I like to read a lot and sometimes a story fascinates me that much, that I feel the need to make illustrations based on it. As a personal project, I made a series of drawings inspired by the short story The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard.

In the story the protagonist finds himself on one of the islands in the Pacific that were used for testing the atom bomb. The landscape of the island is man-made and deserted. 
The protagonist is alienated and tries to make sense of his surroundings.
As often in Ballard's stories; science, surrealism and history are mixed.

In my DeviantArt-journal I wrote about the techniques used and their meaning in the work:

"And the burning bombers fell through his dreams was made with a Rotring pen and ink wash.
The Rotring is a technical drawing pen that comes in line widths of 0.18, 0.25, 0.35 and 0.50. For the lines in this drawing, a pen of 0.18 was used.
Ink wash is a traditionally East-Asian technique using black ink diluted with water.
Comparable with water colour; the grey ink can be made darker with transparant layers.

The choice of material was also conceptual. The pen refers to the drawing boards where the bombers and the hydrogen bomb found their origin; as the dark side of technical advances.
The ink wash symbolizes the pollution that was the result of the nuclear tests on atolls like Eniwetok; all because of Cold War hysteria.

In The terminal beach Ballard places his protagonist on the island after the test are completed. Traven slowly loses his mind, or is the island his new state of mind?"