Dear Z.
← All devlog entries

· Art · Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Sea in a Palm

Key art for the second chapter — a small boat, an endless night sea, and a hand you don't notice until it's too late.

Concept art of a small white-cloaked child rowing a boat across a dark moonlit sea, past pairs of tall glowing doors that each hold a garment or object, while a vast hand made of mist reaches over the water; in the distance a narrow door of white light, a pavilion, and a ship stranded on sand dunes.

Chapter 2, Sea in a Palm (掌中海), is the first stage of the life you walk through: childhood.

The idea

A child drifts in a little boat across a sea that seems to go on forever. They can go anywhere — or so it seems. Pairs of glowing doors rise out of the water, and each pair offers a choice: this garment or that one, these shoes or those, this toy or the other.

What the child doesn’t see is the hand. It has been there the whole time, just beyond the mist, quietly steering.

Reading the image

  • The palette moves from Chapter 1’s grey-green ink to a single deep indigo, lit by moonlight. The only warm color is the amber glow of the doors.
  • The doors come in pairs and shrink into the distance, a row of choices the boat has yet to reach.
  • The hand is made of mist rather than flesh. It feels less like a threat and more like the weather: always there, and hard to argue with.
  • On the horizon, a single tall, narrow door blazes white with a figure waiting inside it. Beyond that, the sea is already turning to sand, and a ship lies stranded. That’s where the chapter is headed.

The same small figure in the white hooded cloak carries on from Chapter 1. Every chapter will be painted in its own color, but the traveller stays the same.