LD17: Riming and Court Tape

LD17 is my final full internal illustration for Lucy's Dance. I have only the epilogue insets and the cover to go, and of course a mystery bag of revisions to arrive from the cultural expert. But back to the illustration. The view echoes that of the opening illustration but is more contemporary, showing small, rectangular structures rather than the qasgiq huts. One of my favorite moments in illustrating Lucy's Dance has been when one student in Stebbins claimed he could point out the location his home on my drawing. Every structure shown here is based on a real one, or at least a structure that stood when my model photograph was taken, so I hope that similar moments arise for others.

LD17's landscape is deeper into springtime than LD1, I assume because it took the village dwellers a bit longer that year to rekindle the tradition. Actually, I thought that a more colorful landscape would better suit the hopeful denouement. The whitecaps on Norton Sound are less rigid. The snow remnants are filmier, now drawn to fit color variations in the watercolor texture, which I burned a little in Photoshop. I would say that in LD1, the coast is blanketed in snow, or maybe smothered. Here, it is merely rimed.

I originally drew Lucy dancing in the sky above the horizon with no special background to bind her to the previously illustrated gymnasium festival. For young readers, though, the effect might have been too surreal. The basketball floor tape has been a common image in my illustrations so far, so I hope that it is recognizable here, in the sunset sky that doubles as a court floor. I won't write an essay on the topic, but I think I subconsciously compared the Curukaq dance festival to a basketball game, for both have their surrounding customs and rules. For this reason, the court tape doesn't strike me as too incongruous with the image of a Yup'ik village. As to whether or not the court tape is recognizable to readers who haven't been looking at it for hours, well, color me curious.