AI style transfer, through seven creative projects

Most of those worlds started as one ring illustration, restyled by a different gradient sphere each time and sometimes given a few words for what should appear inside the ring: sea and mountains, a lake and a forest, snow. The end of this article shows four of those sphere runs. Edits took the ring out and prepared the landscapes for their layouts, with wider frames and, where needed, space on the left for text. Most went through another style transfer and an upscale. The lilac world got its clay finish in that second pass.

The finished worlds then became style pictures themselves. On the card below, a landscape of stone stairs between corals in mist takes the clay world's finish and keeps its three figures and the small green light one of them carries. The same approach carried through a set of scenes with a white figure: a vault door, a walk on frozen water, a desert maze, a lantern among pink trees and a glass dome, each given one of the worlds. Reusing the worlds as style pictures helped hold one look across scenes with very different settings.

The render cdconstantin started from had no materials at all, only grey forms: a stool, a chair, a cabinet with rows of holes, and dishes and spheres on stems. With nothing on their surfaces, their proportions and the way they sit together are easy to read. The style picture was the photograph of a wavy steel chair on sea rocks from How to, and the run came back as one set of polished silver wire standing on the same kind of rocks. It also framed the set closer and dropped the small solid seat at the front, and for product work that missing seat deserves as much attention as the new finish.

A notepad, a clock and an hourglass can sit in the same interface and still look as if they came from different places. art.frant tried a set of finishes on an app's empty-state icons, from the glossy, toy-like look of a 3D shopping bag to banking blue, shopping green, neon and frosted glass. The warm cream notepad on the card below took its look from three style pictures at once: a frosted basket of peaches, a blue shopping basket and a tea set.

Bhaskar started from a mockup of a blank, oversized white tee and a photograph of woven textiles: pink and green diamonds on wraps worn by a group of people seen from behind, with a forest beyond them. The run moved the weave from the cloth onto the tee, added matching bands at the collar, the sleeves and the hem, and kept the oversized cut. The forest came along too, and the tee now hangs in front of it. When you choose a style picture for a garment, look past the fabric, since its setting can decide where the garment ends up.

Or Yogev began with a flat illustrated card: a yellow face over a green and a white speech bubble, the green one shaded with a spray of dots. The style picture was a glossy sculpture of tangled forms in pink, orange, yellow, purple and chrome. The run gave the face and both bubbles rounded volume, highlights and soft shadows, and carried the dots around the green bubble's new curve, while the card's border, its number and its lettering were left out. The result is a still picture with the look of a 3D render.

A 3D character can be tried as an illustration before anyone redraws it. juanmcarrion's subject was a small wizard in a T-pose, and the style picture an airbrushed classical head with a glowing network inside it, in a green starfield and pink haze. The wizard kept its pose, hat, scarf, long coat, boots and green eyes, and took the starfield, the airbrush grain and a glowing outline from the illustration. The model tends to render in the style picture's own medium, so an airbrushed style picture gives an airbrushed character.

For cyp, the subject was already a painting: a lounge with two men in suits on blue armchairs and a window onto green hills. The style came from two stippled paintings of a woman in a pink train carriage, and cyp's words asked to keep the lounge's faces and tones, take the paintings' technique and add a green tint. The men, the chairs, the window and the ceiling lights stayed where they were, the surfaces took the stipple, and the orange tree outside turned green.

The clip at the top of this article began as a style-transfer result, which Yam gave to Seedance 2.5 on video-gen as its first frame, with this prompt:

Expansive rolling field stretching to the horizon beneath a hazy sky, distant scattered trees and low hills. Realistic handheld camera with a slow, steady push-in. Strong but believable wind moves the grass in broad waves across the foreground; distant trees sway subtly. Warm monochromatic orange light and haze drift and shift gradually and naturally. Preserve the same landscape, framing, cinematic realistic handheld look, and stable continuity.