Renaissance Reimagined

This personal project began with a simple question: What would we look like if we had lived hundreds of years ago?

Using contemporary photographs of myself and two friends, I explored the intersection of portraiture, history, and generative AI by transforming modern faces into Renaissance-inspired artworks. Rather than relying on a single prompt, the final images emerged through an extensive process of experimentation, refinement, and visual direction.

The challenge was preserving each person's identity while adapting them to the aesthetics of historical portrait painting. Through multiple rounds of prompt engineering, image generation, and evaluation, I adjusted elements such as clothing, lighting, facial features, composition, color palettes, decorative framing, and artistic style to create portraits that felt authentic to the period while remaining recognizable.

The project also expanded into engraved stamp-style illustrations, exploring how the same subjects could be interpreted through different historical visual languages. This allowed me to investigate consistency, character representation, and storytelling across multiple artistic formats.

More than an AI experiment, this project became an exploration of art direction and creative decision-making. It demonstrated how generative tools can be used not simply to create images, but to develop a cohesive visual concept through iteration, critical evaluation, and intentional design choices.