Chennai Watercolor Travel Poster

Goal: Create a refined travel-poster style watercolor illustration of {argument name="city name" default="Chennai"}, capturing an everyday urban street rhythm with heritage architecture, street food, and coastal details.

Canvas: Vertical portrait poster, roughly 3:4 aspect ratio, off-white textured watercolor paper with generous blank space in the upper left for typography.

Layout: Place the large title “{argument name="headline text" default="Chennai"}” in the upper left in an elegant high-contrast serif font. Directly below it, add the handwritten script subtitle “{argument name="subtitle text" default="Everyday Urban Rhythm"}”. Under the subtitle, add a short typewriter-style poem in small black text: “Salt in the air. / Filter coffee in hand. / Stories in every street. / This is Chennai.” Add a thin hand-drawn horizontal line above and below the poem. In the lower left corner, add a small handwritten note: “Chennai / is not just / a city, / it’s a feeling.” with a short underline.

Scene: Show a sunlit Chennai street in delicate ink-and-watercolor style. The right half is dominated by a richly detailed South Indian temple gopuram rising behind old shopfronts, filled with many tiny sculptural tiers in muted cream, peach, blue, and terracotta. A large leafy tree with olive-green foliage frames the upper right. The street recedes toward the left background, ending near the sea with a red-and-white striped lighthouse.

Key visible elements to include and count: exactly 1 ornate temple gopuram, exactly 1 red-and-white lighthouse in the far left background, exactly 1 large tree on the upper right, exactly 4 black curved street lamps along the road, exactly 2 yellow-and-black auto rickshaws with one large rickshaw in the foreground left and one smaller rickshaw behind it, exactly 1 bicycle cart carrying green coconuts in the center foreground, exactly 1 coconut pile on the curb near the woman, exactly 1 roadside filter coffee stall at the lower right, exactly 1 chalkboard menu beside the coffee stall, exactly 1 green road sign pointing toward “MARINA BEACH”, and exactly 5 small birds in the sky.

People and street life: Include a middle-aged man riding the coconut bicycle cart, a woman in a cream sari with gold accents walking away in the lower right foreground, a coffee vendor standing inside the stall, and small groups of pedestrians in the midground near the temple and beach road. Keep faces loose and painterly rather than photorealistic.

Shop and sign text: Add Tamil lettering on shop signs for local authenticity. On the green road sign, include Tamil text above “MARINA BEACH” and a white arrow. On the coffee stall front, write “FILTER COFFEE” and below it “STRONG & DEGREES”. Include a Tamil menu on the blackboard. The Tamil text may be painterly and imperfect but should look like real signage.

Visual style: Elegant urban sketching, fine pen outlines, transparent watercolor washes, muted warm neutrals, dusty ochre, pale blue-gray shadows, olive foliage, soft coastal haze, subtle paper grain, slightly loose perspective, hand-rendered details, calm nostalgic mood. Avoid glossy digital realism, harsh saturation, modern skyscrapers, cars dominating the street, or crowded clutter.