Fictive Dream, the online fiction magazine focusing on short stories, is hosting an event this week called Editors’ Week. I illustrated the stories and I’ll be posting the images here to show you. Here’s my suggestion: take a look at the illustration and then check out the story it accompanies at Fictive Dream to take in the whole experience.
I’ll show you the illustration and give you the link to the magazine each day. Today’s story is called Second Guess, by Marie Gethin. Look here to read it.
Here is the image with the banner:
and here it is on its own.
Claudia McGill and Her Art World 
For me at least, Second Guess by Marie Gethins is all about menace, fear and confined spaces. It’s a dark story and this illustration in it’s dark palete complements the threat in the text perfectly. I love the blocks of colour that lend to the feeling of being hemmed in just like the protagonist is hemmed in both physically (at one point) and mentally. Thank you very much Claudia for another marvellous artwork.
You’re welcome. I agree, the story to me is about what happens when you have been made afraid, and the world becomes unsafe and closes in on you, and you need to hide, but even hiding isn’t working out so well. I like the color scheme of this piece a lot, and it goes against my usual crazy bright colors, but has a lot of intensity, I think.
That was a difficult story to read. I almost stopped reading early on but pushed myself to keep going. It was a powerful story. The darkness of your painting and your choice of sombre colours really captures the mood of the piece, that claustrophobic feeling of menace, of being hemmed in physically and emotionally by a violent offender, the oppressive experience of trauma, and the stifling feeling of boxing up those thoughts and feelings.
I felt the same way. The story rang very true in how a bad experience scars you, and confines you in that memory, or in your attempts to put it behind you, which of course you can’t. The colors are intense and dark. I like this image (outside of its association with this story) just on its looks alone.
I like how you put the college “institution” in the center and how it is tainted by the darkness around it. I see the story as the pervasiveness of patriarchy that doesn’t adequately respond to the abuse and exploitation of females (in this case, but children and other vulnerable members of the population in other cases.) The blaming/shaming of the victim is often as bad as the offenses themselves.
Thank you. Yes, I think (sadly) of how little things have changed in the 40+ years since I was the age of the character in this story.
You’re welcome and it is sad, you’re right.