A Flower She Picked - Instigatorzine #19

Back in April, I sent an e-mail to my buddy Narciso, and I said, Narciso, I didn't do anything in March, give me something to do. And because he is such a nice person, he did, and then the next week a whole universe of everything to do collided in such a way that I was literally (yes, literally) eating, sleeping and drawing for two weeks straight (until I was abruptly forced to stop because of a medical emergency, but that's a story for another time).

Narciso is the co-founder of Instigatorzine, an awesome Art and Literature magazine. You may recall him and his magazine from when I did the Living Cemetery piece.

Cover Artwork © Elias Shamir.

I picked another poem, this time by Danny P. Barbare, titled "A Flower She Picked." It's lovely writing, but you're gonna have to get a copy if you'd like to read it! This issue has work from Kali Ciesemier, one of my favorite illustrators, and it has some badass reptilian cover art, as you can see above.

Out of the poem I took the keywords: gardenia, writer's block, windowsill, and a glass of water.

Kept drawing different types of windows on the thumbnail stage, until I realized that the sheet of paper could "suggest" the window without actually being one. The colours I originally envisioned were more like blue hour light, but the piece just wasn't coming together that way, and what you see here is is the deliciousness of colors that I got once the blue layer was turned off. Love these browns, so serene.

Poems are my favorite texts to illustrate. They are just so versatile.