An illustrated poem series about unrequited love.

Malam (means night in Indonesian) is a poem written by Calvin Chandra. When he first approached me with a collaboration offer to illustrate this poem, he gave me total freedom to translate it visually. Back then, it was still with no title, only lines of poems.

When I read the poem, for some reason, the word Malam stood out to me the most. so I suggested it as the title of the poem. I feel like this poem could be about the unrequited feelings of a boy, and Malam being a messenger bird he sends away to deliver his feelings to a girl.

These illustrations are done with gouache on 300gsm watercolor papers and then scanned, cleaned & edited digitally. Also special thanks to Aswoood for turning these into amazing animations.