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In the Wellcome Collection I found Trades and occupations in India, a 19th-century album of gouache paintings by an unnamed Indian artist that sets each worker against a pale, empty sky. I cropped six of its Public Domain Mark panels into a Recraft V4 Style and painted the volume the album never had: today's South Asian trades. Each plate keeps an original figure's pose and changes only the tool. The stonemasons' chisels now split laptops for e-waste, the labourer's load is a solar panel, and the bearer's tray is a food vlogger's plate.
Same pose, new tool. Plates: I. Stonemasons to E-waste recyclers. II. Labourer to Solar panel carrier. III. Bearer to Food vlogger. IV. Painter to Freelancer. V. Bookbinder to Phone repairman. VI. Vegetable seller to Delivery rider. VII. Drone videographer, a closing coda with no ancestor in the album.
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SILEH KHANA: The Royal Armoury, Reopened
I’ve always loved how much care went into the things Indian royal courts carried into battle. A shield wasn’t just a shield. It was lacquered, painted with flowers, and studded with gold. While digging through The Met and the Cleveland Museum of Art, I kept finding these pieces: a painted shield from Bundi, a lacquered Rajasthani dhal, gold-inlaid helmets with chain mail, a Jaipur necklace, a jewelled turban ornament, and a gold-leaf turban cloth. In the Rajput courts, all of this lived in the sileh khana, the royal armoury. That made me wonder: what if the armoury had a streetwear label? I built one custom Recraft Style from eight of these objects and asked it to design the clothes we wear today. The result is an eight-piece collection, each piece shown next to the archive object it came from.
Recraft project: https://www.recraft.ai/project/583b1a1b-6020-4892-9356-fee838a6092d
Social post: https://lnkd.in/p/dAcBnK6Y
Archive references:
Kalighat 2026: The Machines Are the New Babus
Kalighat paintings were cheap bazaar watercolours sold in 1880s Calcutta, and they were satire: they mocked the city's new rich, dandies who aped their British masters and lounged while servants fanned them.
I trained a Recraft V4 Style on five anonymous Kalighat sheets from the Cleveland Museum of Art and Wellcome Collection, keeping the bold single outline, flat colour and empty paper ground.
Then I turned the satire on 2026: the machines are the new babus. Phones smoke hookahs on velvet chairs, robot vacuums ride in palanquins, and humans fan, carry and groom their devices. Same masters, new hardware.
Social post: https://lnkd.in/p/gXJn_FQQ
THE INTERNET, MECHANICALLY EXPLAINED
An Imaginary Catalogue, 1890
The Internet, Mechanically Explained imagines digital life as a lost catalogue of inventions from 1890. I built a custom Recraft Style from John Emslie’s public-domain, hand-coloured scientific engravings, published in 1850 and preserved by Wellcome Collection. Eight invented mechanisms turn notifications, endless scrolling, cloud storage, search, recommendations, read receipts and passwords into physical cause-and-effect diagrams. The sequence ends with an offline lever: one small movement that gives the viewer their afternoon back.
Archive originals: John Emslie (1813–1875), Motion and Machinery and Mechanical Powers, published by James Reynolds on 10 December 1850. Both source plates are marked Public Domain by Wellcome Collection.
The custom V4 Style and core illustrations were created in Recraft Studio during the challenge. Selected before-and-afters are attached; the full eight-image series and both archive originals are in the public project.
