The Gloom

By: Alexa Strong

For this project, I decided to do a digital drawing. I was not sure what exactly I wanted to do it of, as I was between drawing something that represented Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys or a drawing representing Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I ultimately went for Mexican Gothic because after reading it I had so much more inspiration and drive to do a drawing for it. The story was so dark and had a lot of layers to it, which I loved, and there were many scenes that I wanted to draw, but I only had time for one. My first idea was to create a disturbing drawing of Howard or Noemi or one of the other characters making a screaming face with their mouths wide open, almost like a broken jaw. Their eyes would also be all white from being rolled all the way back, and mushrooms and mold would be growing out of them. It was a nasty concept but this book in general is very nasty. Moreno-Garcia’s gory details are executed perfectly in this novel, enough that I was inspired to try something new and do a somewhat gory drawing for my project.

Above is my draft for this piece. I liked the concept of having a wide mouth and mushrooms growing out everywhere. I was mainly inspired by the scene when Noemi finds Agnes while she, Catalina, and Francis are attempting to escape. 

“It was the open, screaming maw of a woman, frozen in time. A mummy, a few teeth dangling from her mouth, her skin yellow. The clothing in which she had been buried had long dissolved into dust, and instead she was clothed in a different finery: mushrooms hid her nakedness. They grew from her torso and her belly, they grew down her arms and her legs, they clustered around her head creating a crown, a halo, of glowing gold” (Moren-Garcia 282).

I used this exact description to draw Agnes, however the one part I missed was the yellow skin and mushroom crown, so I went back and fixed that. There was another quote that described her hair color as strawberry blonde, unlike her sister April who was just a blonde, so I did my best at getting her hair color accurate (although realistically because of how long she has been rotting down there, she would technically have no hair, but I wanted something that distinguished her as Agnes.) 

Above is my inspiration for drawing Noemi in this piece. This was in the front of my Mexican Gothic book. I loved the idea of a blue lantern instead of the usual yellow lantern as it added to the gothic horror aspect.

I have Noemi looking the other way because I feel as though it adds to the tension of the drawing. The light is shining on this glowing figure hidden in the darkness, but Noemi has yet to spot her. I wanted to add some suspense and tension to go with how it felt reading the book.

Once I had the characters drawn, I spent time coloring them and adding the darkness and mushrooms. I also added floating text all around them because a common phrase in the book spoken by Agnes to Noemi is “Open your eyes.”

Overall, this drawing took me a long time but I love how it turned out. I feel like it captures the element of the book very well, which was my main goal. I had a lot of fun doing this drawing and I hope others enjoy how it turned out as much as I do!

Works Cited

Moreno-Garcia, Silvia. Mexican Gothic. Del Rey, 2021. Accessed 7 May 2024.