Illustrated Indian Technology in the Style of Natural HistoryIllustrated Indian Technology in the Style of Natural History
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Illustrations of Indian Technology, 1830 🛺 I found Illustrations of Indian Zoology (1830–34), a book of hand-coloured plates made from drawings by Indian artists in Major-General Hardwicke's collection, digitised by the Internet Archive under a Public Domain Mark. I cropped 8 plates (pheasant, owl, bulbuls, flying squirrel, egrets, tortoise, lizard, fish) and trained a Recraft V4 Style on them. Then I used it to build a fictional archive: modern Indian life catalogued as wildlife. The auto-rickshaw grows bird legs, the pressure cooker becomes a tortoise, the e-scooter turns into an egret, and the delivery scooter is a bulbul with a cargo-box hump. 8 plates in total, each shown next to the archive original it grew out of.
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Gaurav Ganesh's avatar
🎬 30-second walkthrough of how I made it: the find, the style, the prompt, the before-and-afters. Correction: the Style is built from 7 plates, not 8. The n48 link in my archive list turned out to be a blank page with a library stamp, so I removed it from the Style. The 8 finished plates in the series are unchanged.
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