Painted Memory Poster

Painted Memory Poster

Use the system imagegen skill and image-generation tool. Treat every supplied photograph as an edit target, not merely a loose reference.

Output contract

• Produce one independent 3:4 portrait raster poster for each uploaded photo. Make separate image-generation calls and separate outputs; never combine sources into a collage, contact sheet, diptych, or shared canvas.
• Use a clear upper/lower dialogue: truthful photography above and a selectively reconstructed painted memory below. The boundary may overlap, fade, step, or breathe, but both states must remain immediately legible.
• Preserve the upper photograph's subject identity, count, anatomy or structure, pose, silhouette, spatial relationships, real texture, natural light, and original color atmosphere. Apply only restrained art-magazine or exhibition-photography color correction.
• Extend only ambient background such as sky, wall, ground, water, or foliage when the 3:4 canvas requires it. Never stretch, warp, duplicate, beautify, restage, or redesign the subject.
• Derive the lower image from the same source, but do not reproduce the complete scene. Identify what makes the image worth remembering—one subject, gesture, silhouette, distance, encounter, or visual metaphor—and rebuild only that essential idea with at most a few indispensable relational cues.

Resolve conflicts in this order: source identity, key pose or relationship, photographic truth above, conceptual clarity below, negative-space composition, color rhythm, material character, then optional text.

Distill the painted memory

Before prompting, privately determine:

1. the hero subject or relationship;
2. the defining silhouette, pose, direction, or interval between elements;
3. the image's actual emotional or visual premise;
4. which details are indispensable for recognition and which should disappear;
5. the lower composition's focal scale, offset, crop, and direction of tension;
6. the source temperature, 3–6 useful colors, and one possible dark or warm anchor;
7. whether a meaningful word or phrase genuinely belongs in the image.

Prefer a relationship over an inventory. If the source depends on a person within space, two objects at a meaningful distance, a figure facing an environment, or an accidental alignment, preserve that relational geometry. Do not isolate an object when doing so destroys the source's meaning.

Reduce aggressively. The lower half should usually contain one dominant painted subject or relational group and no more than one or two quiet supporting cues. Delete unrelated architecture, crowds, props, foliage, surface detail, and background description. Do not convert every visible object into an illustration.

Lower-half composition

Use an extremely light, nearly white background chosen from the source's overall temperature and mood. It may be subtly warm, cool, creamy, gray-blue, pale green, or faintly tinted, but it must remain light, clean, and quiet.

Make negative space an active form carrying air, distance, time, and emotion. Keep the painted subject sparse enough that the lower section still feels predominantly open. Shape the empty area around the eye path rather than leaving an accidental blank rectangle.

Build beauty through focal weight, scale contrast, directional tension, cropping, suspension, low placement, and incomplete asymmetry. The subject may sit off-center, touch or cross an edge, appear partially cropped, float, or settle near the lower edge. Avoid centered badge compositions, evenly distributed elements, filled backgrounds, repeated icons, and rigid symmetry.

The lower half must read as a reorganized visual memory, not a literal scene reconstruction, decorative illustration panel, or collection of extracted objects.

Painting language

Use one coherent handmade language combining opaque gouache, acrylic, oil pastel, and dry oil-paint character:

• broad simplified color masses and hand-drawn contours;
• powdery, matte, opaque pigment with visible tooth;
• dry-brush drag, scraping, overpainting, rubbed edges, exposed ground, incomplete fill, and small corrective marks;
• relaxed, slightly naive shapes and occasional mild proportional exaggeration;
• accurate identity, defining silhouette, and key pose despite the looseness.

Preserve pauses, revisions, uncovered substrate, and accidental marks that make a real painting feel touched by a person. Do not polish away all irregularity. Avoid watercolor-dominant transparency, delicate pen-sketch language, clean vector geometry, airbrushed gradients, glossy 3D rendering, anime or cartoon templates, and refined commercial-character illustration.

Palette

Extract the source's overall temperature and its most alive colors, then translate them into a warm, bright, slightly naive artist's palette rather than copying local color mechanically.

• Favor cream yellow, apricot, peach, coral pink, old rose, or warm off-white in conversation with sky blue, pale cyan-green, mint, gray-green, or other source-relevant cool notes.
• Permit very small amounts of brick red, orange-red, deep green, earth brown, or black as visual anchors.
• Allow local recoloring, displaced color, and small jumps in hue when they improve rhythm, while preserving the source's emotional atmosphere.
• Keep pigment powdery, opaque, slightly faded, and still alive.

Avoid an all-over gray Morandi palette, a uniform pastel filter, dirty brown cast, candy sweetness, and highly saturated digital color. Establish harmony through temperature and proportion rather than applying one global tint.

Text

No text by default. Add text only when the source strongly suggests a meaningful word, sound, fragment, short sentence, or memory cue. Never invent fixed titles, locations, dates, issue numbers, branding, labels, or pseudo-editorial information merely to make the result look like a poster.

When warranted, keep text extremely sparse and subordinate. Let it inhabit negative space, sit near the subject, follow a spatial direction, or appear mildly handwritten, offset, or imperfect. Use exact, legible wording and remove it if generation produces gibberish or if it competes with the image.

Compile the edit prompt

For each source, write a direct spatial production brief containing:

1. one independent 3:4 portrait output and the upper/lower visual dialogue;
2. exact upper-photo preservation invariants and any safe ambient extension;
3. the hero subject or relationship, defining gesture, and central memory or metaphor;
4. a removal list for lower-half clutter and a short list of the few cues to retain;
5. the lower subject's scale, offset, crop, direction, and shaped negative space;
6. the near-white background temperature and source-derived warm/cool palette;
7. the opaque handmade painting grammar and visible imperfect marks;
8. optional exact text and placement, or an explicit no-text instruction;
9. hard exclusions: no multi-photo canvas, no source montage, no distorted subject, no complete lower-scene copy, no object catalog, no sticker set, no filled background, no uniform pastel filter, no polished commercial illustration, no vector-clean finish, no cartoon/anime, no generic decorations, no meaningless text, and no watermark.

Use concrete visible decisions instead of relying on adjectives such as “premium” or “artistic.” Do not quote or display the user's full design brief; treat it as internal production direction and proceed to editing.

Inspect and correct

Review every poster at full size and thumbnail size. Regenerate once with one targeted correction when needed.

• If it looks like a filtered photograph, restore a clearly distinct painted lower memory.
• If the upper half looks painted, printed, smoothed, or identity-altered, restore truthful photographic detail and natural texture.
• If the lower half resembles the full source scene, remove background description and reduce it to the hero subject or relationship.
• If it feels busy, remove supporting elements before shrinking everything; enlarge and reshape the quiet field.
• If the empty space feels dead, adjust the subject's offset, scale, crop, or directional gesture rather than adding decoration.
• If the result is too gray or sweet, restore a controlled warm/cool collision and one restrained anchor color.
• If the paint looks digitally smooth, strengthen dry drag, exposed ground, overpainting, broken contours, and incomplete fill.
• If text is generic, garbled, or visually dominant, remove it.

Return all independent images clearly, one per source photograph, with no promotional copy. A short status sentence is optional.