Drawn Figures for Your Articles

Any blog post can have an illustration drawn for it. Open the post, press Suggest a figure, and your site reads the article, decides which single section a picture would genuinely help, has that picture drawn, and writes the caption and the alt text to go with it. Nothing is added to the post until you have seen it and said yes.

Turning it on

Pictures are drawn by Google's Gemini image models, which is a different service from whichever provider writes your text. Go to Admin → AI Writer and paste a key from Google AI Studio into Google AI key (for drawn figures). Leave Figure model blank unless you know the exact model ID you want.

Two things this is not:

• It is not the Image API key further down the same page. That one fetches stock photos from Pexels or Unsplash for featured images, and the two are unrelated.
• It does not change your writing provider. Keep Claude or OpenAI writing your posts and let Google draw; leave the key blank and the button simply says pictures are not set up.

What happens when you press the button

1. Your article is read and one section is chosen. "No picture needed" is a valid answer and often the right one, so the button will sometimes tell you it is adding nothing.
2. A brief is written for that article, so two posts never get the same picture.
3. The picture is drawn, and you are shown it with the heading it would sit under, the caption and the alt text.
4. You press Insert it or No thanks. Inserting saves the previous version of the post first, so it can be undone like any other change.

Only the drawing costs anything. If no section needs a picture, or the article has no headings, you pay only for the cheap reading step. If no key is set, nothing is called at all.

Why the pictures have no writing in them

A picture with English words in it is wrong on every other language your site publishes. Every sentence lives in the caption and the alt text instead, and those are page fields, so they are translated along with the rest of the article. One picture therefore serves all your languages, and it does not go stale when you reword the paragraph beside it.

This is also why you will not get charts, diagrams or labelled arrows. A picture here is there to hold a reader on a page, not to explain a calculation. Your tables already do that, and answer engines can quote a table but cannot quote a picture.

They use your colours

Each figure takes its colours from your active design, so a buyer's site never gets somebody else's palette. The picture is drawn as a plate set into the page rather than as wallpaper: a dark design gets a light picture with dark linework, a light design gets a gently darker picture with light linework, and your primary colour appears sparingly as the accent. Matching the page exactly was tried and the illustration simply dissolved into it.

A picture keeps the colours it was drawn with. If you change your design later, pictures already sitting in your posts stay as they were; press the button again on any post you want redrawn.

Good practice

• One per post. A second press tells you the article already has one. Remove the existing figure from the editor first if you want a different picture.
• Read the caption before you accept. It is written from the brief, before the picture exists, so occasionally it describes something slightly different from what was drawn. You can edit both the caption and the alt text in the editor afterwards.
• Skip is a good outcome. A reference page, a definition or a list of steps is usually better without a picture.