A botanical world at sea

Working with Disney had been my dream for as long as I can remember. So when the art consultancy Artlink asked me to create artworks for Disney Wish, the new ship of Disney Cruise Line, it felt like that dream was finally coming true. What drew them to my work was the amount of detail and wonder I can bring together in a single artwork: light that shifts from warm to cool, and trees whose branches carry flowers, birds and hidden surprises. The brief was a series of four digital artworks for the crew areas on board: one shared composition in four versions, each with its own colour palette and its own hidden elements, printed in several sizes for offices throughout the ship.

Instead of four separate artworks, I built one botanical world and let the time of day change it. Dawn, Noon, Twilight and Dusk share the same twisting tree and foliage, while the sky, the light and the colour palette shift from one to the next. Side by side they read as one day passing.

Look closely and the tree starts to look back. Five familiar silhouettes are woven into the foliage as living topiaries, kept close to the colour of the leaves so they reveal themselves slowly instead of all at once. They have company: a chameleon curls around a branch, a hornbill keeps watch, and bluebirds and hummingbirds dart between the flowers, each a quiet nod to well-loved stories. Even the butterflies carry a secret in their wings. The longer you look, the more you find.

My first proposal, in November 2020, explored three different trees. The Artlink curator even gathered extra reference images of flowers, birds and butterflies for me, and after our calls I combined the rich foliage of the first sketch with the twisting tree of the second. The centred tree still had too much empty space around it, so twisting the trunk further made the composition more organic and whimsical. Smaller branches and a faded tree in the foreground fill the lower part, and a hint of background foliage and sky adds depth. Birds such as a red fody, a hornbill and blue birds bring colour and life, and the clouds were softened so they never read as rain.

Artlink takes care of printing and framing, so the final artworks were delivered as high resolution files at 300 dpi. Each of the four works comes in three square sizes: an image of 462, 762 or 962 mm, framed at 500, 800 or 1000 mm. Test prints checked colour and detail on paper before the files went out.