TITLE:
The CRAFT Framework: A Pedagogical Model for Teaching Expressive Drawing and Painting with Artificial Intelligence—A Critical Integrative Review
AUTHORS:
Manal Jumah Ahmad Alhomaidi
KEYWORDS:
Artificial Intelligence, Generative Art, Painting and Drawing Pedagogy, Studio Practice, Conceptual Framework, Critical Integrative Review
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.17 No.7,
July
8,
2026
ABSTRACT: This paper proposes CRAFT (Conceive, Render, Articulate, reFine, Transmit), a five-stage pedagogical framework for teaching expressive drawing and painting with generative artificial intelligence (AI), and evaluates the framework against the recent empirical literature. A critical integrative review of ten primary studies (eleven datasets, as one study reports two experiments) and three systematic reviews from 2023-2026 was conducted under a Design Science Research orientation. Reported findings from each study were mapped onto CRAFT’s five stages by a single author. Within the art-and-design education literature, prompt-engineering literacy and AI knowledge predict innovative thinking and creative self-efficacy in design students; structured AI-assisted instruction is associated with higher achievement, motivation, and self-efficacy in design and art courses; and short, unscaffolded interventions are reported to leave students frustrated with AI’s execution of nuanced artistic tasks. Adjacent creative-task evidence provides additional, though non-studio, support for co-creative interface design. Direct experimental evidence from drawing and painting studios remains thin; CRAFT is therefore presented as a candidate scaffold that motivates, but does not substitute for, direct comparative evaluation in studio art settings. The paper contributes a structured pedagogical framework, an honest synthesis of recent primary studies, and a research agenda for future direct evaluation.