Personal study
World Food Programme · 2025
A Little To You
Personal study
A self-initiated study on how to communicate global hunger without exploitative tropes. The idea: what's left on one plate can mean everything to someone who has nothing. Emotional weight built from contrast and metaphor, never from a real person's suffering.
Concept, art direction, generative pipeline, compositing. Self-initiated concept. Not affiliated with or commissioned by the World Food Programme.
The brief, decoded
The self-set brief: a campaign-grade visual for the idea that a little from you is a lot to someone else. The goal was to move the viewer through scale and contrast, not through shock.
The challenge was ethical as much as visual. The image had to carry gravity while staying dignified, no real faces, no staged poverty, only a constructed metaphor.
The idea and the obstacle
The whole idea lives in one object: a fine porcelain plate, beautifully set, holding nothing but a picked-clean bone and a few crumbs. The blue figures painted into the porcelain come alive as hands, reaching for the scraps. Privilege and hunger occupy the same plate.
The challenge was restraint. The image had to land the gut-punch through composition and detail, not shock. The eye reads the elegant setting first, then notices the hands, then understands. That delay is the whole point.
The pipeline, node by node
The pipeline started from a manual sketch, translated into the blue-ink ceramic language of the plate. From there it layered up: the porcelain material, the reaching hands, the bone and crumbs, the embroidered tablecloth, each built as its own pass and assembled into one continuous image.
The final frame was assembled through a mix of photography, CGI, AI texture passes and retouching. AI carried the iteration, not the final image. ControlNet held the structure and lighting consistent across passes so the composite reads as a single, real photograph.
LoRA Dataset
- Trained domain
- Blue-ink porcelain illustration and surface texture
- Dataset
- 48 curated reference images
- Training
- 1,800 training steps, batch 4
- Base model
- FLUX.2 Kontext
ComfyUI Workflow
- 01 · Sketch Input
- Manual sketch: translated into the blue-ink ceramic language of the plate
- 02 · Porcelain Material
- Texture LoRA: blue-ink illustration on porcelain, strength 0.6
- 03 · Reaching Hands
- Composition: hands emerging from the plate ornament, OpenPose-guided
- 04 · ControlNet Apply
- Structure: depth and pose alignment across passes, weight 0.55
- 05 · Detail Passes
- Bone, crumbs and embroidered tablecloth: built as separate passes
- 06 · Assembly + Grade
- Output: layered composite, lighting and grade tuned non-destructively
Conditioning Notes
Depth ControlNet to keep every pass in one continuous spatial plane
Texture LoRA to maintain a single material language across the composite
Manual layered compositing so lighting and grade stay tunable without re-rendering
Output Specs
- Lighting
- Soft natural key, elegant setting reading first before the hands
- Color grade
- Unified grade across the whole frame, warm porcelain and cool shadow
- Intent
- Dignified metaphor, no real subjects
Layer Decomposition
- Plate + porcelain
- Fine blue-and-white plate, the surface the metaphor is painted into
- Reaching hands
- Painted figures becoming hands that reach for the scraps
- Bone + crumbs
- The picked-clean leftovers, the only food in frame
- Tablecloth + grade
- Embroidered linen, silverware, unified final grade
Final Output
- Lighting
- Soft natural key, elegant setting reading first before the hands
- Color grade
- Unified grade across the whole frame, warm porcelain and cool shadow
- Intent
- Dignified metaphor, no real subjects