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Five Stories from a Modern Court
For the @Recraft Archive Style Challenge, I took Indian court paintings from met museum's open-access collection and built a custom Recraft Style from them: flat gouache colour, profile figures, patterned carpets.
Then I asked it to paint things the original artists could never have imagined. A palace with no Wi-Fi. A queen's electric car with a jealous elephant. A king in a VR headset. A delivery drone and an unimpressed peacock. A match night on the big screen.
Each picture tells its whole story in a single frame.
#Recraft #AIArt #IndianMiniature
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Press-on nails are my modern take 😊
I made one Recraft Style that draws press-on nails as if a mineral painter from 1810 had drawn them.
Many people do their nails now: at home, in minutes, a new set whenever they feel like it. Small brands sell them all over TikTok and Pinterest, and they need designs nobody else has. This Style gives them 200-year-old ones.
I trained it on six of James Sowerby's hand-painted rock prints (1802 to 1817), plus a gold ring and a stone table from the Met.
Try it in 3 steps 👍
1. Open the Style and paste: "Five almond press-on nails on cream paper, red jasper with gold veins, one nail with a small gold cabochon." Change "red jasper with gold veins" to try another stone, like "pale pink stone with dark red speckles".
2. Remove the Style, add your drawing as a reference, and paste: "Make these real press-on nails, same colors, white background"
3. Add the set as a reference and paste: "Hands covering the face, wearing these exact nails, red jasper with gold veins, white background"
In the Wellcome Collection I found a little-known set of trade portraits painted around 1840 by an unnamed artist from Tanjore, in present-day Tamil Nadu.
Each plate shows a working man and “his wife” on a flat yellow ground under a cloudy sky, with long brushy shadows and a line of palms on the horizon.
I built a Recraft Style from these plates and sent the same painter to record eight professions of Madras in 2026: an EV cab driver, a cardiologist, an architect, a grooming-studio owner, a millet-café founder, fashion designers, pastry chefs and laundry founders. The poses and staging echo the originals, but the roles have moved on...
Three are shown here; the full series of eight is in the Recraft project, and the video brings all of them to life to a mridangam score.
Same trades two centuries later is a strong idea, and the yellow ground carries over really nicely.
JADEFORM™ — Trace the Unknown
JadeForm™ is a futuristic technical fashion collection inspired by an 18th-century carved jade brush holder from the Art Institute of Chicago.
Brushpot Depicting a Daoist Paradise - Artic.edu
Using Recraft V4 Styles, I transformed its sculpted landscapes, organic contours, and mineral textures into six original outdoor fashion pieces, combining translucent jade aesthetics with high-performance design.
Originally created to hold an artist's brushes, the artifact inspired a new perspective: from painting landscapes to exploring them.
This can go straight into the Hypebeast magazine!