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The Natural History of Digital Habits
I found a hand-coloured illustration from Edward Donovan’s The Natural History of British Insects, Volume VIII (1799), in the Internet Archive Book Images collection on Flickr. I used this archival reference to create my custom Recraft style, Digital Natural History — 1799. My six-image series imagines small creatures using smartphones, wireless earbuds, food delivery, video calls, electric scooters, and robot vacuums. Antique botanical compositions turn modern digital habits into specimens from an impossible natural-history archive.
Thank you, Anas! 😊 I’m glad it inspired you. Imagining modern life through antique insect illustrations has been such a fun experiment!
Such a creative concept! I love how you’ve blended antique natural-history illustrations with modern digital habits.
Thank you, Fatima! 😊 I loved imagining how a naturalist from the past might illustrate our digital habits today. I’m so glad that idea came through—thank you for the lovely feedback!
It’s such a fun and original concept. I love how you’ve connected the past with our everyday digital lives!
Thank you, Fatima! 😊 It was a fun world to imagine, and your encouragement means a lot!
Insects holding a laptop and earbuds is a fun way to mix 1799 botanical plates with modern habits. The faded yellow paper sells it.
Thanks, Rafee! 😊 I’m glad you noticed the aged paper—it makes those little laptops and earbuds feel like discoveries in an old field guide. That mix was really fun to explore!
Thank you, Rafee! 😊 I’m glad you noticed the paper—it helps make these unlikely scenes feel like pages from a real old book. Imagining what a naturalist in 1799 would make of our digital habits was the most fun part!
Thank you all so much for the support, I really appreciate every one of you! 🙌
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I found Illustrations of Indian Zoology (1830–34), a book of hand-coloured plates made from drawings by Indian artists in Major-General Hardwicke's collection, digitised by the Internet Archive under a Public Domain Mark. I cropped 8 plates (pheasant, owl, bulbuls, flying squirrel, egrets, tortoise, lizard, fish) and trained a Recraft V4 Style on them. Then I used it to build a fictional archive: modern Indian life catalogued as wildlife. The auto-rickshaw grows bird legs, the pressure cooker becomes a tortoise, the e-scooter turns into an egret, and the delivery scooter is a bulbul with a cargo-box hump. 8 plates in total, each shown next to the archive original it grew out of.
🎬 30-second walkthrough of how I made it: the find, the style, the prompt, the before-and-afters.
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The New Book of Beasts
A Medieval Bestiary of Modern Human Nature
What if medieval bestiaries described the habits of modern people instead of mythical creatures?
For the Recraft × Contra Styles Challenge, I created Illuminated Bestiary, a custom Recraft Style inspired by public-domain illustrations from 13th–15th-century manuscripts.
I used historical references from the Public Domain Image Archive to explore medieval animal anatomy, ornamental details, ink drawings, and muted natural pigments.
Then I applied the style to eight imaginary beasts, each representing a familiar modern behavior: overthinking, people-pleasing, doomscrolling, procrastination, ghosting, perfectionism, attention-seeking, and impostor syndrome.
The result is a collection of creatures that look like they belong in a centuries-old manuscript, even though their habits are very much our own.
Such a creative idea! Love how you’ve connected medieval art with modern human habits. The concept is both unique and relatable! 👏✨
200 years ago, local artists painted the everyday people of the subcontinent: barbers, porters, chai wallas, knife sharpeners. Each one got a portrait, flat colours, a fancy border, total respect.
So I asked: what if those same painters time travelled to Lahore today?
I found their work in the Wellcome Collection’s public domain archive, trained a Recraft Style on it, and sent it to paint the new pesha of my city.
Same old painter, new Lahore. 😄
Love this. Giving chai wallas and porters that old portrait treatment again feels really respectful. The borders are beautiful.