Lightning

Lightning In My Hands | Procreate/Photoshop digital painting

The Digital Lightning Series presents a world where children, born into the turbulence of a changing climate, discover a strange inheritance—lightning itself. Each collage imagines young figures not as passive victims of disaster, but as initiates learning to wield the raw power of the storm.

Across fields burning with wildfire, coastlines split by thunder, and village courtyards where daily life continues under fractured skies, these children test their gifts. Some cradle lightning gently, as if receiving wisdom from their elders. Others play with it, daring danger like a toy. Still others learn to control it, turning catastrophe into survival. In their hands, lightning becomes both weapon and blessing, a metaphor for the fragile balance between destruction and renewal.

The series was created using digital collage and painting techniques in Photoshop, Procreate, ON1, and Topaz. By layering photographic realism with painterly texture, the works blur the line between documentary and dream, between what is inherited and what is imagined. This fusion grounds the imagery in African American art traditions while extending them into contemporary explorations of climate change, childhood, and power.

What unites the series is its refusal to let children be seen only as victims of crisis. Instead, they appear as guardians, learners, and visionaries—figures who might chart a path through the storms we have left them. Lightning, in their hands, is not just destruction; it is possibility, handed down like memory, like story, like survival itself.