Art direction notes
Fernquill is a small journal about the visual craft behind video-game environments. Each plate looks at one world and tries to name the decisions that make it feel the way it does.
Plate 1
The underwater world built around coral fans and bottlenose dolphins relies almost entirely on a turquoise-to-teal gradient for depth. Creatures swim toward the viewer in layered arcs, each one brighter than the last. The trick is that nothing is dark. Shadows are mid-blue, not black, which keeps the reef feeling like open water rather than a cave.
Plate 2
The nighttime jungle scene gives nearly all of its contrast to a single panther moving through vines. Everything else is low-key greens and purples with rim light from a half-hidden moon. The animal reads instantly because its silhouette is the only curved shape in a field of vertical trunks and leaves.
Plate 3
A desert highway world that uses atmospheric perspective to sell distance. The truck in the foreground is sharp chrome and saturated red; everything behind it fades through ochre haze. The overhead sign provides a horizontal anchor in a composition that is otherwise all verticals and a single vanishing point.
Plate 4
Looking through a porthole at a coral reef is a framing device that does two things at once. It sets the viewing distance, and it gives the artist a reason to put warm metal next to cool water. The brass rim catches the same caustic light that dances inside, linking interior and exterior in one shared lighting pass.
Plate 5
The tropical island scene borrows its entire mood from vintage travel illustration. Flat gouache washes with visible brush texture, a limited warm palette for the sky and a limited cool palette for the water, and one young elephant placed at the golden-ratio intersection for scale. The illustrator trusted the medium more than the rendering engine.
Fernquill is written in Singapore by two people who keep pausing games to look at the art. We are not game reviewers and we do not score anything. We look at how environments are drawn, lit, and coloured, and we try to write clearly about the choices behind them.
There is no publishing schedule. New plates appear when the writing is finished. We are not accepting submissions or advertising.