Today, I'd like to share with you my poem: A Note for Her. Before I get into the process of how and why I started writing one and the supporting illustration, I want to give you the time to read it first.
If you are still here, thank you for taking the time to read my words. Over the past few weeks, I have felt this weight on my shoulders formed primarily by news on assault and safety surging across social media. Where social media can build a space for awareness, it can also become consuming and tiring. The information that we are granted so freely encourages me to learn, create and write. However, from time to time, the swamp of information speaks for my need to find balance. To overcome this tussle, I turned to write a poem, a reminder, a self-note. One that blurs out worries and changes required in society and celebrates the greatness of women's work over the century.
To pull apart my mishmashed thoughts and see them visually on a page, I wrote down the word 'Women' in confident letters and encircled it with a feeling of readiness flowing through me; almost as if this was something I was always unknowingly longing to do.
As I started drawing arrows away from the central ring, I told myself to write freely and, so, pay attention to thoughts I consider negative and abstract.
Despite what seems like a bunch of entangled necklaces spread across a page, the arrows demonstrating how I arrived at an impression help me find my beliefs around women. To uncover my thoughts further, I picked six words from the crowd: light, soil, cycle, flowers, voice and space. While these words can be interconnected, each resembles diverse struggles and triumphs, and therefore, sparks different emotions.
With a two-minute timer ticking by my side, I allowed myself to focus on each of these words alone. Although I found myself repeating several words and phrases from the previous mindmap, I could appreciate the intensity of that notion and the purpose it serves me.
These clouds of words and the intentional revisit to literacy devices convinced me on taking on this challenge to write the poem I had been hesitant to start.
After a few days of wrestling words and re-reading lines, I was able to put together A Note for Her. As the words rested on a blank page, I dwelled on the concept of an illustration bearing the intentions of my poem. With this idea, I went on to do more mindmaps.
While it is no surprise to you or me, this process helped me configure objectives for my illustration. I felt eager to use layers of cool and warm colours without causing a distraction to the words within the poem. The cool tones will speak for the deprivation of women representation in certain communities. While the bright colours will emerge feelings of hope and gratefulness. Together, this combination of earth tones will resemble the scenes before and after a storm. In short, I strived for depths of colour and simplicity.
Where I tend to use pencils for my artwork, this novel experimentation with digital art naturally drew me into feeling open-minded about the design process. With my set of objectives in front of me, I selected a thick paintbrush and started exploring with overlapping dark tones with light and vice versa. This allowed me to build multiple layers of colour and add an element of depth to the illustration. By having images of storms at hand, I was able to be more intentional with my choice of colours and reinforce the words within my poem.
The main difficulty I had with writing this poem was sharing a message close to my heart in just a few lines. However, the process of producing mindmaps allowed me to find specific words that spoke my thoughts and lessened this difficulty.
I am interested to know what you understood or took away from this poem and if it stimulated a range of emotions. As always, your thoughts and tips for improvement are very much welcomed, so don't be afraid to leave them in the comments!
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