An impasto oil painting of a covered bridge in Hội An. A tiled roof with ornate ridge ends shelters a red wooden gallery hung with red lanterns, set on stone arches, between an ochre house with pink bougainvillea and a red-walled building. A small wooden boat is moored by stone steps, and everything is reflected in the water, with cream clouds and an orange sun behind.

Palette-knife cities / 2026

The Japanese Bridge, Hội An

Hội An's Japanese Covered Bridge in thick paint. The tiled roof, red lanterns, ochre walls and bougainvillea are all doubled in the water below.

Chùa Cầu, the Japanese Covered Bridge, has crossed a small stream in Hội An's old town for about four hundred years, and it is the town's emblem. The prompt takes its colour from the landmark, or from the city as people picture it. Hội An answers with both: the red of the bridge, ochre walls, red lanterns under the eaves.

Around it are the few related things the prompt allows: pink bougainvillea at a doorway, a wooden boat tied up by the steps. The water holds all of it upside down, lanterns included.

The prompt is a template: from one city to the next, only the name in square brackets changes. It is shown here in English translation.

Codex image generation

The creative direction

[Hội An · Chùa Cầu, the Japanese Covered Bridge], oil painting style, a 3D miniature landscape in thick palette-knife impasto, with paint of varying thickness giving a real sense of volume. 3:4 portrait, a centred diagonal composition. The main colour comes from the landmark's own signature colours, or from the colours people associate with the city. A sweep of oil paint in matching tones runs from the lower left to the upper right, carrying the finely made landmark and rendering its iconic outline, structure and materials accurately, with a few related elements dotted around it. The paint at the bottom and the water in front echo the building's main colour; the water clearly reflects the whole landmark, keeping natural glints and layers of colour. Behind the building, milky-white clouds are built up from thick oil paint, varied in size and overlapping front to back, with clearly raised thickness, palette-knife texture and soft cast shadows, and an orange-gold sun rises between them. About a 45-degree oblique view from above, soft side light, a minimal layout, large areas of white textured paper left blank, the edges of the paint showing natural scraped and broken strokes. No text, no watermark.