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LD6: Typefaces, Voices and Hair

The sixth illustration in Lucy's Dance shows Yup'ik Elders directing a meeting to plan Curukaq, the springtime potluck/dance festival that went unobserved for many years.


DESIGN NOTES

The room shown in my illustration is roughly based on the Community Hall in Stebbins, Alaska, but with a few adjustments. I intentionally created a bit of similarity in the arrangement of this crowd scene to that in illustration 2 to emphasize the return of the dance festival tradition. The Community Hall and the qasgiq (of traditional festivals) both serve as gathering places for events of village-wide interest, and deserve some visual comparison.

I may design custom patterns to embellish the qaspeks in this drawing as I did for Lucy's in my previous post, but for the moment, there's enough going on in this composition. The pattern may end up being a way of distinguishing Lucy's character in future images. Here' Lucy stands on the bench in plain clothes. I'll probably dress her in a qaspek for the potluck at the end.

Why do the characters have purple hair? Yup'ik Eskimo hair usually appears to be nearly black. Black is a heavy color against which I cannot draw lines of texture without changing my line color. I've seen both purple and blue used to suggest black in shadows in many other places. The idea is that if a color is used consistently enough, the eye recognizes it as neutral. Everything matches blue jeans -- except blue -- but would everything go with red jeans? In order to sustain this special status for purple, though, I can't really use purple heavily elsewhere in the drawing without upsetting the illusion.

A bit more on type:

A fellow designer mentioned that Futura, the typeface I have used in past illustrations, felt a little rigid. I experimented with a few other fonts and with italic versions of Futura, but ended up coming up with only one "softer" alternative: Adobe Caslon Pro, a friendly, unpretentious serif that could come from the body of a favorite novel.

For me, choosing a typeface for a story is like choosing a reader for an audiobook. After I realized this, I began to wonder which voices best represented the two fonts between which I'm debating. I decided:


Adobe Caslon Pro: Miette of Miette's Bedtime-Story Podcast (a terrific podcast, by the way, for lovers of short literary fiction)

These are very personal interpretations, and if any readers live in Denver and have arguments about the vocal equivalents of these or other fonts, I propose that we discuss it over overpriced coffee.
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Comments

  1. Deb VanasseFebruary 25, 2010 at 9:35 PM

    I love the way you've managed to infuse what might otherwise be a too-static scene with a sense of character and action. Interesting about the hair color. This is the first time I noticed the purple, and I can't decide whether it's only because you pointed it out or because there are lots of purple-headed people in the scene. Would dark brown work? From what I can tell, the type face looks nice.

    ReplyDelete

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