Imagery in Ink | Piece #1: “Gearhead” by C.G. Dominguez

For my series, I chose to focus on striking or impactful imagery, both present in the work and imagined, in three of the fiction pieces selected for this issue of Windmill.

Piece #1: “Gearhead” by C.G. Dominguez

“Gearhead” was, from the start, one of the pieces I loved the most out of our selections for this issue of Windmill. This was, in part, thanks to Dominguez’s masterful descriptions within the story. While there’s plenty of breathtaking depictions of the scenery during Georgia and Fernan’s rides within the piece, I chose to illustrate a bike that contained multiple elements from the story. My reference image was a real yellow bike, like Georgia’s, though not Swiss, and I added on a strapped-down Bluetooth speaker and Christmas lights around the top part of the frame as some of the other cyclists did at the party ride where Georgia and Fernan met. The bike is absent of anyone actually riding it, serving as a symbol for its connecting role in the story. I also wanted to illustrate a bicycle specifically because of our Windmill class—many sessions into the class, after “Gearhead” had already been named a contender, I discovered that many of my classmates thought the story was about motorcycles. This is a nod to that fun moment as well.