To Live

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: To Live / 活着, by Yu Hua.
Emotional tension: Patient endurance after loss; a very small living presence against the long continuity of the earth.
Scene: A broad harvested field, seen at a shallow diagonal. Three or four long irregular umber furrows run across the lower half, with a small elderly ox standing sideways at their far edge, around x=680 y=930. The animal is a compact, spare ink silhouette, head slightly bowed, feet grounded. No person. The field thins into untouched paper at its far edge. Keep the animal tender and ordinary, not heroic.
Visual decision: The horizontal span of worked earth and the tiny still ox. Avoid imitating the dune-and-horse reference; this is close, level farmland with furrows.
Palette: #b78156 and #4a4136. Render as restrained printed inks, not glossy gradients.
Omit: Portraits, houses, mountains, sun disc, birds, plough machinery, dramatic tragedy.

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