulated a huge number of references over time: visual art, cinema, music, literature, photography, memories… Eventually, all of this forms a kind of magma, an inner world that I draw from fairly unconsciously.

That’s why I’d rather not single out particular names. I would inevitably leave people out, but more importantly, I don’t think you need to know my references in order to connect with my images.

Certain influences might be obvious to someone who shares my visual culture, while someone else might bring completely different references to the same image.

Ultimately, you could think of it as a huge internal database built up over the course of a lifetime. It contains what we love, but also what we dislike, our attractions as much as our rejections. All of that helps shape the way we see things and the choices we make.

On research

How do you organize your visual research? Do you use websites, portfolios or specific tools as references or to discover new things?

Honestly, not much, actually. In my collage work, searching for images is obviously essential. I spend a lot of time looking for photographs and other elements that I can cut out, transform and recompose.

I spend relatively little time looking at what other people are doing and a great deal of time generating, experimenting and, above all, selecting.

AI allows you to produce an almost absurd quantity of images, so the real challenge becomes choosing. You have to be extremely selective to extract from that mass the very small percentage of images that genuinely have something interesting.

I’m on Instagram, but I have to admit I’m becoming increasingly allergic to it. I mostly use it to show my work, because that’s still difficult to avoid today, but I rarely use it as a research or inspiration tool. I don’t really build libraries of references, and I spend relatively little time looking at or cataloging other people’s work.

Influences

Are there artists who don’t use AI who influence your work?

Of course. In fact, almost all of my influences come from outside AI. They were formed at a time when generative AI simply didn’t exist, so everything that originally shaped my visual world came from work made through other mediums.

Today, I simply bring that whole magma of influences with me into a new tool.

More generally, the technique used to make a work isn’t a particularly important criterion for me. I’m not going to be more interested in an image because it was made with AI, any more than I would be because it was drawn by hand.

You can admire a drawing for its extraordinary virtuosity and technical mastery, but for me, virtuosity alone isn’t enough to make a work interesting. The process doesn’t determine its “value”.

So whether an image was created with AI, a pencil, a paintbrush or a camera is ultimately secondary. What interests me is the image itself, the choices that led to it, and what it triggers in the person looking at it.

I art advice

What advice would you give someone starting out today? If you had to start over, what would you do differently? Are there any mistakes you’d be willing to share?

I’m not sure, creativity is something very personal, and everyone probably has to find their own way of approaching these tools, but an advice i could give would be not to be afraid of experimenting, and especially not to be afraid of getting things wrong.

When you discover a new tool, you don’t know how to master it yet, and that’s precisely what can make it interesting. It can take you in directions you never anticipated, including directions that initially seem wrong or pointless.

So I don’t think you should try to control everything too quickly. You need to leave some room for accidents and surprises. A mistake or a completely unexpected result can sometimes open up a much more interesting path than the one you were originally looking for.

Franki Domino‘s online portfolio.
franki.domino on Instagram
Colagene, Franki Domino’s agent.

© Images franki.domino 2026