Place a strip of red rooftops beside a travel photo, then cut out a tree from another roll. Two unrelated pieces suddenly become a street you remember. That’s what we love about journaling and collage. You get to choose which window to use, where the tree goes, and how much room to leave for a note about the weather that day.
At MOOBOOM, every pattern in our original tape collection is drawn by an illustrator. We start with original artwork because we value the way each artist sees a scene. We also want their illustrations to leave plenty of room for your own creativity.
Every Illustrator Sees the Same Street Differently
Ask two artists to paint a hillside town. One might pick out a row of rooftops in bright orange. Another might soften the colors and spend more time on the window frames and the shadows along the walls. Watercolor pools at the corner of a building. A brush lifts halfway along the roofline. Over time, choices like these become part of an artist’s style. Even a single building cut from a roll can feel like it belongs with the other buildings that artist has painted.
AI can imitate watercolor washes, paper grain, and brushstrokes. What we find hardest to replicate is the judgment an artist develops through years of looking and drawing. Where does a scene need one more brushstroke? Where is a little blank space enough? Some tapes made with AI-generated artwork look polished when you unroll them, but the inconsistencies become easier to spot when you cut out individual elements. A staircase leads past the door. A railing stops at a corner. The windows on one floor follow a different perspective from the ones above. When you’re piecing together a street scene, those details can make the whole page feel less cohesive.
Supporting the Artists Who Keep Drawing
Generative AI can produce a street that looks like a watercolor because it has learned patterns of color, composition, and brushwork from large collections of images, including work by human artists. A model can generate an image that hasn’t existed before. To us, originality also comes from a person’s way of seeing a subject, deciding what to keep, and drawing it in a style they’ve developed over time.
When the images used to train a model and the permissions behind them aren’t publicly documented, it’s hard for a shopper to know whose work helped shape the pattern on a roll of tape. We choose to work with illustrators’ original artwork because we want the people who keep drawing by hand to get recognition and support for their work, and to have the chance to draw the next street or garden.
Collage Is a Creative Act in Its Own Right
Journaling and collage give us a chance to put down our screens and pick up scissors, paper, and a pen. Even adding a little window to a page about an ordinary day is a way of choosing how to remember it. You can cut apart a street an illustrator has drawn, rearrange it around a train ticket, or let it end beside a few lines of handwriting.
When a collage relies heavily on ready-made AI scenes, much of the composition, lighting, and mood has already been decided. Put several of those scenes together and the page can end up looking like another AI-generated landscape, with less room for you to shape it yourself. We like making tape you can use as a full streetscape or trim down to a single window or roofline. Where that window goes is up to you.
The Environmental Impact of a Roll Goes Beyond the Artwork
Generating an image happens on a screen, and running the model takes electricity. In a study measuring the energy use of several AI tasks, image generation had relatively high average energy use among the tasks tested. Each additional round of generation also requires more computation. Study on the energy use of AI image generation
Comparing the environmental impact of two rolls of tape also takes information about the backing material, ink, adhesive, release liner, packaging, and shipping. One thing we can do at the design stage is make the illustrations easier to combine and use up. After you cut out a street scene, the little tree left over can go beside a date, and a short piece of stone wall can finish the edge of a card.
We’re happy to spend more time drawing a window, a tree, or the edge of a roof. Months later, when you turn back to that page, the little window you picked might be the first thing that brings the day back.
