# Paintings in a Different Style > Source: > Published: 2026-07-16 18:37:08+00:00 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 behind the figures. That gold instantly kindof makes it read as sacred... A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte → Retro-Futurist Screen Print Seurat built this between 1884 and 1886 out of tiny dots of colour — pointillism, an early attempt at getting your eye to do the mixing. Swapping his dots for the flat, limited-ink layers of a retro-futurist screen print is almost a translation between two dot-based methods. The Kiss → Layered Paper-Cut Collage Klimt painted **The Kiss** during his "Golden Period," around 1907–1908. It's already so pattern-heavy and flat that turning it into layered cut paper barely fights the original — the gold ornament just becomes stacked paper shapes with real drop shadows. The Third of May 1808 → Woodcut Print Goya painted this in 1814, and it's often called the first truly modern painting about the horror of war. As a black-and-white woodcut it loses Goya's murky colour but gains harsh, carved contrast, which suits the subject — the lantern light and the raised arms of the condemned man read even more starkly in stark black on white. Composition 8 → Cloisonné Enamel Kandinsky painted **Composition 8** in 1923, while teaching at the Bauhaus — pure geometry, no subject at all. The recreation reads as cloisonné enamel: every line becomes a raised gold wire and every shape a pool of coloured enamel between the wires. His flat circles and triangles are basically built for the technique, so this one feels less like a reinterpretation and more like the same drawing rendered in metal and glass. Skeleton with Burning Cigarette → Neon Noir An early Van Gogh — he painted this skeleton smoking a cigarette around 1886, probably as a joke during dull anatomy lessons at the Antwerp academy. The neon-noir version drags it a century forward into moody blacks and electric rim light, which suits the morbid humour of the original better than the drab brown academy palette did. Salome with the Head of John the Baptist → Wood Engraving Caravaggio painted this around 1609–1610, near the end of his short, chaotic life. Recreated as a black-and-white wood engraving, all of Caravaggio's drama has to be carried by line alone — every shadow becomes cross-hatching. It's a fair swap, because Caravaggio's extreme light-and-dark (*chiaroscuro*) is exactly what old engravers spent their careers trying to reproduce in print. What is your favourite?