Amazon Basin, Brazil

This scene is an original illustration set in Amazon Basin, Brazil. It lies in equatorial latitudes, where the climate is tropical rainforest — hot and wet all year.

Tall pale trunks rise straight out of dark still water, their bases swollen and buttressed. A wooden canoe lies moored among them. There is no shore in the frame — the forest floor is simply water — and the far trees fade into flat layers of pale haze without a single cast shadow.

Why do these trees stand in water for months at a time?

Trees standing in water for months at a time are a specific adaptation, not an accident of flooding: seasonally inundated forest exists where an enormous river system rises and falls by many metres each year. The buttressed trunks brace shallow roots in soft ground. The canoe is the only sensible vehicle. Flat, directionless light and layered haze mark the wet season under continuous cloud, close to the equator.

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