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
I found Mark Catesby's 1777 fish plates on the Biodiversity Heritage Library (Missouri Botanical Garden copy). I built a custom Recraft Style from 6 of the plates and used it to draw hand built propeller machines, as if Catesby had discovered them in the Carolinas and Bahamas. The old hand colored engraving look turns modern machines like drones and airships into newly found species. The full series is in my Recraft project, and the Style is public so anyone can try it.
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
JADEFORM™ — Trace the Unknown
JadeForm™ is a futuristic technical fashion collection inspired by an 18th-century carved jade brush holder from the Art Institute of Chicago.
Brushpot Depicting a Daoist Paradise - Artic.edu
Using Recraft V4 Styles, I transformed its sculpted landscapes, organic contours, and mineral textures into six original outdoor fashion pieces, combining translucent jade aesthetics with high-performance design.
Originally created to hold an artist's brushes, the artifact inspired a new perspective: from painting landscapes to exploring them.
This can go straight into the Hypebeast magazine!
Press-on nails are my modern take 😊
I made one Recraft Style that draws press-on nails as if a mineral painter from 1810 had drawn them.
Many people do their nails now: at home, in minutes, a new set whenever they feel like it. Small brands sell them all over TikTok and Pinterest, and they need designs nobody else has. This Style gives them 200-year-old ones.
I trained it on six of James Sowerby's hand-painted rock prints (1802 to 1817), plus a gold ring and a stone table from the Met.
Try it in 3 steps 👍
1. Open the Style and paste: "Five almond press-on nails on cream paper, red jasper with gold veins, one nail with a small gold cabochon." Change "red jasper with gold veins" to try another stone, like "pale pink stone with dark red speckles".
2. Remove the Style, add your drawing as a reference, and paste: "Make these real press-on nails, same colors, white background"
3. Add the set as a reference and paste: "Hands covering the face, wearing these exact nails, red jasper with gold veins, white background"
The Impossible Inventions - 1850 Archive
What if Victorian inventors had imagined scientific devices that never existed?
For the Contra × Recraft Styles Challenge, I created a cohesive series of eight fictional inventions using my custom “The Impossible Inventions - 1850 Archive” style in Recraft V4.1 Vector.
The series reimagines nineteenth-century scientific illustration through an alternate-history archive, featuring eight imagined devices: The Pocket Telegraph, The Wireless Whisperers, The Mechanical Songbird, The Pocket Planetarium, The Pocket Sunmaker, The Stormglass Oracle, The Abyssal Lantern, and The Deep-Earth Resonator.
The visual direction draws inspiration from John Emslie’s Hydrostatics: Scientific Equipment (1850), held by the Wellcome Collection. The historical source is identified separately from my fictional inventions.
Historical reference: John Emslie, Hydrostatics: Scientific Equipment (1850). Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark.
Social post on X: https://x.com/Imk_solanki/status/2115808957021515938
Such a unique and creative idea, I really like how you combined vintage scientific illustrations with imaginative inventions. The details and overall presentation look amazing. Great work👏✨