Made of Us & Line 26: two styles about the crowd of everyday life We built two custom Recraft V4 Styles from public-domain works in museum and archive collections. Both look at modern life through the people in it: one builds objects out of tiny people, the other lays our daily habits into tile murals.

1. Made of Us

What if everything we love were made of all the people behind it?

References: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Dance Hall Bellevue (1909/1910) at the National Gallery of Art, and Utagawa Hiroshige's View of Fuji san from the Mountains in the Province of Izu (1858) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. From Kirchner I took the bold Expressionist colour and the thick, outlined brushwork; from Hiroshige, the soft gradients and the calm, layered space. The idea of an object made of people is inspired by yose-e, the playful composite pictures of Edo period Japan. In the posters, everyday objects are built from hundreds of tiny people, one day and one week at a time; in the photographs, real crowds stand together to form the shapes of this month's trends, some of them animated.

2. Line 26

What if a city's metro network had a tile mosaic mural at every station, each one celebrating a habit of life in 2026?

References: Emily Noyes Vanderpoel's Color Analysis from Arabian Illumination (Plate LXVII) from Color Problems (1902), Wassily Kandinsky's Painting with Green Center (1913) at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Theo van Doesburg's Contra Composition (1927–28). From Vanderpoel I took the strict grid of small colour squares and its red, blue, olive and cream palette; from Kandinsky, the expressive curves and layered colour; from van Doesburg, the flat planes and heavy black lines. The result is an imaginary metro network whose stations are named after things we do today, from Tap In and Matcha Line to Run Club and Padel Park, introduced by a street entrance, a network map and the next train arriving, with some murals animated.

Two styles, one subject: the crowd of everyday life, painted person by person and tile by tile.

Delft Now & Overused: two styles from museum archives

I built two custom Recraft V4 Styles from public-domain objects in museum collections, then used each one to imagine things their makers never could: our offices, our clothes, our phones and our daily habits.

1. DELFT NOW

What if the 17th-century painters of Delft decorated the way we work and dress today?

References: a Delftware vase from De Grieksche A factory (c. 1690–1700) and a Delft plate (1695–1705), both at the Art Institute of Chicago.

From the vase I took the cobalt garlands and lattice painted on white tin glaze; from the plate, the flowers, fences and small birds. Both were cropped to their painted surfaces so the style learns the brushwork and the blue-and-white palette, not the shape of the pottery.

The style is shown in three chapters: office and studio interiors, a product collection of bags, shoes, hats and accessories, and a studio lookbook.

2. OVERUSED

What if the things we use most aged 2,000 years overnight, and we kept using them anyway?

References: the Celestial Horse from China's Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE) at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and a bronze belt hook inlaid with gold and silver from the Warring States to Western Han period at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

From the horse I took the green verdigris patina and the worn surface of old bronze; from the belt hook, the thin lines of gold and silver inlay. Phones, earbuds, watches, remotes and keyboards take on the patina of a Han dynasty bronze, while the hands, the light and the moment stay photographic.

The style is shown as museum-like posters and everyday photography.

Two archives, two very different materials, one idea: the past can still dress the present.