The Metamorphosis

This prompt generates text-free artwork. The title and author are composed separately afterward. This standalone recipe incorporates the revision; the original generation prompt is preserved separately.

Use case: illustration-story.
Create ONE original literary cover illustration. Portrait 2:3, 1024 by 1536 preferred, flat edge-to-edge paper. No book mockup.
Art direction: quiet mid-century printmaking, irregular ink edges, fine restrained natural paper grain, matte warm ivory (#f1ede3). No more than two main muted ink colours plus graphite linework and the ivory paper. Wide, confident forms; very few small details. A lived-in spatial scene with a sense of distance, weather or absence—not a floating icon, logo, object sticker, or decorative emblem.
Reserve the entire top 43% as completely empty warm ivory for separate live typography. The narrative occupies roughly 47%–87% of the canvas; the bottom 9% remains clean ivory for an author line. The scene can reach the side edges. Coherent at 180 pixels wide. Paper is the light, not a bright sun.
No text, letterlike marks, digits, signature, watermark, publisher logo, frame, collage, glossy 3D, photorealism, cute cartoon, ornate ornament, heavy distressed texture or green. Make an original interpretation, not a copy of any published cover.

Work: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Emotional tension: estrangement inside one's own home. An austere empty room, reduced to two broad warm-grey wall planes and an ivory floor. One narrow closed deep charcoal door sits off-centre; its base leaks a hairline of dim ochre light. A large, hard-edged charcoal shadow extends diagonally from the unseen foreground toward the door. The shadow is an ambiguous rectangle, NOT an insect silhouette. An uncomfortably small door in a quiet enclosed space, with simple geometric perspective. No insect, human, animal, furniture, clocks, eye, symbols, patterned wallpaper, extra windows, sun or surreal collage. Palette: warm mineral grey and charcoal with one tiny muted-ochre glint.

Final composition requirement for this fresh generation: preserve an uninterrupted warm-ivory author margin across the bottom 9% of the image. Keep the narrative illustration above that margin. No lettering anywhere. This recipe incorporates the margin correction made to the selected artwork; it does not guarantee identical pixels.

Generated: 2026-10-15
Tool: OpenAI built-in image generation; exact model version not exposed by the tool.

A targeted revision

The first draft invaded the author margin. An image edit cleared the lower edge while preserving the composition.

Use case: precise-object-edit. Adjust only the lower edge of this literary print illustration so it can carry typeset author information. Keep the existing portrait 2:3 canvas, upper ivory negative space, exact main composition, small subject, restrained two-ink palette and paper texture. The bottom 10% of the full canvas must become completely clear unprinted ivory paper matching the top. End the printed scene with a gently imperfect print edge at 88% height. Do not shift the title zone, add a frame, add text, or add any new objects. Preserve the image above 75% height; resolve only the lowest portion naturally. No lettering or marks in the new ivory margin.