I have always loved thunderstorms. There is a feeling of energy and life in them that I have enjoyed since I was a child. Each year, there is a special moment when I hear spring’s first roll of thunder. 2018 held a lot of personal struggle for me as I figured out what to do and how to be an adult in the wake of my graduation from college. In early 2019, I began to feel more hopeful, and I wanted to capture the moment of hearing that year’s first roll of thunder along with the early songs of sparrows in the bushes in front of my house. This painting was also an experiment, both with a comic book page layout (with manga-style speech bubbles) and with a color palette limited so as to give the effect of colored light, like you might see at dusk or in the early morning. I’m not very technologically advanced, so I did the line art in ink on a larger sheet of paper, then printed it out onto watercolor paper and painted over it, refreshing the ink over it as I went.