CRATE is a literary magazine of the University of California at Riverside’s Creative Writing MFA Program, whose faculty includes award-winning writer Chris Abani and California Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. The magazine is edited by the program’s graduate students.

With a mandate to illustrate and design a 6″ x 9″ printed book cover (front, spine, and back), I based my work loosely on an image from a poem in the forthcoming eighth issue. Starting with a pencil sketch, I built the main figure layer by layer using Art Rage software and a Bamboo tablet. I then moved over to Illustrator to develop vector accents, background texture, and typography.

This artwork is titled “The Strike”. Many kinds of strikes have been on my mind recently as the weather begins to warm up–particularly discussions about what is next for the “99%”, and the increased frequency of strikes in mainland China due to rampant totalitarian development and corruption. The Chinese characters for “strike” are present in this artwork in both simplified and traditional forms.