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What if Stone Age hunters had access to modern weapons and technology?
For the Recraft Styles Challenge, I created The Anachronists, a series of six illustrations following a group of hunters on a mammoth hunt, from tracking it with a drone to bringing it home in an off road vehicle and celebrating with a feast.
I used prehistoric rock art from the Iberian Mediterranean Basin, Bhimbetka Rock Shelters, and Tassili n’Ajjer as references to create a custom Recraft Style. Then I used it to bring these unexpected scenes to life as if they had been painted on cave walls thousands of years ago.
Same old Stone Age, very different technology.
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Before cinema, there was Eadweard Muybridge.
In 1878 he photographed a galloping horse in sequence and proved that all four hooves leave the ground. His studies, collected in Animal Locomotion (1887), split motion into frames and helped pave the way for the moving image.
I built a Recraft V4 Style from his public-domain plates and asked: what if his camera had kept rolling into the future?
Meet Future Locomotions. Try the style here. Full project here.
Made with @recraftai for the Recraft × Contra Public Domain challenge.
muybridge as the starting point for a recraft style is a nerdy move and i respect it
Codex Modernus: The 15th-Century Tech Collision
What would 15th-century Flemish and French illuminators have painted if modern digital tech existed in their world? For this challenge, I curated high-resolution, CC0 public domain illuminated manuscript leaves from the Cleveland Museum of Art (c. 1400–1470) and trained a custom Recraft V4 Style named "CODEX".
Using this custom style, I brought to life a cohesive 6-plate series exploring "The Collision": a Gothic knight commuting on an electric kick-scooter, cloistered Benedictine monks holding morning standup over a 9-way Zoom conference grid, a bicycle food delivery courier exiting the castle gates, a gilded quadcopter drone delivering wax-sealed letters, a medieval noblewoman taking a smartphone selfie, and a tonsured scriptorium scribe nodding along to music in Apple AirPods Max.
Every plate faithfully preserves authentic manuscript characteristics—pigment texture, gold-leaf ivy borders, Latin rubrication, and historical marginalia—demonstrating how Recraft V4 can masterfully honor centuries-old art history while rendering concepts the original scribes could never have conceived.
While digging through The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s public domain archives, I got lost in the 16th-century arms and armor collection. Seeing the Ottoman cuirasses and Milanese steel plates up close, it struck me that this wasn't just battlefield defense, it was the bespoke luxury streetwear of 1560, obsessed with status, intricate gold filigree, and personal protection.
That sparked an obsession: what if a master Renaissance armorer was handed the brief for a modern techwear drop instead of a king's battlefield armor?
Using a custom Recraft V4 Style trained exclusively on those gilded steel artifacts, DAMASCUS // DROP 1560 strips away modern plastic to forge trail runners, modular hard-shell packs, and studio monitors out of blackened Damascus steel, articulated scales, and hand-chiseled 24k gold. It turns everyday consumer gear into brutal, beautiful artifacts from an alternate timeline where high-tech utility never lost its reverence for old-world metallurgy.🔥
