Between the lake and memory, between smoke and silence.

Project Description:
“Threshold Smoke” is a short, authorial illustrated and literary zine created in a retro western and liminal space aesthetic. It tells the story of a man left alone — after love, after a woman, after everything — by a quiet, still lake. Time doesn’t flow, smoke doesn’t fade, and he lingers on the threshold of something unnamed.
The project is an experiment in visual storytelling: combining poetic prose, bilingual text (PL/EN), hand-drawn scenes, and a strong atmosphere of suspension. The zine explores themes of solitude and memory inspired by 1960s Marlboro ads, westerns, modernism, and the emptiness of neon and matches.

Style & Technique:
All illustrations were digitally created in Procreate, using a custom color palette and brushes. The graphic style blends muted colors, vintage textures, and distortion motifs — grain, noise, and offset printing imperfections. Smoke and water are treated as liminal characters

Purpose:
“Threshold Smoke” is a personal project combining illustration with text, aiming to capture a state of “in-between” — between memory and presence, word and image, being and absence.
Between the lake and memory, between smoke and silence.
Thx to mockup #DRKGLS.

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