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 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
Chaekgeori 2026 — The Shelves of Today
Chaekgeori were 19th-century Korean folding screens that painted a scholar's bookshelf as a portrait: no face, only books, brushes, porcelain and the objects that defined a person. I found these screens in the open-access collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CC0) and The Met (Public Domain), and trained a Recraft V4 Style on their flat reverse perspective, mineral pigments and indigo silk.
Then I asked the Style to paint the shelves of 2026: a streamer, a developer, a DJ, a student, a gamer, a podcaster, a designer and a remote worker. Each one is still a portrait without a person. The ring light sits next to the peony vase, the rubber duck next to the ink stone, the sleeping cat next to the clock. The genre was always about the objects that define us; it just needed new objects.
The project shows the full 8-panel screen, plus each shelf as its own folding screen.
Also on comments specific shelfs for
- Streamers
- Developers
- DJ
- Student
- Gamer
- Podcaster
- Designer
- Remote worker
📜 Archive references:
Books and Scholars' Accoutrements, Yi Taek-gyun, late 19th c. — Cleveland Museum of Art (CC0): https://clevelandart.org/art/2011.37
Books and Scholars' Possessions, anonymous — The Met (Public Domain): https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/73134
Books and Scholar’s Objects (Chaekgeori), 19th century: https://collections.artsmia.org/art/4812/books-and-scholars-objects-korea
🎨 Recraft project: https://www.recraft.ai/project/6ecc9616-9551-4dca-9ac8-df5b6ff3b6b5
🖌️ Try the Style: https://www.recraft.ai/styles/16bdb41a-58f0-4079-b0c5-c647f889b6d1
#recraftstyleschallenge
While exploring public-domain artwork, I stumbled upon Emily Eastman, an American folk artist from the 1820s whose delicate graphite portraits of young women in New Hampshire immediately caught my attention.
Among her works, Young Girl Bedecked with Flowers was the most fascinating to me. There was something about the composition that left me in awe. The flowers, the delicate details, and the quiet simplicity of the portrait felt like a small window into someone's everyday world. I particularly loved how much character she managed to capture without relying on elaborate details.
I started wondering what that same artistic approach would look like if it were applied to our everyday lives. After all, the young woman in that drawing was surrounded by things that belonged to her time, so what would a similar portrait look like if the subject were surrounded by things that belong to ours?
That question became the inspiration for this project.
Using the original public-domain drawing, I trained a Recraft V4 Style to bring Eastman's distinctive graphite precision and restraint into 2026, exploring everything from smartphones and earbuds to coffee cups, electric scooters, delivery drones, and city streets.
I wasn't interested in simply placing modern objects inside vintage illustrations. I wanted to see whether an artistic style could travel across two centuries, encounter an entirely different world, and still feel unmistakably like itself.
Emily Eastman never got to see the world we live in today, but through this experiment, her artistic language gets to explore it.
Archive Source:
Emily Eastman, Young Girl Bedecked with Flowers, early 19th century.
Public domain.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Original collection: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (M. and M. Karolik Collection)
I found a postcard photograph titled "Tudia de Loja, Ecuador" (c. 1935–1955, Fototecnia Stein, Quito) in the Rijksmuseum's public-domain collection. My grandparents are from Loja, so I imagined the life of this young woman and a "White Nights"-style love story set in an Andean plaza, where she falls for someone who is waiting for someone else. I built the "Warm Folk Realistic" Style from this reference, keeping its warm film tones, grain and documentary realism. Then I used it to tell her story across the series.
