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For the Recraft Archive Style Challenge, I built a custom Recraft V4 Style (Flexible match) from John William Waterhouse's The Magic Circle (1886, public domain) and used it to paint things Waterhouse never saw: a sorceress summoning a laptop inside her magic circle, the Lady of Shalott with a smartphone by her loom, Ophelia floating with wireless earbuds as her phone drifts by, and Circe offering a glowing energy drink to a weary sailor. Try the style yourself here: https://www.recraft.ai/styles/e11d6a4a-7f0d-4b1b-8eab-0f7b171beb97 #recraftstyleschallenge
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Kalighat 2026: The Machines Are the New Babus
Kalighat paintings were cheap bazaar watercolours sold in 1880s Calcutta, and they were satire: they mocked the city's new rich, dandies who aped their British masters and lounged while servants fanned them.
I trained a Recraft V4 Style on five anonymous Kalighat sheets from the Cleveland Museum of Art and Wellcome Collection, keeping the bold single outline, flat colour and empty paper ground.
Then I turned the satire on 2026: the machines are the new babus. Phones smoke hookahs on velvet chairs, robot vacuums ride in palanquins, and humans fan, carry and groom their devices. Same masters, new hardware.
Social post: https://lnkd.in/p/gXJn_FQQ
What if Stone Age hunters had access to modern weapons and technology?
For the Recraft Styles Challenge, I created The Anachronists, a series of six illustrations following a group of hunters on a mammoth hunt, from tracking it with a drone to bringing it home in an off road vehicle and celebrating with a feast.
I used prehistoric rock art from the Iberian Mediterranean Basin, Bhimbetka Rock Shelters, and Tassili n’Ajjer as references to create a custom Recraft Style. Then I used it to bring these unexpected scenes to life as if they had been painted on cave walls thousands of years ago.
Same old Stone Age, very different technology.
Iroha Crest Works: what if the crest makers of 1881 had our tools?
I found the Iroha-biki Monchō, a public domain book of Japanese family crests compiled by Tanaka Kikuo in Tokyo in 1881, in the Smithsonian Libraries scan on the Internet Archive. I trained a Recraft V4 Style on eight of its crests and asked one question: what would its makers have done with our tools? With the Style I drew eight new crests as working sheets over the faint compass construction they drew by hand, opening with their tool, the compass, and closing with ours, the pen tool. Recraft's vectorizer rebuilt them as cyanotype blueprints, and Edit image put them back on the things crests lived on in 1881: a noren, a furoshiki, a paper lantern, a lacquer box and a sake bottle. Every image and clip after the archive was made in Recraft; the film and the before-and-after panels are cut from those outputs, with our plum set beside the book's own plum page.
Product steps, plain scene to Edit image to Outpaint: https://www.recraft.ai/project/3f2aaffb-d32a-4a2c-85e6-55a34d172c35
an 1881 crest book as training data.. very good pick
