I continue with my illustrations for Flash Fiction February 2020, twenty-nine days of flash fiction stories at Fictive Dream, an online fiction magazine featuring short stories.
For the event I created a small abstract painting for each selection – in fact, I did more than one painting per story. I am showing you all the images, day by day, throughout February. I’m also including a short write-up as to how I went about turning the authors’ words into pictorial representations.
I hope you’ll take a look at my art, then go to Fictive Dream, see which image editor Laura Black chose for the magazine, and read the story!
Thank you to Laura for her faith in my work and to the authors for such wonderful material to work with.
Today’s story is:
Hurry by Sheree Shatsky. Read it here at Fictive Dream.
Here are the artworks on their own:
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- Image 27
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- Image 28
and here they are with the banner.
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- Image 27
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- Image 28
Comments:
This whimsical story relates the reunification of a child with its mother. The narrator, a human, helps a lost baby hurricane find the mother hurricane, who is traveling the state of Florida looking for him. In both pictures I included the reunion between the two, and in both cases I based the color scheme on shades of purple, as the sky was described in the story.
Image 27 – I depicted the big and small storms using a dense spiral pattern in different colors, with raindrops spattering the scene and the baby storm in an area of calm now that he has found his mother.
Image 28 – In this picture I represented the two hurricanes as loose purple spirals reaching toward each other, once again in a rain-spattered sky, with a yellow house off to the side to represent the narrator.
Read the story at Fictive Dream.
Claudia McGill and Her Art World 
What nice images and a very unique story line. I will check out the story.
Thank you. I liked this story a lot. It is humorous and touching, too, with a wry tone that I liked a lot.
Both images are really strong and I find I like them equally and think both would have worked as effectively as illustrations for the story. I love the purple spirals in the second piece and love the visual texture of the first piece.
Thank you. For me, I just loved using that purple-blue color. It was mentioned in the story and it reminded me of that ominous look the sky can get before a storm.
Yes! I love the colour the sky is just before a storm.
I loved Hurry by Sheree Shatsky the moment I read it as I did both of these two pieces of artwork. Either would have worked very well. The colours are glorious. In the end I loved the tightness of the mother and child storms in image number 27 and the fact that they have fund each other. Beautiful work. Thank you, Claudia.
Thank you. I also really enjoyed this story and the imagery for it came right to mind – the combination of mother/child and the spiral shape of the hurricanes worked out well, and the purple color mentioned in the text gave me the color cues for the picture.