A different painting for every small thing
Every small thing in Orange Lantern comes with its own painting, and no two paintings are made the same way. One is a paper cut, one is pen and wash, one is a felt puppet, one is a woodblock print. A line under each painting names the style. This note is about how that came to be.
Trying everything on the same two stories
We started by painting the same two small things, one indoors and one outdoors, in 106 different ways of painting: ink, watercolour, clay, embroidery, pixel art, stained glass, and on through the catalogue. Seeing the same scene in every style made the comparison honest. Eighteen were rejected on sight, and the rest became the pool. For each way of painting we wrote a short profile: what the lines are like, what the colours are, what the material is, what it must show to be recognisable, and what it must never do.
Matching a style to a story
Then each small thing was matched to the way of painting that fits it, with the reasoning written down. A quiet breath on the pillow became ink on soft paper, where the breath is a wash that spreads on its own. Guessing the weather through a gap in the curtains became a paper cut, because a cut gap is a real hole that hides what is behind it. A pair of fingertips that have to meet with eyes closed became fine-line gongbi, which can draw the one-millimetre gap between two paws. Every story also got two alternatives, in case the first choice does not survive the painting.
Two rules shape the whole set. No way of painting is used for more than two small things, so the app does not fall into a house style. And the three things you can be offered on one day are always in three different styles, and in styles you have not seen for a few days.
Rules every painting follows
- A visible source of light, or a visibly lit area, in every painting. That is what lights up when you light the lantern.
- The cat never looks at the camera. It is busy with the small thing, or watching it.
- No words, no logos, no second lantern, no human faces or hands.
- A style name describes a way of painting. We do not name living artists, and we only name an artist at all when they have been gone for more than a century; a style is never a claim of affiliation.
- No dark palettes, and, after a pass over the whole library, no paintings that are only black, white and grey.
How the pictures are made
Each painting starts as a written composition: the camera, what is in the scene and where, what the cat and the snail are doing, where the light is and what brightens when the lantern is lit, how the cat reacts, and what must not appear. That description, plus the profile of the chosen style, becomes the brief for an AI image tool. We generate the picture, then check it against the rules one by one, including the corners for stray signatures and the whole for anything that looks like a flag, a brand or a photograph. Pictures that fail are redrawn. The style name shown in the app is there so that you know what you are looking at.