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:

The Never-ending Story by Jan Kaneen. Read it here at Fictive Dream.

Here are the artworks on their own:

and here they are with the banner.

Comments:

This story takes place in a supermarket and is full of description. There is a surreal feel to the visual environment that is explained by the ending of the story and it is described from a child’s point of view, focusing on bright colors and emotions.

Image 53 – I depicted the supermarket in the beginning of the story. The child is down the aisle from her mother but can see her figure. The aisle is described as “columns of brightly-coloured tins, all electric oranges and neon greens”. The mother is just visible at the end of the aisle on her way into the next one.

Image 54 – This picture depicts the situation near the end of the story, when the environment has become hostile: The child has grown anxious and runs down the aisle: “… piled high with pet food that towers tall above me in tins covered with pictures of animals” showing their teeth. I used the same bright colors but set them in tall columns with little room between them to move, with a panel of representing teeth at the end.

Read the story at Fictive Dream.