A week painting Andalusia's ruins in synthwave

On Monday night, I sat down in front of the monitor in my home studio in Valencia and opened the photo folder from last week's trip to Andalusia. Among the more than 800 photos, the crumbling columns of Medina Azahara caught my eye. Shot around sunset, the stone surfaces were bathed in a reddish gold, and a thought hit me: what would it feel like to convert this into a synthwave palette?

That's how a week of experimentation began.

Day 1-2: Prompt design and first failures

I spent nearly all of the first day working out the prompt structure. The basic strategy was simple: feed in my ruin photos as image input and composite synthwave's signature neon pink and cyan gradients with a grid horizon. But the first results were dismal. The structure of the ruins was completely ignored, and what came out was just a garish neon cityscape.

The problem was that "synthwave" was overpowering "ruins" in the prompt weighting. I adjusted the balance so the architectural structure would be read first, then layered the style on top. It wasn't until the afternoon of the second day that the arched doorway of Medina Azahara finally appeared, holding its form within a purple haze. Just as layer order matters in UI work, prompts have their own hierarchy.

Day 3-4: Unexpected discoveries

On Wednesday, something interesting happened when I fed in a photo of the Roman Bridge in Córdoba. The surface of the Guadalquivir beneath the bridge was converted into a synthwave grid, making the bridge look as if it were floating above a digital sea. It was a composition I never intended — one I never would have attempted if I'd been drawing it myself. Seeing this, I changed course and started prioritising photos that featured water.

On Thursday, I ran a small fortress ruin I'd photographed on the outskirts of Granada. This time I added "pixel grid overlay, 16-bit color depth" to the prompt to mix in a pixel art texture. The result looked like a background from a 90s adventure game. I liked it enough to save that prompt variation separately.

Day 5-6: Iteration and refinement

Friday and Saturday were spent creating variations of the best results I'd pulled so far. Even with the same photo, changing the time of day from "golden hour" to "midnight" completely transformed the mood. The Medina Azahara archway, in particular, when run with the midnight setting, produced an effect where neon light seemed to seep out from between the cracks in the stone — as if a thousand-year-old ruin still held some kind of energy within it.

One thing I discovered along the way: adding the phrase "worn stone texture visible" to the prompt made the AI preserve far more of the original photo's texture. A single line that nearly solved the problem of overly smooth rendering.

On Sunday morning, as I organised the working folder and counted, I found I had generated roughly 200 images. Of those, only twelve truly satisfied me. That's about 6%, and honestly, my sketch-to-finished-piece ratio in digital painting isn't all that different. There's something oddly comforting in knowing that the yield of creation stays similar even when the tool changes.

Laying the twelve images side by side, I could see a series taking shape. Islamic and Roman ruins of Andalusia coming back to life within synthwave's fluorescent glow. That feeling I've always loved from collecting vintage travel posters — the sense that a real place can become an entirely different world through a single style — was right there.

For my next trip, I'm thinking of heading to the Roman Theatre in Mérida. I already find myself drafting prompt notes, imagining what semicircular seating rows would look like rising above a neon grid.