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
The 108 Heroes of Ordinary Life
In 1827, Utagawa Kuniyoshi became famous overnight with "The 108 Heroes of the Suikoden": tattooed warriors battling sea dragons and demons in explosive indigo and vermilion woodblock prints.
I trained a Recraft V4 Style on five of his public-domain prints from the Cleveland Museum of Art and The Met, keeping the claw-like foam, carved line and kabuki fury.
Then I gave his printshop new heroes: the people who fight the monsters of modern life.
A delivery rider battles a serpent made of traffic.
A night nurse holds back a fever demon.
A new mother raises a baby bottle against a 3 a.m. skeleton.
The monsters changed. The heroes didn't.
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
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
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
SILEH KHANA: The Royal Armoury, Reopened
I’ve always loved how much care went into the things Indian royal courts carried into battle. A shield wasn’t just a shield. It was lacquered, painted with flowers, and studded with gold. While digging through The Met and the Cleveland Museum of Art, I kept finding these pieces: a painted shield from Bundi, a lacquered Rajasthani dhal, gold-inlaid helmets with chain mail, a Jaipur necklace, a jewelled turban ornament, and a gold-leaf turban cloth. In the Rajput courts, all of this lived in the sileh khana, the royal armoury. That made me wonder: what if the armoury had a streetwear label? I built one custom Recraft Style from eight of these objects and asked it to design the clothes we wear today. The result is an eight-piece collection, each piece shown next to the archive object it came from.
Recraft project: https://www.recraft.ai/project/583b1a1b-6020-4892-9356-fee838a6092d
Social post: https://lnkd.in/p/dAcBnK6Y
Archive references:
