ART BRIEF: the pictures for Scott's personal thank-you email

From Elsie to GRETA, 22 September 2026. Bespoke Grok scenes, drawn fresh for this email, headless on Scott's own subscription. Nothing reused, nothing cropped out of another job.

Scott, 17:3x BST, verbatim: "throw the whole lot out and start again with bespoke grok art work and an email from scott@salus", and a moment later: "forget the look of the website".

WHAT THE EMAIL IS, so the pictures know what they are for

A personal letter from Scott to one person who has just subscribed. Iris's draft 2 is in his own voice: he says who he is, that thirty-five years of practice taught him to ask whether a thing holds up for a real person in a real moment (anxious, grieving, exhausted, or awake at three in the morning), and he hopes it gives them their nights back.

So the pictures are not a product catalogue and not an advertisement. No tiles, no categories, no feature icons. One person's quiet night, told in two frames. The reader should feel the room, not the app.

THE SLOTS

CUT TO TWO PICTURES on Scott's word of 17:3x BST, verbatim: "this is a peronal email not a business transaction". A letter from one person carries one picture at the top and at most one at the foot. The third scene below is WITHDRAWN and is not drawn.

slot	file name	pixels (2x for a 600 wide email)	shown at	where it sits
1	`header.jpg`	1200 x 600	600 x 300	the top of the email, full bleed, above his first word
2	`scene-rest.jpg`	1200 x 675	536 x 301	below his sign-off, the last thing on the page
3	~~`scene-awake.jpg`~~	withdrawn 17:3x BST		not drawn

Exact pixels, please. Not "about". The email reserves those boxes and a different shape will either letterbox or crop on a phone.

WHAT EACH ONE SHOWS

1. HEADER, the room at the end of the day. Seen from inside a bedroom: the edge of a bed in the near foreground, a window with the curtain half drawn, and beyond it a quiet night, hills or a far scattering of town lights. One small warm lamp is the only made light. Nobody in the frame. It should read as somebody's real room, not a hotel and not a showroom. Wide and calm, with the interest low and left so the picture still works when a phone crops its edges.

AWAKE. WITHDRAWN 17:3x BST, not drawn. It was to be the small hours seen from outside, one window lit in a dark row. It is kept named here only so nobody re-adds it as a third picture.

2 (the second and last picture). REST, the night given back, and the last thing the reader sees. The same room as slot 1, later. The lamp is out, the first grey of dawn is at the window but the sun is not up, the covers are settled, and a phone lies face down on the bedside table with its screen dark. Nobody in the frame. Softer and warmer than slot 1, so the two read in order as the end of the day and the rest that follows.

THE RULES FOR BOTH, and any one of these breaks the picture

No lettering of any kind. No words, no wordmark, no logo, no badge, no rating, no numerals, no clock face, no signage, no book titles. Every word in this email is real text, so a word baked into a picture is a word nobody can change and a word Iris did not write.
No app screen, no phone interface, no user interface of any kind. In slot 3 the phone is face DOWN with a dark screen, which is the point of it.
No people, no faces, no hands, no figures near an edge, and no figure in or near deep water. The rooms are empty on purpose: the reader is the person who lives there.
One consistent hand across all three. Same illustrator, same light, same level of detail, drawn as one small set. Three fine pictures that do not match are worse than three plain ones that do.
No text overlay is coming later. These are finished pictures, not backgrounds for a headline.

THE PALETTE, AND IT IS YOURS TO SET

The website's look is deliberately NOT the reference here (his sentence above). Do not take the site's navy, its lavender glow or its teal. What I need instead, so the two hold together and so the email can take its colours from them:

A low, warm night register: deep blues and warm browns, one warm light source per scene (the lamp, the lit window, the first of the dawn). No neon, no electric teal, no purple bloom, no heavy vignette.
They will sit on a warm off-white paper ground (the email is a letter), so each picture needs its own quiet edge and must not rely on bleeding into a dark page.
When the two are done, tell me the two or three colours that actually dominate them. The email's rules, its sign-off and its small furniture will be set from your pictures, not from any palette decided before they existed.

HOW THEY REACH ME

Finished files at exactly those pixel sizes, as JPEG, quality high, each under about 400 kB so the whole email stays light on a phone. Leave them anywhere you like and tell me the paths. I upload them to r2:salus-mind/images/email/play-welcome/ myself, read each back over https, swap them into the shell where the grey placeholders sit now, and render the whole thing for Scott.

Nothing is sent. He sees a render first.