A Little Sketchy

There'll be no more further personification of typefaces as NPR-style voices in this entry. You have my word. The next few illustrations for Lucy's Dance will include gift-gathering montages that focus on one or two characters at a time. This can be refreshing after drawing a large crowd scene, which takes significantly more attention to detail. Here I have more room to play with texture and visual style. Each two-page gift-gathering spreads combines several action scenes that overlap a bit. In each, I show insets of the gift being gathered or earned. Lucy's brother chops firewood with boots floating above his head, showing his intent. The story calls for store-bought boots. I think I loosely and subconsciously based this pair on my dad's army surplus boots, also known as "bunny boots." The boots contain insulation coated in rubber, and are extremely heavy. My siblings and I used to lace my youngest brother into them when he was four to keep him from wanderi

The sixth illustration in Luc y'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 dre