
The last whisper
Designer
Dreamprotocol
Country
France
category
Conceptual & Fine Art
Prize
Official Selection 2026
Short Description
The Last Whisper explores the ephemeral nature of butterflies and the fragility of their existence. Their delicate wings, short lifespan, and vulnerability become symbols of transformation and disappearance. The human presence gives greater weight and gravity to this fragility, amplifying the dramatic dimension of such a brief life. Through dissolving membranes, eroded textures, and fading forms, the images seek to capture that fragile moment between presence and disappearance.
Prompt Logic
For this project, the logic was to begin with a very simple symbol — the butterfly as an image of beauty, fragility, and ephemeral life — and then gradually allow its materiality to contaminate the entire visual universe.
We started by looking at the wing almost as a raw material: scales, veins, translucent membranes, powder, fine ridges, iridescence. Rather than simply depicting butterflies, we extracted their textures and transposed them elsewhere: into headdresses, collars, dresses, then into the human body itself, and finally into the surrounding environment.
We then introduced the idea of metamorphosis. The human body is no longer simply dressed in this material; it begins to be transformed by it. Wings emerge, surfaces break down, membranes tear, and forms dissolve into dust or pigment. The intention was for the butterfly material to become more than decorative — almost biological.
The landscape follows the same logic. Trees become covered in butterflies, while certain textures spread into the bark, the ground, the flowers, and even the atmosphere. This creates a world in which the boundaries between human, insect, and landscape become increasingly difficult to define.
We also deliberately maintained a strong tension between grace and unease. The poses remain elegant, slow, almost ceremonial, while the materials become unstable, powdery, torn, wet, or in the process of disappearing. This contrast gives the project its unsettling quality without turning it into overt horror.
Finally, the human presence gives greater weight to the idea of impermanence. The butterfly alone already evokes fragility, but by bringing the human body into this cycle of metamorphosis, disappearance, and decay, that fragility becomes more dramatic and emotionally charged.
Process
The process began with the creation of macro textures inspired by butterfly wings. I focused on highly enlarged details — scales, veins, translucent membranes, powdery surfaces, fine ridges and iridescent color shifts — to build a visual material that could then be reused throughout the project.
I then used these generated textures as visual references and combined them with moodboards to influence the overall rendering. The moodboards helped define the atmosphere, color palette and visual consistency, while the references pushed the images toward this specific butterfly-wing texture and the more graphic, almost drawn quality that gradually emerged across the series.
The final look came from repeatedly mixing these references, prompts and moodboards until the material began to feel less literal and more abstract, somewhere between organic photography, fashion texture and illustration.

