Helsinki-based illustrator and graphic designer Pauli Salmi creates a series of night-time digital paintings that explore how familiar places feel different in darkness, moving between social moments and quieter, more instinctive scenes in the hours just before morning.
There is a particular quality to the hour before sunrise: familiar places become uncertain, light and atmosphere are in the process of shifting, and the line between what is real and what is imagined begins to soften. Pauli Salmi’s series At the Hour of Dusk is built entirely in that in-between space.
The works were created as digital paintings in Procreate across 2025 and 2026, each beginning from a simple idea or mood and developing through layering, adjusting and repainting without a fixed plan. “I start with a feeling rather than a composition,” Salmi says. “That openness lets unexpected things appear. The images end up holding more than I originally intended.” The series moves from social moments, a festive show in the night, figures in urban scenes, to quieter and more instinctive ones: a jungle cat moving through shadows, ruins under stars, a lone figure over city lights. Mood, colour and atmosphere are the constants; fixed narrative is deliberately withheld, allowing each image to stand alone while remaining part of the larger whole.
The inspiration draws from night-time environments, urban scenes and cinematic imagery, particularly the visual register of those pre-dawn moments when the world has not yet resumed its ordinary logic. Familiar places feel quieter, more open to interpretation, more available to the imagination. “I’m drawn to the feeling that something is about to happen,” Salmi says, “but you can’t tell yet whether it will be ordinary or extraordinary. That uncertainty is the atmosphere I’m trying to hold.”
Pauli Salmi is a Helsinki-based illustrator and graphic designer specialising in painterly digital illustration. His work combines strong colour, atmosphere and narrative ambiguity across editorial, book and brand contexts.
Instagram: @pauli_salmi_illustrations
At the Hour of Dusk, 2025 to 2026. Digital paintings, Procreate. Works include: Crepuscular lights and shadows (2025), Festive show in the night (2025), Jungle cat sneaking in the shadows (2025), Ruins under the stars (2025), Figure over city lights (2026).
