#made flesh

I started this differently than where I wound up. Decided midway through to let myself be experimental and rely solely on a sketchy concept guiding me rather than a full reference. I am purposely using my character, Eve, to force me into drawing weirder poses and hand work.

I think it's a pretty striking little piece, and might want to flesh it out better later on. In particular I think I did the "webs" of the fingers nicely, and it really came together when I shaded her body.

@hope-is-the-best-medicine

Shutara clutches the small wooden box in her hands, containing the thing she’s most wanted to give him, since she realized that she wanted him in her life forever.  She opens the lid up and looks at it for a minute, before opening the polished silver. On the left is her profile, carved with her neutral expression, beautiful, mysterious, and fierce.  The relief carved into the bone is highlighted a dark brown by the rubbing of her blood dye into the crevices, the rest smooth and luminous polished ivory.  The other side, right handed, not the side of initiation, is Jushiro’s likeness, his open expression and calm likewise impressed into the bone inlay balancing her as he does in life.  Satisfied, she shuts it—there is nothing else like it in the universe, and no one else could create such a gift.  It’s fastened to a thin, blue satin ribbon, dark like the night sky in direct opposition to the starshine of his hair, coiled up neatly, ready to be tied.  She wove that too with herself, mixing her hair into the silk, so that every part would contain her.  

She shuts the box again before she enters the room where Jushiro has been resting, merely enjoying himself in her library filled with all kinds of wonders. For a brief moment, she wonders if he remembers when she talk about making him such a thing.  Not exactly this, a cameo for lovers forced to wander, but something made of her flesh and blood that can break the barriers of this world and let him too call it home whenever he wishes.  There was a time when he couldn’t process the idea of being on his own without her.  But now, he’s healed.  He understands that because she is the universe, there has never been a moment in his entire life where she’s not been there surrounding him.

Finding him on her couch there, she cozies up to him, sitting her light frame down in the small space between his arm on the arm of the chair, and his lap.

amrit brar, 2017 the cover of made flesh: the zine

THAT day drew a broken tower out of the tarot pack     a plume of flame and over the wreck a vast flower with ragged petals of soft white ash that was once flesh and useless paper blooming over the postcard-perfect blue

Of all the tiny figures falling end over end     there were two who had stepped up holding hands to give themselves together to the air A love that       sudden and certainly    I knew I didn't share and didn't want to share with anyone but you                                      your sunlit demons your cigarettes and fire escapes your petals and grenades      your laugh like the chime of wind in icicles the chuckle of fire in ecstasy of its own burning                                  and at my fingertips were ten digits  you had asked me never to dial again

And then it seemed my whole head the dot on this little i     would blow like the puff of a dandelion And then the seedpods of my eyes split into tears      and I felt a swift clutch at my throat      that was the root of cruelty and tenderness worming its way in

YOU are the hummingbird that comes a pure vibration    wings a blur propeller-burring a million beats to keep still     the world's littlest pivot spinning the heaven's hemisphere as a wineglass with a wet finger laid on the rim to make it ring

Feathers a rainbow    how you reel hovering over blossom     cheeks tucked into the honeysuckle to lap a single drop of nectar onto your tongue       messenger-goddess kicking a gold-dust of pollen out of your winged heel

The slow promise of your approach makes my throat thick     the joy gathers deep in my spine       as if it were a snake making a smooth wave of muscle toward the taste of water

The same fire is touching us around the edges   licking wrinkles into the corners of our eyes making the skin inside our elbows silky as old coins And when we lie together   and I feel your bones blaze    and the rose of your face unfolds and the incandescence of your skin crackles   like the paper at the tip of a drawn-on cigarette   and dies in a final fluttering of ash