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
Nineveh draws BaghdadIn 1849-51 Austen Henry Layard dug up the palace walls of Nineveh, near Mosul, and his engravers copied the reliefs line by line for his book Nineveh and Babylon. I live in Baghdad, a few hundred kilometres down the same river, so I built a Recraft Style from four of those engravings (Internet Archive Book Images on Flickr, no known copyright restrictions). Then I asked it to carve the city I see every day: delivery riders, the street generator and its knot of cables, the gas-cylinder cart, the jam on the bridge. Same river, same carts, about 2,700 years apart.Part 1/3 of one series, "three old ways of seeing Iraq: stone, paint, light" (Instagram @lostcolours.iq). The other parts: Abu Zayd (paint) and The colours Iraq lost (light).
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
What if the Old Masters designed sportswear?
While taking part in the Recraft contest, I started thinking about how to mix classical painting with modern brands. I experimented with 18th–19th-century oil painting aesthetics and thought: why not take this idea further and create an entire sportswear brand around it?
Classic art, modern athletes, contemporary fashion. A little unexpected? Maybe. But that's what makes it fun! So, I created a sportswear brand concept that brings these two worlds together. The result is right below 👇
Recraft project: https://www.recraft.ai/project/ae17a521-566c-457e-9482-d4b94157111f
Archive references:
Sick art direction
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.
This is beautiful Sofiia! Love how you turned your daily coffee ritual + Japan daydream into a full brand concept. The MADO packaging with that Japanese illustration style is so warm and nostalgic. Coffee tooth is real! ☕️ Hope you get to Japan soon!
I found the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, the 16th-century Persian royal manuscript painted in Tabriz around 1525–35, in The Met's public-domain Open Access collection.
I cropped the calligraphy and borders from eight folios and trained a Recraft V4 Style, "Shahnama Tahmasp Miniature," on the painted scenes alone: jewel-tone skies, flat stacked perspective and tiny elegant figures.
Then I used it to retell the Haft Khan, the seven trials of the hero Rustam, as one shift of a modern food delivery rider on his motorbike. After the order arrives, his trials are stray dogs, a storm, a traffic dragon, a doorman with a broken elevator, a one-star-rating demon and the last stairs, until the final delivery.
Every scene keeps the manuscript's palette, patterned ground and courtly staging, so the series reads like lost pages of the epic.
