Image - 2026-09-19 10:15

STYLE: hand-painted 2D Slavic folk-art animation - Bilibin / lubok / Orthodox-icon sensibility. Bold decorative ink outlines with visible line-weight variation, flat matte gouache color fills (poster-flat, minimal gradients), ornamental folk pattern work, strong readable silhouettes, storybook-fable atmosphere. Flat painted, posterized light. Limited, defined palette that keeps a cool accent (not all-warm). Cinematic 9:16 VERTICAL (portrait) storyboard frame, film-still composition, high emotional readability. AVOID COMPLETELY: photoreal 3D shading, cel-anime gloss, glossy digital painting, soft volumetric or atmospheric lighting, 3D rendered depth, photoreal skin, fine engraving hatching, uniform sepia monochrome, any realistic render. CHARACTERS: use the ATTACHED character sheets and keep every character exactly on-model - same face, hair, proportions, costume, ornament and palette as on the sheet. No reinterpretation between shots. Match the FLAT decorative folk-art look of those sheets: the same bold ink linework, flat gouache fills, lubok / icon graphic flatness, and ornament. IN THIS SHOT: IGOR "Klinok", ARTYOM "Serdtse", KIRILL "Tvyordaya ruka", MISHA "The Eye" - all four in their MODERN ARRIVAL LOOK from the sheets (frames 1-5 block), not the armor. The bandits are not from a sheet. FULL-BLEED: fill the entire frame edge to edge. NO ornamental border, NO decorative frame, NO margins, NO letterboxing, NO horizontal 16:9 framing - the image bleeds to all four edges of a vertical 9:16 picture. VERTICAL COMPOSITION: 9:16 portrait. Build the shot top to bottom - stack the main elements across the upper, middle and lower thirds, keep the key face or object near the center, use the tall format for height (trees, columns, the demon, the blast). Do NOT compose a horizontal image and crop it. TEXT: no text, no lettering, no captions and no Latin letters anywhere inside the image (Russian captions are added afterwards). If text is truly unavoidable, it must be Russian (Cyrillic) only. SCENE: Over-the-shoulder from behind a thick bush: the four friends in modern clothes crouch hidden among leaves, peering out. On the forest road beyond, a group of burly folk-tale BANDITS (patched caftans, fur hats, axes, scruffy beards) escort a wooden cart with an iron-barred CAGE full of frightened villagers. The bandit leader has a large iron KEY hanging from his belt, highlighted by a glint and placed at the compositional focal point. Palette: evening amber and olive, rust-brown bandits, cool slate shadows in the bush. Vertical stacked depth: leaves across the top, the friends in the middle band, the road and the cage at the bottom. Mood: tense hidden watching, a plan forming.