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

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.

Objects built from tiny people is a strong idea. Which museum collections did you pull the source works from?