Third Issue: The Volcano PART ONE
The first installment of a forty five minute daydream that ended in my first dialogue with an image AND an update on the present and future plans for Imagination Illustrated.
Beneath a Monument to Hermes
In the leafy arena
Where the trees are all ash
I find a monument to Hermes
And dream them a prayer
Of soft landing
For beneath the stone there is new sky
An open border between the known and unexpected
A second skin
Covering the tendons of threat and the flesh of promise
Where the blood that makes me curious
Leads to terror and drums of war
But all this light below compels me
I must try to know it and thereby make it cosmos
And so afraid, I descend the stairs to the sand
Was it I who built this boardwalk
On some vacation long ago?
By some homesickness did I affix the image and cover it in wax?
The lava won’t spare these things, you know
And now with charcoal I can make it sturdy
Even if only on the teeth of paper
If I still myself, to hear the spinning tubes
Waiting for some unformation
The waves set a tempo
For the gray horse to dance with his shadow
Far away he’s just a trinket
But drawing near
He glows with volcanic heat
And leads me back to his behemoth
By the touch of his sheen
Gently hikes me up the switchbacks
To the hard rock orifice
Where he sends me into find the shining apples
On a golden pedestal guarded by a dwarf
Who glows in commemoration, a good guardian of the eternal
Directs me left
To where Kali sits.Greetings all!
I want to say THANK YOU to everyone who is opening my posts, especially to those of you who’ve pledged funds for future subscriptions. I didn’t know how encouraging it would be to see notifications about your pledges. It’s a great feeling and I’m truly grateful for your support.
A quick update on where things are going with Imagination Illustrated:
I’ve started creating my own panel layouts. That’s why the latest issue format is slightly different, appearing as two separate pages instead of one. I had been tracing in stock layouts from photos of a book my daughter got me for Christmas. I had trouble laying the first two layouts so that they rendered square on the page. So, I drew my own squares and love the cleaner look.
For those who are curious about what is driving the direction of the site: Imagination Illustrated is becoming an outlet for my current fascination with the work of renouned psychologist, Carl Jung and his experiments and observations with the unconscious part of the human mind. Particularly I’m interested in the hypothesis that the unconscious is the source of all creativity. My own experiment has led me to practice using my imagination on a daily basis, as if I were strengthening a set of muscles. This has led to some really astounding psychological events, including an overflow of creative inspiration. My posting timeline is about thirty days behind where I am in my practice, and I can tell you there are plenty of exciting developments coming to my subscribers over the course of the next month.
My current workflow: Each day I daydream for at least thirty minutes, usually mid-morning. I record each session in poetic verse. I was writing prose narratives and poetry has proved much more efficient given the perishable quality that daydreams tend to have in memory. At the beginning of each week I select the strongest image or theme from the previous week and devote Monday - Wednesday for a physical work that explores the image. So far I’ve been doing portraiture, mainly which you can find some of at “@damontbailey” on Instagram. Midway through the week I’ll switch to the iPad and start to adapt one of the poems into storyboards. I treat each storyboard like a collage, using Google Images to construct what I’ve imagined. Once the collage is laid I will drop it into Procreate for outline and color. Some of each panel is handdrawn but I find my storytelling capabilities are expanding at great lengths by using the collage method.
Incentives for pledges are coming! Don’t worry, free subscribers and visitors won’t lose any access they currently enjoy! I want to add subscription incentives for different levels of financial support and would love suggestions. Some have already suggested custom portraits, AMAs, advance downloads of new work. But I’d love to hear more ideas so expect to receive a reader survey in your inbox soon!
Ultimately I hope to continue the comic book style for the remainder of one year. In the upcoming weeks I’ll be illustrating some of the major stories from my life in addition to recording my daydreams. Stay tuned for stories about mental health, family triumphs over adversity, reimagined traumas, and more! I also anticipate that as I become more practiced at engaging unconscious images, I will want to do some worldbuilding and possibly plot a long form fiction work, whether it be written or illustrated or both. Expect to see something longform in the near future released on Substack, possibly whole or in episodes.