A Little Sketchy

This Christmas, I find myself surrounded with a banquet of non-electronic sources of entertainment, including silly putty, books, family, as well a literal banquet. However, I also find myself without internet for some ten days this Christmas. Today, the withdrawal symptoms have been punctuated with a trip to a local Panera. I feel like an alcoholic slipping down to the corner bar, only my cup contains mango ceylon tea which delivers a fresh smack of fishtank pebbles with each sip. The wi-fi, however, is slicker than I-80 in January. In a brief (and and slightly overdue) detour from Lucy's Dance , the book for which I will shortly produce my first polished illustration, I thought I'd post a Christmas illustration I recently revised for Buffalo Exchange . The request: "I'd like to show a bunch of buffalo pulling Santa's sleigh, which will be driven by a [Star Wars] stormtrooper . . . all drawn in the approximate style of Ralph Steadman ." I did my best.

In past weeks my layout sketch allotments for Lucy's Dance have included up to 4 double-page layouts. This week demanded a mere 3 single pages (the final illustration and two covers) . . . and an inset of a dance stick to illustrate the educational postscript. The latter doesn't really have a "layout," per se, but I thought I'd sketch it anyways to get a start. LAYOUT 17--LUCY'S DANCE: At the end of the Curukaq festival, Lucy dances at last, hovering over a final view of Stebbins, Alaska. I used Google Maps to confirm the shapes of buildings shown in fuzzy photographs. Lest anyone think I'm lazily echoing the view from illustrations 1 and 2, know that I first rendered Stebbins from an entirely different view before I decided to show the same coast and buildings again. It didn't work out. Not only do I prefer this view compositionally, but I like the way using a similar vantage shows the progression of time. I may shift the angle of one of the earlie

In this week's layout sketches for Lucy's Dance , Lucy shyly presents to Apa her homemade gift: a piece of dog fur, a sprig of tundra cotton, and the tip of a moose antler, all bound to a crooked stick with red yarn. The gift is is a child's version of the traditional Yup'ik dance stick, which Yup'ik men adorn with figurines, tundra cotton, and other embellishments that represent their memories and achievements. Inspired by Lucy's gift, Apa recalls the origins of the three gift parts, then launches into an enthusiastic traditional dance, indicating how much he missed participating in the festival of Curukaq . On previous pages, Apa's character is reticent, withdrawn into his parka. I wonder whether the thoughts in Apa's covered head sound at all like the words of the speaker in one of my favorite Old English Anglo-Saxon poems, The Wanderer . Below is a modernized excerpt: Where is the horse gone? Where the rider? Where the giver of treasure? Where are th

This week brings a third installment of rough layout sketches of illustrations for Lucy's Dance , a picture book about Yup'ik culture by Deb Vanasse. At this point in the book, Lucy's small Alaskan village has decided to host a Curukaq , or potlatch dance festival, in order to satisfy Lucy's demands and cheer up Lucy's apa (grandpa). Traditionally, Curukaq involves competitive gift giving that requires months of prior handicraft and collecting of materials. Lucy's family members work to collect and their gifts, but Lucy does not have money to purchase or skill to build much for anyone. Instead, she hunts around the house for gift-able items--beneath her bed, in a closet, in her mukluks, and in her backpack. Lucy finds three items: a tuft of animal fur, a piece of antler, and a swab of tundra cotton. I have always approved the of the practice of poking around the house for anything I can reuse or give away. I have a pesky feeling that there are a dozen differen

So continues my unpolished sketching of illustration layouts for Lucy's Dance , a children's picture book dealing with the Yup'ik dance festival Curukaq . Layout sketches 5-8 show relatively modern settings, but still required some odd research. TECHNIQUE NOTES: Two of these illustrations are gift-gathering montages, which I will keep a bit abstract. I tried a few collage elements in the first gift montage just to see the effect. The color comes from an ink wash that I scanned and converted to different hues. KITCHEN: On this page, Lucy points out Apa's loss of appetite and sad demeanor, convincing her mother to re-initiate the festival of Curukaq in order to cheer him up. In order to do so, she uses the citizen's band radio, which sits at ready on the counter, like the Bat Signal. I drew two of my original character studies with this page in mind, so I decided to drop them in for layout purposes. When I was sketching Lucy's mom, I wasn't sure at first wh

This week I sketched layouts for the first four illustrations of Lucy's Dance , Deb Vanasse's forthcoming picture book celebrating the Yup'ik dance festival/potlatch. These sketches are meant to be primitive rather than finished drawings. I've included some greeking (sample text) here to show where the story might appear. The wider images will fill two pages. These layouts may have to change a bit later to create a gutter for the binding crease. The first and third illustrations show overviews of the village, which is inspired by the village of Stebbins, Alaska. My setting studies helpfully acquainted me with a view of the Stebbins coastline. The first view shows the village in its original state, with kayaks, a fish-drying rack, and winter subterranean dwellings called qasgiq and ena . The opening words of Lucy's Dance mention the potlatch, called Curukaq , so I wanted to show the potlatch somewhere in the first picture. In the book, Stebbins Dance Festival , Y

In junior high school I collaborated on a project with a small, mostly-female group of students. We were to design a unique, fictional culture and build illustrative cultural artifacts. We would bury said artifacts in a cardboard box filled with soil. Another team would then excavate our artifacts and guess about our culture. After several days of creative deliberation, we designed a pyramid-based matriarchy wherein men were kept underground as slaves, brought out occasionally to build more pyramids. Elvis was God. According to the artifact of my memory, middle school was a confused and hostile culture. I began this week's illustrations, again, with visual research. I still don't know everything about these artifacts, but my Stebbins Dance Festival book has some interesting statements about them. Part of what I do know I impart below. According to their cultural artifacts, the Yup'ik people practice artful dancing to drums while waving furred objects. They also spend time

I promised further discussion of the Curukaq festival and its customs, but I've decided to save that bit for later, for there are many entries ahead of me. Also, I appear to have written a short novel in the place of my last entry, and I'd like to keep this installment relatively terse. This week I continue my study sketches for Lucy's Dance , a children's book by Deb Vanasse that celebrates Yup'ik culture, specifically the Curukaq potlatch festival. I have heard recently that a group of students and teachers from Stebbins, Alaska (the town that inspired the story), may be perusing my blog. I invite them to correct me on any point, or better yet, to send photos of their gymnasium and their general landscape during the months when Curukaq would normally be recognized. When I first set out to create setting studies, I envisioned myself drawing and naming lots of plants, weather, etc. However, a brief perusal of the manuscript informed me that the better part of Lu

It seems I will be spending my winter months thinking about Alaska again, for I'll have the pleasure of illustrating a picture book by Deb Vanasse . The book is titled Lucy's Dance , and will be published by the University of Alaska Press in Spring of 2011. I will post scraps of my illustration and the research behind them, trying not to muddle the cultural details too awfully. Mind you, I'm only giving you the chocolate coating of the story. You haven't seen the last of the snail fallacies, but they may enter hibernation for the winter. Potlatch Raillery, Bingo Ladies Cracking Wise Lucy's Dance deals with the fading tradition of the the potlatch celebrated by the Yup'ik people of western Alaska. The central character is a Yup'ik girl named Lucy who prods her village to resurrect the Curukaq (choo-ROO-gawk), or the Challenge Festival, also known as the Messenger Feast, or potlatch. Lucy's mother explains that the tradition is no longer recognized beca

Ad hominem is one of the better-known fallacies, perhaps because it is so common. In Latin, it means: "to the man." In American, it translates fuzzily to: "Oh yeah? Well, you're ugly." Broken down, the ad hominem argument looks like this: Person 1 makes claim X There is something objectionable about Person 1 (maybe ugliness) Therefore claim X is false Ad hominem is one of the many red-herring arguments, fallacious when it diverts attention from the core argument to focus on some flaw about the arguer. In creating my illustration, I needed a distracting character, and what character is more distracting than one of those bellowing circus-game people with the rings, bottles, and inflatable dolphin prizes? I quickly realized my vocabulary lacked a word for a purveyor of state-fair gamery, other than the generic "carney." Perhaps this is because I have never played a circus game, due to my lack of coordination and my dominant interest in spending my tick

This week's common nonsense is the fallacy known as ad ignorantium , or the Argument from Ignorance. I prefer to remember it as the Argument from Uncertainty, as uncertainty seems more relevant to the definition. The fallacy occurs when I try to prove my argument by pointing out that no one has proven it false. The flamingos in my yard are real until they melt in your bonfire. This fallacy is very much like shifting the burden of proof . . . it's taking the benefit of unproof, twisting doubt in your favor when neither side can really make a solid case. I always suspect it must take a face like Ben Kingsley 's to commandeer uncertainty in this way and take it for a pleasure drive. I just saw him in the 1996 Shakespeare-based film Twelfth Night . I thought for the first two acts that his character was an an eccentric nobleman. As it turns out, he played the role of the Clown. Maybe Kingsley's stage presence lends him authority by default, though one could also argue that

In the SG definition, "Such arguments (also called teleological) are based on a reversal of cause and effect, because they argue that something is caused by the ultimate effect that it has, or purpose that is serves." As the White Stripes put it in their song, " Effect and Cause ": "first comes an action, and then a reaction, which you can't switch around for your own satisfaction." Another fitting example from the song: "if you're headed for the grave, don't blame the hearse." I've decided to be a bit abstract in my interpretation of the fallacy. Normally, the negative space , or the space around the snail shape, is an effect of the snail. In this drawing, I have shifted the negative space to the foreground, allowing it to cause a shadow. I have effectively cut out the negative space and placed in front of a telescope. The fallacy is sometimes called the "teleological" (end/purpose) fallacy because it makes effects, o

At times, the Wikipedia list of fallacies seems endless, as though it will take all the snails in French butter to illustrate. Recently, I noticed that the Skeptic's Guide contains a list of its "Top Twenty" fallacies , worded in new and precise ways. This delighted me, as cross-referencing is a mischievous habit of mine. My eye landed on the false continuum. It seemed to lend itself to illustration, and at very reasonable rates, so I complied. The SG defines the false continuum as: "The idea that because there is no definitive demarcation line between two extremes, that the distinction between the extremes is not real or meaningful." Wikipedia offers the example of baldness and non-baldness. We know a bald man (or woman) when we see one, though he/she may still have a few hairs left. We probably can't name the minimum number of hairs a person can have before qualifying, yet the distinction exists. For a colorful, Grecian example of this dilemma, see the Sor

Snail shells are almost identical in shape to cinnamon rolls. As I tweaked away at the vector art, I could almost smell those puffy confections that beckon across malls and airports with their buttery, come-hitherish aroma. I colored these snails in orange, which reminded me of the kind with orange-flavored icing. Now if only I could cause a bakery fragrance to emit from my blog, readers might associate my writing with delicious baked goods. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc , like pareidolia, deals with illusory connection. The Latin translates to "after this, therefore because of this," a phrase that nicely sums up the logical snafu. Post hoc reasoning occurs when I perceive that because one event follows another, the first event must cause the second. My favorite example of this fallacy is the restaurant bathroom visit; the waiter always arrives just after I've excused myself to the ladies room. So can I command food to arrive by visiting the ladies room? More importantly, do

The topic of this week's illustration falls into my snail series, but pareidolia is not, strictly speaking, a fallacy. It is a psychological phenomenon that I feel underlies much fallacious thought, but also much creative thought. Pareidolia involves the human tendency to perceive a pattern or an organized image in a set of nebulous stimuli. The most common examples involve people seeing Elvis or the Virgin Mary among the shapes that appear on their pancakes or birthmarks, or in images of the surface of the moon. Rorschach inkblot tests make use of pareidolia in attempts to elicit material from the subconscious. Pareidolia can also invoke other senses by causing us to hear voices in radio static or heavy metal songs played backwards. Beneath pareidolia lies the urge to seek patterns and create meaning, to make a confusing and disparate world intelligible. The urge to think associatively--to seek patterns where patterns don't always exist--can be harmful or constructive. We see

About a year ago I decided to undertake an ambitious creative project: I would illustrate the informal fallacies using a snail motif. What led me to such pedantic subject matter? Let me start with definitions. Informal fallacies refer to arguments that are unsound for reasons other than their formal logical structure. Check my links for a more detailed explanation. Many fallacies have latin names that I always meant to translate after hearing them tossed about on the news, such as post hoc or ad hominem . Others have more intuitive names, such as the slippery slope fallacy or argument from ridicule. Fallacies--I vaguely recall my college philosophy course brushing past them, but my real understanding of them arrived when I taught Introduction to Academic Writing at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. There I was employed to teach freshmen how to write that amorphous animal, The Academic Essay, in a way applicable to their individual fields of study. My lesson topics ranged, often