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.

The Living Cemetery - Instigatorzine

The ever supportive Narciso gave me the opportunity to make an illustration for a piece of poetry in his zine, Instigatorzine. The poem is "The Living Cemetery" by Anthony Ward.

This was a challenging project because of the amount of imagery in the poem. Given the abundance of images provided by the author, it was hard to decide exactly which ones would convey the overall feel of it. I ended up picking a few separated verses that could be related to each other.

What I gathered in a nutshell is:
-The people in the city are free to leave but they don't, or can't, because they (psychologically? emotionally?) trap themselves within it, like a vicious cycle. So, the bounds on their legs are wide enough that they could easily slip through, yet they don't. 
-They remain anonymous to each other. Hence, no faces.
-Their fall is "made all the more prominent by [their] height." I took this literally and elongated their limbs, which also makes them frail and flimsy-looking, which is how I had already imagined these people.

For the colors, I wanted something drab, depressing and almost disgusting. The military green dulled the mood, and the rusty/coppery orange added a punch of brightness to balance out the dull. I definitely find these two colours together disgusting, but that works, because every time I look at it, it reminds me of the depressing mood of the poem.

Lately I've also been steadily experimenting with not having outlines everywhere all the time. I have a penchant for heavy outlines and defined contours, but on the other hand, I also love that printmaking look of a shape without line work. I've found it tends to balance my work out, such as in this piece.

[EDIT] As commenter Jade kindly reminded me, the wide open space in the middle is supposed to be for the poem!