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"Beneath The Golden Willow"

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~ Florence Harrison, "And went into the garden walks" from Christina Rossetti: Poems

Design Notes; The Seven Deadly Sins

Greed points at everything they want and grasps anything they can. Their true form is unseen. Their own hand partially blinds them. Different eyes puncture their crown, stolen from others. They float, detached from all. Their stick is sharpened at both ends

It is the first and oldest design, dating back to 2023

The stick sharpened at both ends is a reference to Lord of the Flies (in the book, one end of the stick goes into the earth while the other holds a severed head) I wanted it to symbolize violence

Sloth exists in a wrapped cloth that provides comfort but muffles all sensations. Sloth doesnt see, speak nor hear. The cloth overwhelms them. They are bound by a rope whose edge reaches inside their confinement, giving them the ability to free themselves if so desired.

I made an extra effort to put the rope within Sloth's control, to avoid associating inertion from mental illness to laziness

I wrapped my Blajah plushie with a bed sheet and used my robe's belt as rope to get a picture reference for the upper body. Despite eerie origins, my designs come into paper with a lot of silly methods.

Pride exists inside a golden, hollow statue. Their gaze is set upon a cracked book of pages set in stone. Their laurel crown is sharpened to the point of horns. Pride can be set free if they break the outer shell that binds them with the gavel they use to condemn others.

The pose and clothing is a reference to the painting The School of Athens, by Raphael.

Being mettalic, the book only reflects back themselves. Even if you interpret it as stone, it would still work since the pages remain static

I like to imagine the rotten legs dragging their heavy statue shell around. Ever since I was little I have a strange fear of statues moving

Gluttony is a stomach, living and consuming themselves within their confinment. They’re not represented by an underweight or overweight person; it had to be something everyone has. Their scale is purposefully unspecified; because everyones is different.

The design resembles the Horseman of Famine because gluttony and famine are connected; the excessive hoarding by some people causes famine to others. They're like two different plates on a scale

While the basic representation is just fat, I never considered drawing an underweight person to counter it and appear subversive. When talking to a friend recovering from an eating disorder they mentioned how cheap and uncomfortable it is when people use extreme thinness just for the sake of horror and I have to agree. I always avoid drawing real bodies for horror

Lust is the only one who tries to disguise itself with a human appearance, tho it has too many hands. One hand to beckon, one to threaten, and one to silence you. It kneels because not all of its victims are adults. It lives undercover and invites you in as well

Many asked about the fourth hand: it's the one you only notice afterwards and are left wondering what it means, whether it's an innocent gesture or not. How it made you feel.

It has 2 other variation designs. While what I made before is beautiful, it is not unsettling enough. It has the artstlye of an angel rather than something human and dangerous

I settled on the design after a passage in the book Second-Hand Time, by Svetlana Alexievitch. It was a passage about a teen abused by a military squad, killed when she got pregnant, and mocked over how underveloped her body was. Because of that my original idea was to have Lust wearing military boots, but that would restrict the concept too much. I thought that drawing would make that passage less haunting to me, but to no avail.

Envy is a slowly burning and constricted heart. It covers its identity with a mirror; the more it seeks to resemble the reflection of others the less it will resemble itself. But even the reflection is broken, inaccurate, and unsatisfactory.

Many have said the concept looks like a chrysalis or a flower bud, unable to flourish. I like when people interpret my drawings, they often find beautiful meanings that escaped me

I pondered whether to paint the mirror in front of them black, to symbolize phone screens, but decided against it because it would blend into the background

Least popular design but one where people have told me ''I cant stop thinking about it'' the most, which made me cherish it a lot

Wrath is not a beast acting ravenous, but a human thing slowly crawling towards you. All of their actions are justified by the halo they claim to be righteous. The closer they get, the more they shed their humane appearance

It was a challenge to make wrath differ from someone being rightfully angry. It applies to all designs; how to portray dangerous excess to very common and not entirely wrong emotions.

Wrath has no legs. Nothing to stand on

''Little by little, it turned into that wild fury in which the eyes camouflage with a black veil, the fists contract with a tremedous force and your very teeth find the enemy'' Roughly translated quote by Nikolai Gumilev that I kept in mind while designing it. Amazing writer