The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
Trades of the 21st Century: a lost Company School album of modern work.
In the Wellcome Collection I found a run of anonymous 1800s watercolours of Delhi trades. A carpenter, a jeweller, a rice seller: each squats on bare cream paper with the tools of the trade laid out around him. These "Company School" albums were painted to catalogue a city's working life, so I trained a Recraft V4 Style on nine of them and asked it to paint the trades their painter could never have imagined. The result is ten new plates: the delivery rider checking his phone beside an e-scooter, the phone repairer with his loupe, the creator in front of her ring light, the earbud seller weighing earbuds on a brass scale. Same pose, same patience, new tools.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Related posts
For this challenge, I explored the rich artistic heritage of 17th-century Mughal Miniature Paintings from The Met Museum's public domain archive. I created a custom Recraft Style called 'Mughal Tech' to blend this historic art style with modern digital tools. The series showcases a creative collision where Mughal royalty and soldiers interact with unexpected modern technology like AirPods, smartphones, E-scooters, and food delivery systems, maintaining a unified visual aesthetic throughout the collection.
VARIETÉ 2026: eight acts of modern life
Moriz Jung, born on 22 October 1885, was a Viennese art student who drew satirical postcards for the Wiener Werkstätte, including a numbered series of variety acts in 1907 and a send-up of the brand-new airplane in 1911, before he was killed in the First World War at 29. His cards are public domain at The Met, yet his flat color, heavy black line and rubber-faced caricatures remain little known outside museum collections. We built a Recraft V4 Style from five of his 1911 cards and used it to stage VARIETÉ 2026, eight acts of modern life from Day 132 of the Digital Detox to the Leap into Inbox Zero, each numbered after the Jung act it remakes so the originals and remakes sit side by side. We released it on 22 October 2026, his 141st birthday. I chose the direction and signed off at every stage; Claude, an AI agent, searched the archives, prepared the references, wrote the prompts and ran Recraft under my direction.
I selected two public domain fashion plates published by Nicolaus Heideloff in 1794 and 1800 from The Met’s collection. I used them as visual references to create a custom Recraft V4.1 Style inspired by their hand colored engraving and fashion plate silhouettes. Using that Style, I created six original designs for a fictional botanical expedition on Venus, blending archival fashion with futuristic expedition wear.
