Style books

Flora and ground

Giant pale trees, moon bells, star moss, teal ground. Calm empty moss between the things.

A sheet of Alvheim plants: a giant pale tree with a blue-green crown, a clump of blue moon bells, a clump of pink ones, a mound of star moss with glowing pale stars, a patch of teal moss with a vein of moonstone, a pale cap mushroom on a log, a fern with curled fiddleheads, a birch with cotton grass.
The flora kit.
  • The giant pale trees: silver-white trunks 3 to 5 m thick, marks grey, big rounded roots with moss, a high crown of small blue-green leaves in a few large masses with sky gaps. All trees within 80 m of the well are this kind. A dark-trunked forest tree inside the ring breaks the place.
  • Moon bells: five to seven bells on arched stems over broad leaves, 0.4 to 0.7 m tall, in pale blue, violet or pink; one colour per clump; only the bell's heart glows. In drifts of 3 to 7 clumps along ways and round the well, none in the 3 m round a path's middle.
  • Star moss: teal cushions with tiny pale star flowers that glow faintly at night; the ground cover under the trees.
  • Glow caps: pale caps with a cyan glow underneath, on roots and logs in the old wood round the edge only.
  • Ferns with fiddlehead spirals (the living form of the spiral motif); cotton grass and a white mountain flower at the edge, where Alvheim meets the mountain.
  • Ground: teal moss in broad shapes, lighter cushions 1 to 3 m across, moonstone veins 0.3 to 1 m wide winding through it, pale gravel on ways, dark teal-grey where it is trodden. No snow inside the ring, no brown earth, no grass blades over 15 cm.
A path of flagstones through glowing moss under old trees, ribbons of cyan bell flowers and violet star flowers along it, an elf village and waterfalls far off, a full moon.
The grass portfolio's target for Alvheim at night: glowing bells and stars in ribbons along the way. Painterly technique is in the Eventyrland chapter on grass and flowers.

Between the things: calm, empty moss. No cluster nearer than 6 m to the next. The place is spare, not a city.

See grass and flowers for how clumps are painted and moved, and the Alvheim row of the grass table: body #2F5D58, tip #7FCDB6, height 0.20 to 0.35 m, density 2.0, no lean, elf bell (cyan #4FF3E0) and elf star (violet #C77DFF) in ribbons 1.3 to 5 m from a way and rings 2 to 4 m round the old trees and the well.