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
Leonetto Cappiello died in 1942 without ever experiencing the spiritual peace of a 2:00 AM corner bodega run. He never saw a glowing wall of Cup Noodles, never crushed a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos on a curb, and never washed it down with a 99¢ Arizona iced tea. But as the artist who basically invented modern advertising by throwing fire-breathing imps and masked jesters against pitch-black velvet voids, he would have loved every second of it. For this challenge, I asked an absurd question: what if the greatest luxury poster artist of 1920s Paris treated our dirt-cheap midnight junk food like the grandest status symbols in the world?
Digging into the public domain vaults of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF Gallica), I used 8 of Cappiello's master lithographs (1903–1927) to build a custom Recraft V4 style capturing his velvety black backdrops, theatrical pantomime, and violent chromatic shock. The result is Haute Convenience, a 7-poster collection where circus devils spit volcanic fire from burning Cheetos, Pierrot clowns wrestle infinite instant noodles, and an Art Deco bodega queen spills midnight snacks from a golden cornucopia. Finished with bespoke vintage typography for each print, it turns modern corner store survival into pure Belle Époque spectacle.
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
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
[ 🕰️ Relics Of Time ] - bringing the past into the present
before wristwatches became a part of everyday life, pocket watches were one of the most popular ways people carried time with them. but what always fascinated me was that they were more than just timekeeping objects. their beautifully crafted cases, intricate engravings, ornamental patterns and little details made each piece feel like a work of art.
i've always been drawn to objects that carry a sense of history and craftsmanship, so i wanted to explore what would happen if those details found their way into the watches we wear today.
for this project, i explored historical references from the met museum collection, including antique jewellery, pocket watches and decorative objects. i was particularly inspired by their rich textures, colourful patterns, gold detailing and handcrafted elements. instead of simply recreating historical pocket watches, i wanted to take the essence of their design and reinterpret it through contemporary wristwatches.
using these references, i created a custom style in recraft and experimented with bringing antique textures, engraved surfaces, ornamental patterns and vintage colour palettes into modern watch cases, dials and straps.
the collection explores different interpretations of this idea, from rectangular dials with colourful beaded straps to ornate gold cases, detailed engravings, roman numerals and decorative metalwork. each design has its own character, but they all share the same inspiration: the beauty of old-world craftsmanship.
the thought behind this project was simple: what if the artistry of antique pocket watches had evolved alongside modern watchmaking? i wanted to create something that feels nostalgic yet contemporary, as if a little piece of history had found its way into the present.
references: the metropolitan museum of art
#recraftstyleschallenge #recraftai #productdesign #vintageinspired #designexploration #horology #18thcenturydesign
Iroha Crest Works: what if the crest makers of 1881 had our tools?
I found the Iroha-biki Monchō, a public domain book of Japanese family crests compiled by Tanaka Kikuo in Tokyo in 1881, in the Smithsonian Libraries scan on the Internet Archive. I trained a Recraft V4 Style on eight of its crests and asked one question: what would its makers have done with our tools? With the Style I drew eight new crests as working sheets over the faint compass construction they drew by hand, opening with their tool, the compass, and closing with ours, the pen tool. Recraft's vectorizer rebuilt them as cyanotype blueprints, and Edit image put them back on the things crests lived on in 1881: a noren, a furoshiki, a paper lantern, a lacquer box and a sake bottle. Every image and clip after the archive was made in Recraft; the film and the before-and-after panels are cut from those outputs, with our plum set beside the book's own plum page.
Product steps, plain scene to Edit image to Outpaint: https://www.recraft.ai/project/3f2aaffb-d32a-4a2c-85e6-55a34d172c35
an 1881 crest book as training data.. very good pick