Striking My Quiet Fire – A Fire Horse Moment
After some back-and-forth and a creative boost from my husband, a fire-lighting horse might just be the spark I needed for this illustration.
I'm still working on my Fire Horse illustration today. I had a little meeting with my husband—who’s also my art director—and showed him the sketch ideas I shared in yesterday’s blog post. Personally, I didn’t feel super drawn to any of the concepts, but he really liked the match-striking horse and the fire-breathing horse. He encouraged me to explore those two more deeply.
He often has a way of pointing me in a direction that turns out to be more interesting than I’d expect, and I didn’t know what else to try, so I decided to finish up the match-striking horse illustration, including the coloring.
The competition I'm entering has a specific risograph color palette: Yellow, Fluorescent Pink, Burgundy, and Medium Blue. So I started coloring with those in mind—and something clicked. I especially felt a spark (no pun intended!) when I decided to draw a fire-breathing horse on the matchbox itself. That’s when I thought: maybe this is it!
2026 is a Fire Horse year, which comes only once every 60 years. I imagine this horse quietly lighting its own inner fire, ready to step into a rare and powerful version of itself. There’s something exciting and quietly fierce about that. So I came up with a title for the piece:
Striking My Quiet Fire — a Fire Horse moment, once in sixty years.
I’ll take another look at the piece tomorrow, and if it still gives me that same excitement, I’ll move forward with it!