Paintings in a Different Style | ExperimentLog

Paintings in a Different Style<br>July 16, 2026

I remember playing with neural style transfer years ago, using CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks), and later GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), to recreate a painting in the style of another artist. Recently I was reading how modern Gen AI — like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion — achieves this with a different training and generation mechanism.

Today, most style recreations use something called a diffusion model, which works in a surprisingly intuitive way. During training, the system takes a real image and gradually adds visual "noise" — think of a photo dissolving into TV static, one small step at a time — until nothing recognizable is left. It learns to do this in reverse. So when it creates a new image, it starts from pure static and cleans it up step by step, slowly revealing a coherent picture, almost like watching a Polaroid develop. Because it builds the image gradually rather than all at once, it can produce remarkable detail and get the overall look right.

Modern systems also rely on a technique called attention. Earlier approaches tended to focus on small patches of an image at a time, so they were good at local texture but could lose track of the big picture. Attention lets the system consider how every part of the image relates to every other part all at once — how the lighting, proportions, and composition fit together as a whole. This is also how the system understands your instructions: when you ask for "a portrait in the style of Van Gogh," attention connects the meaning of those words to the image it's building, so the final result actually matches what you asked for.

Lets experiment! Each pair below is a slider: it loads showing the recreation, and you drag the handle to wipe across and reveal the original underneath.

The Starry Night → Japanese Woodblock

OriginalRecreation⇆

Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889, from the window of his room at the asylum in Saint-Rémy. Rendered as a ukiyo-e woodblock print, the swirling sky flattens into hard outlines and layered flat colours — which is a nice bit of circularity, since Van Gogh was openly obsessed with Japanese prints and copied several of them by hand.

Café Terrace at Night → Art Nouveau

OriginalRecreation⇆

Another Van Gogh, this one from Arles in September 1888 — the first of his night scenes with a proper starry sky. The Art Nouveau version leans into whiplash curves and decorative linework, the kind of thing you'd expect from Mucha or a period poster. It sits comfortably close to the original, since both come from roughly the same turn-of-the-century moment.

The Scream → Art Deco

OriginalRecreation⇆

Edvard Munch made The Scream in 1893 (there are several versions). Pushing it into Art Deco is a strange fit on purpose: Deco is all clean symmetry, geometry, and control, which is about the opposite of the original's raw anxiety. The model straightens out the wobbling lines into stepped, ordered shapes and mostly loses the panic.

Girl with a Pearl Earring → Stained Glass

OriginalRecreation⇆

Vermeer painted this around 1665. Turning it into stained glass forces the model to make a decision on every soft gradient — Vermeer's whole trick is the smooth falloff of light on her face, and stained glass has to break that into leaded segments of solid colour. It holds up better than I expected.

Mona Lisa → Cubism

OriginalRecreation⇆

The obvious one. Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa from around 1503 onward, famously never quite finishing. The Cubist take fractures the face into overlapping planes seen from several angles at once — which, if you squint, is a fair test of whether the model actually understands the composition or is just copying pixels. The half-smile mostly disappears...

The Persistence of Memory → Bauhaus

OriginalRecreation⇆

Dalí's melting clocks date from 1931. Bauhaus is a design school built on function, primary colours, and hard geometry, and Dalí's whole point was dream logic with no function at all. The model keeps the drooping clocks but reframes them in flat blocks and clean type, so it reads more like a poster about surrealism than a surrealist painting.

The School of Athens → Glazed Ceramic Tile

OriginalRecreation⇆

Raphael painted this fresco in the Vatican between 1509 and 1511, packing in what feels like every philosopher of antiquity. As glazed ceramic tilework it takes on an azulejo feel, with the deep perspective of the architecture broken up by a visible grid of tiles. The grid actually flatters the piece, since the original is already built around strong receding lines.

The Creation of Adam → Byzantine Mosaic

OriginalRecreation⇆

Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling around 1508–1512, and this is its most quoted panel. Recreated as a Byzantine mosaic, the soft modelled flesh becomes thousands of small tesserae, and — as any real mosaic would — it drops in a gold ground...