My Memories of Old Beijing

This prompt generates text-free artwork. The title and author are composed separately afterward.

Use case: illustration-story.
Create ONE original literary cover ILLUSTRATION LAYER, not a finished cover. Exact title and author will be typeset later from font files. Portrait 2:3, exactly 1024 by 1536 pixels, PNG preferred. Flat edge-to-edge paper, no book mockup.
Art direction: quiet mid-century printmaking, broad confident shapes, irregular ink edges, very fine natural paper grain, matte warm ivory (#f1ede3). No more than TWO muted ink colours plus graphite linework and paper. Very few small details. An inhabitable spatial scene with weather, distance or absence, never a floating icon, logo, sticker or decorative emblem.
PRODUCTION COMPOSITION: reserve the ENTIRE TOP 43% (y=0 through660) as empty warm ivory for separate typography. All meaningful illustration occupies y=720 through1330, roughly 47%–87%. Entire bottom 9% (y=1398 through1536) stays clean, empty warm ivory for the author line. Scene may reach left/right edges inside its own area. No border or artificially white rectangle pasted over an image. Quiet space is part of the composition. Coherent at 180 pixels wide.
No text, letterlike marks, digits, signature, watermark, publisher logo, frames, collage, glossy 3D, photorealism, cute cartoon, ornate ornament or heavy distressed texture. No green. Make an original interpretation, not a copy of a published cover.

Work: My Memories of Old Beijing / 城南旧事, by Lin Haiyin.
Emotional tension: Affectionate childhood memory touched by the quiet disappearance of familiar people.
Scene: An intimate old Beijing alley seen from a child's low eye level. Two broad weathered stone-grey walls recede gently to a small sunlit opening, not a dramatic vanishing-point tunnel. A closed faded terracotta door at the left and a very low, empty wooden stool beside it. The stool is the only portable object. A single oblique patch of pale afternoon light cuts the ground. Crop architecture into the scene edges; keep all architecture below y=700, ending by y=1330. Use very few roof and paving lines.
Visual decision: A low empty stool beneath adult-sized walls; an intimate scale relationship rather than an architectural showcase.
Palette: #a09b85 and #bd8972. Render as restrained printed inks, not glossy gradients.
Omit: Lettered shop signs, lanterns, bicycles, children, crowds, ornate roofs, tourist scenery.

Generated: 2026-10-16
Tool: OpenAI built-in image generation; exact model version not exposed by the tool.