Because who doesn’t love the Smorkin’ Labbit by Frank Kozik?

The Experiment

January always feels like the moment to pause, recap, and start dreaming about the year ahead — and, for me, it’s the perfect time to dive into personal projects. This one comes from my love for vinyl toys and collage-style visuals.

I was ideating around a new project and wanted to work with Kidrobot toys, so this is where I landed.

While researching visual directions, I kept coming back to naive, carefree graphics — those childlike drawings with a sweet rawness and lots of energy. I paired that with Frutiger Aero–style glossy gradients, which felt like a natural fit for vinyl toys because of their shiny, plasticky look and the era they reference. Both styles feel very present again right now.

Starting from just four source images — a portrait of a young woman, the Labbit figure, and a Pinterest image of children drawings — I used Nano Banana to composite everything into a cohesive, motion-ready visual language, blending the two styles together. The results were surprisingly strong. I was able to dial the balance in quite precisely by introducing colour splashes, perspective shifts, and graphic details.

What really stood out was how well the model understood direction — even when pushed with unusual perspective prompts, despite the original image being a simple portrait. Also as you can see in the image bellow i did not used Image of Frutiger Aero but rather just prompt it. And the model understood the prompth prety well

Confi Ui workflow

Final Thoughts

For me, the beauty of this exercise lay in the model itself. Starting from a simple portrait image and guiding it through prompting to achieve these poses and editorial-ready looks felt almost magical. It opens up a completely different creative space at pitch stage, making it possible to achieve a studio-quality aesthetic without the need for an actual photoshoot.

It also made me think about how limited the process used to feel—scrolling endlessly through stock libraries, with the composition largely dictated by whatever human-shot editorial imagery happened to exist. And, of course, the endless fake smiles. It often felt restrictive rather than inspiring.

What excited me here was the freedom to shape the image language more intentionally. I led the research and chose to experiment with two visual styles, both of which felt right for the Labbit character and its street-culture, pop-extravaganza energy.

As a final production method, it is not flawless. To achieve full motion control, the ideal next step would be to rebuild the chosen direction in 3D. But as a research and development tool, it is incredibly powerful—offering a much more expressive and flexible alternative to traditional stock-led exploration.