Huseyynu

“Redhan Han’dhuvaru,” or in English, Moonlight Bioluminescence, is an artwork I created as a mural for Visit Maldives Corporation. Around that time, I had been experimenting with different digital illustration styles, so I treated this project as a chance to explore further. It ended up being something I’m really happy with.

I’ve always wanted to capture the feeling of a quiet night on an island, especially moments I’ve experienced during night dives and fishing trips on calm, moonlit evenings. There’s a certain kind of beauty in those moments that a camera never quite captures properly. It feels more like something you have to imagine and interpret. That’s what I tried to do with this piece, to recreate that atmosphere through illustration rather than just replicate what’s seen.

The canvas, or in this case the wall, was a wide panoramic space, so there was plenty of room to go into detail. I started with a rough sketch based on the ideas I had in mind. One thing I really wanted to explore was bioluminescence, especially that soft glow you sometimes see around fish near the surface. From there, I pushed the idea further and exaggerated it, imagining it lighting up an entire underwater world. That’s how it turned into a kind of Maldivian underwater scene, from coral reefs all the way to the larger, more iconic sea life.

Once the overall structure was in place, the detailing took weeks to finish. Every line was drawn by hand, and that included every single fish, even the small schools of baitfish. I spent a lot of time referencing real images to make sure each coral and fish species in the artwork was as accurate as possible.