Charcoal Memory Travel Poster

Charcoal Disappearing Travel Study

Use the system imagegen skill and image-generation tool. Edit the supplied photographs; do not invent an unrelated scene.

Output contract

• Produce exactly one independent raster poster per uploaded photo. Never combine photos, subjects, or outputs into a collage, contact sheet, diptych, or shared canvas.
• Use a 3:4 portrait composition with two intentional visual regions: approximately the upper 50% as real photography and the lower 50% as warm-white charcoal paper. Adjust the boundary slightly only when needed to preserve the source naturally; never make it feel like a rigid graphic template.
• Return separate images with no title, caption, date, number, logo, watermark, border, or explanatory text.
• The central idea is the contrast between what was actually seen and what remained in memory.

Preserve the upper photograph

Keep the upper region immediately identifiable as the original real photograph, not a photorealistic redraw. Preserve exactly:

• subject identity and count, anatomy or construction, pose, proportion, placement, and direction of movement;
• architecture, vehicles, animals, terrain, spatial relationships, perspective, depth, lighting, texture, material, and source color atmosphere.

Apply only subtle art-photography refinement: natural restrained color, balanced tone, and barely visible film grain. Do not apply a black-and-white filter, charcoal texture, painterly treatment, artificial haze, or stylized reinterpretation to the photograph.

For the 3:4 ratio, use a natural crop or a gentle extension of plausible surrounding sky, ground, mountain, wall, water, or open space. Never stretch, warp, relocate, replace, beautify, or redesign a real subject.

Read the source before generating

For each source photo, privately determine:

1. the one or two strongest memory anchors;
2. their defining silhouette, pose, orientation, scale, structural cues, and value pattern;
3. the minimum surrounding trace needed to preserve place and recognition;
4. which details and background can disappear;
5. the physical mark direction and one or two deepest charcoal accents that carry identity.

Possible anchors include a house, cable car, person, animal, vehicle, boat, bridge, tree, stairway, rock, doorway, or architectural feature. Do not turn the whole photograph into a charcoal landscape.

Build the lower disappearing charcoal study

Reconstruct only the selected anchor or relationship on warm matte white drawing paper. Preserve its key identity, pose, proportion, direction, and scale, but simplify aggressively. Keep the charcoal subject to roughly 18–35% of the lower paper area and leave generous untouched paper around it. The lower region must not be filled.

Allow at most 1–3 quiet environmental traces: a broken horizon, a small rock or slope fragment, two or three mountain strokes, a cable line, a few tree marks, a small cast-shadow indication, or brief spatial smudges. Everything else should dissolve into blank paper. The result is a selective unfinished travel study, not a complete background drawing or literal tracing.

Use a restrained physical charcoal vocabulary:

• willow charcoal, compressed charcoal, charcoal pencil, and very light graphite;
• broad directional marks, short broken strokes, uneven hand pressure, broken contours, finger-smudged gray, kneaded-eraser lifts, charcoal dust, loose crumbs, and visible paper grain;
• broad structural masses and pauses instead of dense academic rendering, crosshatching, or photo-level pencil detail.

Reserve the darkest charcoal for only essential recognition structures: a doorway, deep shadow, window, tire, human silhouette, animal horn, structural seam, cable-car support, boat underside, or equivalent source-specific anchor. Use only one or two controlled gray smudges to suggest volume, and keep paper visible through the drawing.

Physical disappearance, not a digital fade

The lower study must progress as if the artist stopped drawing or partially erased it:

clear charcoal structure → broken contour → loose smudge → scattered charcoal dust → untouched paper

Let edges lose definition through missing marks, rubbed charcoal, lifted graphite, unfinished strokes, dry residue, and exposed paper. The disappearance must be physical and irregular.

Do not use digital opacity, blur, glow, mist, airbrush, feathered masks, soft focus, artificial gradients, or smooth atmospheric fades. Do not create a polished vector illustration or a charcoal-colored filtered copy of the photo.

Paper and palette

The entire lower half is strictly monochrome. Use only warm white paper, warm gray, cool gray, charcoal black, and extremely subtle graphite silver-gray. Never carry photographic color into the drawing.

Make the paper tactile and matte, with visible fibers, tooth, rubbing, powder residue, eraser traces, small imperfections, and natural unevenness. The paper void is an active compositional element.

Review and correction

Inspect every output at full size and thumbnail size. Regenerate with one focused correction if a core invariant fails:

• If the upper region looks illustrated, filtered, monochrome, or paper-textured, restore real photographic detail, source color, depth, and texture.
• If a person, animal, building, vehicle, or other subject changes identity, pose, count, proportion, position, or direction, correct it from the source before refining style.
• If the lower half becomes a full landscape, dense illustration, oversized subject, or busy scene, delete secondary marks and restore blank paper.
• If the charcoal looks digital, smooth, blurred, gradient-faded, or vector-clean, replace those effects with broken hand marks, physical erasure, dust, and visible paper.
• If color enters the lower half, remove it entirely.
• If the split becomes a hard template edge, make the transition clean but naturally composed, with a slight source-responsive adjustment rather than a decorative divider.

Hard exclusions: no collage, multi-photo composition, full charcoal landscape, full-background redraw, black-and-white treatment of the photo, photorealistic pencil redraw, dense academic illustration, watercolor, ink wash, oil paint, digital airbrush, mist fade, blur, smooth gradient, decorative border, rigid poster template, oversized anchor, invented scenery, changed people or animals, altered architecture, subject replacement, logo, watermark, title, number, or explanatory text.

Before returning, verify that each output is separate, the top is a truthful recognizable photograph, the bottom is a selective hand-made monochrome charcoal study of the same source memory, and the composition remains quiet, sparse, tactile, archival, and emotionally restrained.