You know how during a solar eclipse you can make a pinhole camera inside a cardboard box so you can safely witness something too bright and overwhelming to look at directly. This felt like that. Only instead of an eclipse it was an intense meteor storm ripping through the atmosphere. Fire in the sky. Chaos above. And we stood below with cardboard boxes over our heads, each with a small viewing hole. Not hiding. Not blind. Just filtering the scale of it.
I don’t think the dream was about fear. It was about managing scale. There is something deeply human about building a crude device just so you can look at the unlookable. We do not turn away. We engineer a way to cope. A box becomes a lens. Limitation becomes protection. Distance becomes clarity. Total self help bullshit, but that’s what came to me in the moment.
Write about your approach to budgeting.
Lately I have been thinking about money in the same way. Budgeting as a full time artist is hard. If I am being honest, it can feel impossible. Income arrives in bursts. A sale here. A quiet month there. A commission that saves you. A drought that tests you. Trying to create a clean predictable budget inside that kind of landscape feels like trying to forecast a meteor shower with a calendar.
For years I did not feel in a position to budget properly. When income is irregular, budgeting turns into guesswork. You brace instead of plan. You react instead of design. The sky feels loud and chaotic. It becomes easier to just keep moving than to sit down and map the terrain.
Now with a regular job and regular income, something strange has shifted. The meteor storm is still there. The creative chaos is still there. But there is a box. A viewing hole. A controlled frame.
Budgeting suddenly feels less like a fantasy and more like a tool. Not a corporate spreadsheet ritual. Just a simple structure that lets me look at the numbers without being blinded by them. The job covers survival. The art is free to wander. That weight is gone. The art no longer has to rescue me every month. It can be what it wants to be.
And what it wants to be is getting stranger.
This artwork is part of my ongoing visual dream journal. Each piece begins in sleep, pulled from that place where logic has no authority and the subconscious runs wild. I use AI as a collaborator, not a replacement. It helps me drag those fleeting images into the waking world before they dissolve like mist at sunrise. The dream arrives raw. I interpret it. Together we build a physical artefact.
When you collect one of these pieces you are not just buying an image. You are taking home a fragment of a dream that once lived only inside my head. A small viewing box into something bigger than both of us.
The sky will always throw meteors. The world will always feel overwhelming. But sometimes all you need is a box with a pinhole and the courage to look.
Kids Book Illustrator Andy C Marshall 