Arwyn and I have been through some things together this year, and we've been working hard on making our relationship work as well as we can without it being a burden either way. To be entirely fair to her, a lot of the issues were coming from me and my struggles with jealousy and envy within the group that we spend a lot of our time together; while I did my best to avoid them getting in the way or causing problems, she did a lot to accommodate me and never judged me for any of it either.

That said, in more recent months I noticed a trend in her that I was dealing with in myself: I found it terribly hard to ask for things, even though I might feel the need very strongly. Frankly, I think it was only because I felt so strongly about them that I ever spoke up. As I noted to her when talking about it a while back, I couldn't recall the last time she asked anything of me over the past several years.

I'd actually written this idea down during a trip about a month ago starting from the closing verse of the poem, and I held onto it tightly until I could ask her about it. I was definitely picking up a sense of this from her, but didn't want to be presumptuous or risk basing it off of me unfairly projecting onto her. This is, after all, an introspective, personal piece that speaks directly of another person's struggles too - possibly the first of its kind for me.

I won't go into specifics, but when I talked to her about it, her response all but confirmed that my feelings weren't unfounded. I made this in about an afternoon following that, and I'm really quite pleased with the result.

There is something interesting I noted about the process of making this piece, though. After I'd gotten done with the parts of the art that felt I had a clear plan for - namely the linework and lettering - the choices I had ahead of me regarding the colouring left me feeling a little unsure and directionless.

With something like Art is Poison, it was as if I had this unbearably intense impetus to get the feelings out of my system as part of the process of, well, processing them. This led to the choices coming easy to me, almost as if they happened all by themselves. In this case, I felt almost... Placid? Complacent about the piece? Like there wasn't that same sense of urgency I'm accustomed to when making art about intensely personal issues like this.

After finishing the piece, I realised what had happened. Once I'd spoken to Arwyn to confirm if this was relatable to her - she'd already done a very good job of reassuring me that we would work on this issue together. It hadn't instantly solved it, but I'm quite sure that feeling like we had a path forward channeled my energy away from needing to get this piece done quite so badly.

It's just a little bit of info from behind the scenes that I felt was worth delving into. As a reward, have the first draft sketch I put together from the original concept.