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Ogbeide Archive - Bold Afro Ankara
I built a Recraft style that preserves and modernizes bold African Ankara patterns with clean vector illustration of Nigerian youth. Inspired by Port Harcourt street fashion and Nigerian textile archives.
Trained on Recraft V4.1 using 3 curated reference images of Afro hairstyles and Ankara fabrics. The goal is to give African designers and brands a ready-to-use style that correctly represents our colors, prints and skin tones.
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The Natural History of Digital Habits
I found a hand-coloured illustration from Edward Donovan’s The Natural History of British Insects, Volume VIII (1799), in the Internet Archive Book Images collection on Flickr. I used this archival reference to create my custom Recraft style, Digital Natural History — 1799. My six-image series imagines small creatures using smartphones, wireless earbuds, food delivery, video calls, electric scooters, and robot vacuums. Antique botanical compositions turn modern digital habits into specimens from an impossible natural-history archive.
200 years ago, local artists painted the everyday people of the subcontinent: barbers, porters, chai wallas, knife sharpeners. Each one got a portrait, flat colours, a fancy border, total respect.
So I asked: what if those same painters time travelled to Lahore today?
I found their work in the Wellcome Collection’s public domain archive, trained a Recraft Style on it, and sent it to paint the new pesha of my city.
Same old painter, new Lahore. 😄
Love this. Giving chai wallas and porters that old portrait treatment again feels really respectful. The borders are beautiful.
The New Book of Beasts
A Medieval Bestiary of Modern Human Nature
What if medieval bestiaries described the habits of modern people instead of mythical creatures?
For the Recraft × Contra Styles Challenge, I created Illuminated Bestiary, a custom Recraft Style inspired by public-domain illustrations from 13th–15th-century manuscripts.
I used historical references from the Public Domain Image Archive to explore medieval animal anatomy, ornamental details, ink drawings, and muted natural pigments.
Then I applied the style to eight imaginary beasts, each representing a familiar modern behavior: overthinking, people-pleasing, doomscrolling, procrastination, ghosting, perfectionism, attention-seeking, and impostor syndrome.
The result is a collection of creatures that look like they belong in a centuries-old manuscript, even though their habits are very much our own.
Such a creative idea! Love how you’ve connected medieval art with modern human habits. The concept is both unique and relatable! 👏✨