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The Pocket Aviary is a natural-history archive from an alternate nineteenth century, where the strange creatures of the digital age have been rediscovered, classified, and immortalized as birds.
Drawing on Edward Lear’s public-domain 1832 parrot plates, sourced through the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Project Gutenberg, the project transforms the delicate visual language of Victorian ornithology into an entirely new speculative world. Hand-colored linework, meticulous stippling, warm archival paper, and a restrained naturalist palette establish the visual DNA of the collection.
Using Recraft, I developed an archive-led Style from Lear’s original plates, then refined the delivery bird into a dedicated visual identity, saved as “Aviary Delivery Plate,” to maintain consistency across subsequent generations.
Within this imaginary ornithological record, familiar technologies evolve into extraordinary specimens: earbuds become curious songbirds, food delivery takes flight, electric scooters emerge as peculiar urban species, video calls become encounters between distant birds, and notifications transform into restless messengers.
Each specimen is presented with the quiet authority of a discovery that never happened, as though an unknown naturalist had spent decades documenting the wildlife of a future that did not yet exist.
The Pocket Aviary is where Victorian natural history meets contemporary digital culture: a field guide to the birds we never knew we had invented.
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LOVED THIS ONE! While exploring the Rijksmuseum's public domain collection, I fell for Ohara Koson's quiet woodblock prints of small birds and flowers on soft, misty skies.
I trained a custom Recraft Style on ten of his prints from 1900–1930, cropping away signatures and margins so only his gentle colors, delicate lines and generous empty space remained.
Then I asked: what if his birds moved to the city? I used the Style to design for everyday 2026 life, from a tram wrap and a full-sleeve tattoo to café umbrellas, a building mural and a pedestrian crossing painted as a lily pond.
A century later, Koson's birds are still finding new places to land.
An interesting implementation.
Specimens of the Future — a field guide to the machines of 2026, drawn in 1899
What if Ernst Haeckel had been handed our century to catalogue?
In the Biodiversity Heritage Library's scans of Kunstformen der Natur (1899) I found the most beautiful filing system ever made: jellyfish, radiolarians and hummingbirds arranged like jewels, every creature centred, symmetrical, and gravely serious. I trained a custom Recraft V4 Style — Machina Naturae — on eight of Haeckel's plates, and used it to catalogue the fauna that actually surrounds us now.
PLATE I · THE SMARTPHONE — the slab that glows back; its charging cable curls like a tentacle.
PLATE II · THE WIRELESS EARBUDS — twin grubs resting in their shell-case nest.
PLATE III · THE CAMERA DRONE — a four-winged insect with a single compound eye.
PLATE IV · THE ELECTRIC SCOOTER — a heron on one long leg, at rest between migrations.
PLATE V · THE VR HEADSET — a blind deep-sea creature, banded where its eyes should be.
PLATE VI · THE ROBOT VACUUM — a disc tortoise, grazing the savannah of the living-room floor.
PLATE VII · THE SMARTWATCH — the wrist-dweller, its dial a single watchful eye.
PLATE VIII · THE FOOD-DELIVERY BOX — a hermit species that carries its insulated home.
The brief: In the stacks of the Biodiversity Heritage Library I found Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1899) — plates that arranged jellyfish and radiolarians like jewels in a cabinet. I built one custom Recraft Style from eight of his plates and used it to catalogue the machines that now live alongside us: the smartphone, the drone, the robot vacuum. Each device is drawn as Haeckel drew his specimens — centred, symmetrical, gravely serious — as if a naturalist of 1899 had been handed the year 2026 to document. The result is a field guide to a fauna nobody ordered, but everybody owns.
Full series in the Recraft project: https://www.recraft.ai/project/bb94acd8-7b26-4c8c-9f19-00e7ec676a26
Try the Machina Naturae style: https://www.recraft.ai/styles/30cb7d33-a267-4687-bbbe-852998bcc5b5
Archive references (all public domain, Wikimedia Commons):
· Trachomedusae — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haeckel_Trachomedusae.jpg
· Tetracoralla — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haeckel_Tetracoralla.jpg
· Trochilidae — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haeckel_Trochilidae.jpg
#recraftstyleschallenge
Project Title: Surreal World 🌀✨
Description: Hey everyone! Here is my submission for the Recraft Challenge — a poster series called "Surreal World"! 🎨
For this project, I dove deep into the Public Domain Image Archive and gathered vintage 18th and 19th-century illustrations from various talented artists of that era — think old-school book engravings, scientific botanical plates, and classical etchings.
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I wanted to give these historical artworks a fresh, weird, and fun twist by mixing them with modern surrealism, bold colors, and psychedelic vibes. With Recraft, I blended classic cross-hatching textures and aged paper looks with funky symbols, neon contrasts, and dreamlike patterns.
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Hope you enjoy this little trip where history meets surreal imagination! Let me know what you think! 👇✨
i love these!