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Tales of Mystery & Notification 🕯️🔴
What if Harry Clarke had illustrated our nightmares? In 1919 he drew Edgar Allan Poe's. I asked him to draw ours.
I went digging through the Public Domain Image Archive and found Clarke's 1919 plates for Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination: black-and-white ink by a Dublin stained-glass artist, all long pale fingers and dread. I trained ten of them into a Recraft style, Clarke Ink 1919.
Then I retold ten of Poe's tales as the horrors of the smartphone age. Each plate sits beside Clarke's original, and each caption is his own line with one word swapped: "the heart beat on with a muffled sound" became "the phone buzzed on". A man is buried alive in his inbox. The masked guest is a 99+ badge.
The only colour in the whole book is the red notification dot. The film ends inside Recraft, showing how it was made.
@Recraft
Happy Halloween. The style is public, so try it yourself 👇
I love the art direction and the way this video brings everything all together is just so good. Great concept!
Thank you, Ayush! I wanted the whole piece to feel like one world rather than separate shots, so I'm glad the art direction came through
This is an example of how simple art can be turned into films.
Everything is so refined and polished. I genuinely wanna know how did you come up with this?
Thanks, Akash, that means a lot. I started from a simple piece of art and let it move from there, so the original look stays recognizable. It was made with @Recraft
Wow just wow.
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7:30 a.m. First coffee. Same ritual, every single day.
Some people have a sweet tooth. I have a coffee tooth. And while the kettle boils, I usually catch myself daydreaming about the same place: Japan, a trip I’ve wanted to take for years.
For this challenge, I brought the two together. Digging through public domain archives, I found Japanese woodblock prints with rolling waves, round windows, cherry blossoms and graceful women drawn in a few calm, confident lines. I turned them into a custom Recraft Style and gave it a brief no Edo-era print shop could have imagined: a modern café, with takeaway cups, delivery bags, loyalty cards and an ordering app.
The café is called Mado, “window” in Japanese: a small window to slow down in a busy day. Its barista, also Mado, wears an indigo wave apron, a round-window hairpin and wireless earbuds. She remembers your oat milk order, protects the window seats from video calls, and believes every laptop should close when the cake arrives.
Old prints, new rituals. My entry for the Contra × Recraft Archive Style Challenge.
Such an original idea! 😍
Nocturnes of 2126✨
What if Van Gogh and Whistler had painted the night of 2126? 🌙 Nine nocturnes of a future city (robot hounds, rainy delivery bots, air ferries, a tree wired with light), painted with a custom Recraft style built from public-domain paintings at The Met and the Smithsonian.
I went digging through the open-access collections of The Met and the Smithsonian looking for the night. I found Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 Saint-Rémy paintings (Cypresses, Wheat Field with Cypresses, Olive Trees, Irises) for their swirling impasto, and James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturnes (Bognor, Valparaiso) for their deep blue darkness lit by small points of gold. I blended the two into a Recraft style, then chained a second style from its results to lock in a cobalt-and-amber night palette. Nocturnes of 2126 uses that 1889 brush to paint a future neither artist could imagine: robot hounds, delivery bots in the rain, silent air ferries, AR lenses and glass houses with solar roofs, all at blue hour.
The style is public, so try it yourself 👇
day by the day work you are doing is outstanding man.
Keeping the Halloween-inspired concepts coming! 🕯️✨
This time, we're sharing Ovelle — a luxury candle e-commerce website with warm tones, elegant typography, and a moody editorial aesthetic. Would love to hear your thoughts! 🎃
