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Mustard Seed Garden: Modern Cities
I discovered Wang Gai’s Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, a Qing-dynasty instructional book that taught painters how to study plants and landscapes through quiet woodblock plates.
I use Recraft and turn them into a Recraft Style.
The Style is minimalist, soft, and calm. I use Recraft V4 Style and generated some images. ✨
When I tested it on modern cities and glass buildings by the water, it looked unexpectedly beautiful.
Wang Gai could never have imagined his plates being used centuries later to draw modern cities.
So I created this series and applied the same drawings to real uses: postcards, a hotel room key, a café menu, a city guide, and a highway billboard.
Good work
My pleasure
That's a seriously smart solution.
Looks good!
Love this!
Great job Lynn 🤌
Such a beautiful concept, taking a Qing dynasty painting manual and applying it to modern cities. Really thoughtful work Lynn.
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i went back to the late 1890 and earliest 19th century, and choose to work with a beautiful painting called; Giant Magnolias on a Blue Velvet Cloth by the artist; Martin Johnson Heade.
it definitely deserved a comeback, so i turned it into a Recraft Style, and use it to draw things Martin would never have imagined, like modern fashion wears, techs and appliances.
there's alot in my recraft project, check it out through the link.
more with V4 Style
LUDUS MAGNUS — Modern Life, Unearthed
What would remain of our everyday lives if someone unearthed them centuries from now?
Inspired by the Getty Museum’s Statue of an Athlete, LUDUS MAGNUS imagines a museum of our present: ten classical marble sculptures preserving the ways we play, move, escape, connect and dream.
A basketball player hangs forever before the shot; a breakdancer balances upside down beside a stone boombox; a woman raises her phone to capture a moment that has already outlived her.
Built around a custom Recraft Style drawn from the archive sculpture’s pale marble, weathered surfaces, irregular fractures and quiet museum lighting, the collection carries these familiar gestures into an imagined archaeological future, where a surfboard, a vinyl record, a VR headset or a drone becomes a clue to the lives once lived around it.
Across all ten works, chipped stone and missing limbs leave the viewer to complete the movement—to recognise the ambition in a leap, the intimacy of listening, the desire to be remembered, and the enduring human impulse to reach beyond ourselves.
The objects tell us when. The gestures tell us who.
#recraftstyleschallenge
Ten posters. Modern rituals, ancient marble.
Reimagining modern food delivery through the intricate Art Nouveau lens of Alphonse Mucha, this project merges contemporary fast-paced urban culture with late 19th-century elegance. Using public domain posters sourced from the New York Public Library Digital Collections, I created a custom Recraft V4 Style that captures Mucha’s iconic floral arches, flowing linework, and warm gold palettes. Modern couriers on electric scooters, smartphones displaying delivery apps, and steaming takeaway meals are seamlessly transformed into vintage decorative panels. The result is a humorous yet aesthetic collision between today's instant convenience and the timeless craftsmanship of 1890s advertising art.
