Illustrating the Embracing Kulture Magazine Cover: A Cactus and the Courage to Begin
Issue 4 of Embracing Kulture magazine is out, and I have two reasons to be happy about it. I illustrated the cover, and Valentina is in the interview pages.
The cover came from the founder's letter, which is about the courage to begin before you feel ready. I sat with that for a while before I picked up a pencil. I kept coming back to a cactus. Not the postcard kind, the kind that looks like it's surviving something. I drew it with a window cut into its side, so you can see inside it instead of just the spines and the shape.
Inside that window are five words: begin, root, stretch, adapt, bloom. Growth doesn't move in a straight line, and a cactus holds a lot of contradictions at once. It protects itself and it's generous with what it stores. It looks still and it's actually moving, just slowly. It survives hard conditions and somehow still flowers. That felt closer to the truth of starting something than a sunrise or an open road would have.
The interview section is a different kind of cover, the kind that asks people to be honest. This issue's conversations cover immigration, cultural pride, gender identity, sobriety, entrepreneurship, and family, told by people who've actually lived inside those questions. Valentina is one of the voices in there, talking about identity and belonging in the specific, lived way that doesn't translate well into a quote on a tote bag. I'm not going to summarize their words for them. Go read the interview.
What I keep noticing, working on something like this, is that the theme of the issue and the way I draw aren't that different. I'm always trying to find the small true detail instead of the big sweeping one. A founder's letter about courage to begin turned into a cactus with a window in it, not a sunrise. That's usually how it goes here.