Super Underrated AI Art Technique: "Fast Draft Fwd"

It’s a bit embarrassing, but I have a friend drawing some concept art for my 2026 personal vision board.

The entire shot is supposed to be me in front of some futuristic looking corporate building. He first, by hand, just drew a sketch of the building itself:

I was curious to see what it would look in its final form, so I sent ChatGPT a photo of myself and asked it to put me on the building in the art style of Marvel’s tv series, “What if?”.

Instantly, here’s what it came up with:

I then asked for a more positive looking expression, to which it responded:

I was pretty impressed by what it came up with, but I couldn’t get my head around the implications of this for the creative process. I’m sure others are doing this, or something very similar, but I thought I would try to give this creative technique a name.

I’m excited to introduce the Fast Draft Fwd Multimodal AI art technique.

Fast Draft Fwd is a multimodal creative technique that uses AI to generate high-fidelity previews of later-stage creative assets — allowing artists, writers, designers, and teams to leap forward in their process and iterate based on potential outcomes, rather than just intuition or low-res drafts.

What are the main benefits of this technique?

• Accelerated Decision-Making
  Previewing the potential final output early enables faster, higher-quality choices about direction, tone, style, or composition - before investing hours into dead ends.

• Creative Clarity
  Seeing where the idea could go gives you immediate alignment with your original intent or inspires stronger alternatives you hadn’t considered.

• Better Vision Alignment Across Teams
  Design, writing, and product teams can rally around a tangible north star, rather than misaligned interpretations of a vague brief.

• Unlocks Creative Exploration
  You can explore multiple "what-if" futures quickly, without the commitment or fatigue of building each from scratch.

• Improved Feedback Loops

  Clients, collaborators, or stakeholders can react to more complete previews - leading to more precise, actionable feedback much earlier in the process.

Similar to the forwards motion, we can also work backwards or travel in any direction at pretty much any stage of our creative process. For example, given the above image, I asked for an architectural render or proposal document of just the building itself:

I then asked for a CAD render:

In case you’re curious, our current semi-final (hand-drawn) wide shot draft looks like:

Final Thought:
My only piece of advice to creatives would be to use this technique more often. Don’t wait to finish a thing before evaluating it. Use AI to jump ahead, explore the future of your ideas, and come back wiser. Think of it like time-travel for your creativity. It’s fast, cheap, and it sharpens your final vision.