The Atavist Magazine
art director - Ed Jonson
This story is about an extended family in Eastern Ukraine, and how they've navigated multiple pregnancies and childbirth during the occupation of the Kharkiv region by Russian troops.
Task: create two larger/lead illustrations, and three spots
Her greatest fear wasn’t even the rockets but complications from the birth. What if Lera hemorrhaged? Or the baby was breech? She wasn’t trained for this. She had no experience. She could have the death of a child on her hands, or of a mother who was little more than a child herself.
...At the beginning of April, internet connectivity disappeared. Landlines and cell phones stopped working. For three weeks there was no electricity. Soon, obtaining anything at all became a struggle: gas, medicine, bread, news.
....No one went to work that day. People hid in basements and root cellars as planes and helicopters flew overhead and columns of tanks and artillery drove through Ridkodub and Dvorichna. They were unmarked...
P/s This project was my challenge. How to draw something like this? How to draw a war that has been going on for 2 years outside your window? I was so emotionally impressed, so I didn't know how to start to draw. All I was trying didn't work. And then I realized that I couldn't draw this because it a nonsense to try to make it aesthetic. So I started to make cutouts of what I was feeling, making prints and trying to mix them. After this work, I also created a lithography print of "Occupation" illustrations
